I just spent the better part
of an hour sitting on my back porch watching my youngest son squirt
himself with a Super Soaker squirt gun, first his feet, then his chest,
then his head, and even in his mouth, with ever increasing joy. I got to
do that in the middle of a weekday because I work an early shift that
lets me get home by noon most days. This is the way I handle being a
mom, and I don’t suggest that it is the best way, and certainly not the
only way, but for my children and me, it works.
I’ve been thinking about our
choices as mothers since seeing the cover of TIME Magazine, the one with
the nearly 4-year-old boy standing on a chair nursing from a blonde
woman. The image is a little unsettling, the almost defiant quality of
what I think of as a nurturing act, but what stopped me was the
headline.
“Are you mom enough?”
No question TIME was trying to
sell magazines with that headline, and the headline combined with that
provocative picture certainly accomplished its goal. This issue is their
No. 1 seller of the year. Perhaps we were all just masterfully
manipulated into asking ourselves this question – Are we mom enough? – a
question I’m not sure we should ever ask. Even less so, I do not
believe it is a question we should direct at others. Someone with far
more wisdom and understanding than us sought fit to trust these spirits
to us. I’d go with that.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try
to do our best with our children once they’re here. In one of the many
backlash columns I read after the TIME article came out, a writer argued
that we mothers ought not do anything we resent. If we resent cooking
dinner but not breakfast, we should only cook breakfast. If we resented
playing on the floor but not reading stories, we should only read
stories, etc.
“So what if you resented
giving baths? Would you let them go dirty?” Sharon Goodrich, head of
charitable and corporate giving for Primary Children’s Medical Center,
asked on “A Woman’s View.” “No. You find a way to make it fun, to make
it pleasurable for you, for your children, instead of drudgery all the
time.”
“I resent doing homework with
my kids because I was incapable of doing it,” social worker and
addiction counselor Rachelle Call shared. “It was triggering something
in me. It was my own stuff. Women have to be willing to deal with that,
to lean into whatever we resent about motherhood. Resentment is a
marker.”
So, what if we resent breastfeeding, as so
many women do? Or the opposite, what if we believe that breastfeeding is
mandatory and any mother who doesn’t breastfeed is not “mom enough.”
“Breastfeeding triggers a lot of women,” Call explained. “Women find their power there.”
I can honestly say I had never
considered anything about breastfeeding to be powerful, but when I
looked again at that magazine cover and heard what Rachelle said, I saw
it. A sense of power. Misplaced power, in my humble opinion, but power
nonetheless. Breastfeeding is not about power; it’s about nourishment
and love.
“I wasn’t very successful at
breastfeeding, and I felt guilty,” Goodrich was courageous enough to
share. “It was something I wanted to do. I just didn’t produce milk. I
finally decided it was just better to be close to my twin daughters by
bottle feeding. What I say is celebrate those who wish and do, and
support those who wish and don’t.”
Beautiful. Brilliant. I say let her write the headlines from now on.
I suppose men have been
putting up with the “Are you man enough?” question for so long, some
might say it’s our turn. I am not among them. I don’t think men deserved
the question, nor do I think we mothers do. I frankly think anyone who
asks it shows their ignorance. It shows their bias, the smallness of
their thinking, their blinders-on-approach to motherhood (or manhood) —
to life. There are a million ways to be a good mother, to be strong
enough, kind enough, patient enough, thorough enough, loving enough, and
just as many ways to be a good father. There are good mothers who are
with their children every day and good mothers who see their children
only via Skype from Afghanistan. Through the magic of love, both are
good mothers.
Are we human enough to get that? That there is more than one way to love, more than one way to parent?
As I write these words, Aiden
is sitting beside me writing his first number “10.” His first effort
came out “01.” I said, “No, Aiden. The”1” comes before the “0.”
“Oh,” and he tried again, shortly thereafter showing me a perfect “10.”
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