Pandemic Mothering
Hi friends,
I hope you’re staying safe and well! We’re doing okay here. June was a long month for me, a blur of trying to guide my kids through finishing out remote learning for the year (the NYC public school year lasts till the end of June). We did it, but all three of us are wiped out, and to be honest I don’t have the emotional reserves yet to think about the fall and what decisions and compromises we’ll need to make.
I’ve been a mother for seven years. For me, one of the defining experiences of motherhood has been trying to figure out how to be a good mother and also have any sense of self. It’s always seemed to me like this is easier for other women than it has been for me. Maybe because I have two children who were born only sixteen months apart. Maybe because I chose to stay home with them. Maybe because I became a mother in my early twenties. Maybe because I have a care-taking personality that takes over my life if I don’t work hard to keep it well-pruned. I have no regrets about any of these things, and I like motherhood, but sometimes it feels relentless, like coming up for air is impossible. Like finding any kind of balance isn’t even worth the effort.
It had started to get better! Both my kids were in school full-time for the first time this past fall. And I wouldn’t say I was handling it gracefully, because I still haven’t figured out how to handle big life transitions gracefully, but I was getting there. And then COVID happened and suddenly my children were home with me again all the time. We were, in fact, spending more time together than we had since they were babies. And in some ways, it felt like they needed me more than they had since they were babies. Their lives were upended too, and they’ve responded to it by demanding constant attention. My 7-year-old wants me to talk to him all the time, wants to be reassured that I’m around if he needs me, that I’m not going to go anywhere. My 5-year-old wants touch. Touch, touch, touch. Any time I stop moving he climbs on me. If I stand up, he’s around my legs. If I sit down, he’s in my lap. He gives me 87438 kisses every day.
It feels impossible to balance these current needs of my children with any of my own needs, especially when what I usually need is space. To think, to pray, to read, to write, to take a deep breath. Usually my kids are pretty independent, but right now they take it as a personal affront if I go into another room and lock the door. My free time is the stolen hour I get before sunrise, and my kids sometimes want that time too. And what kind of mother would I be to say no when my son stumbles sleepily into the kitchen at 4 in the morning, asking me to come snuggle him? He just wants the reassuring presence of a warm body in bed with him. I also don’t want to sleep alone right now. I can’t really begrudge them this, so I try to breathe through every day and remember that this won’t last forever.
On Sunday morning, I helped my younger son build a gigantic spiderweb in our living room. He had been learning about orb weaver spiders, and he wanted to be an orb weaver spider, and so he put on his backpack and we put some yarn in the backpack and he was a little orb weaver, weaving a web, with a lot of help. The last few months of mothering have been so intense, but they’ve been a strange kind of gift too. My kids have had a hard time, but they’re still kids--goofy and good-natured and so excited about each day. We do stuff like this all the time, building spiderwebs, pretending to be birds in a nest, playing endless games of Battleship and chess. Sometimes it feels suffocating, but at least as often it feels like a gift to be welcomed into their sweet, imaginative world. When I start to catastrophize about the future, as I am wont to do, I know I can drop into their playfulness. They’re good at keeping me tethered to reality.
I don’t have a tidy way to wrap this up. Everything feels hard right now. I want my kids so far away from me and so close to me at the same dang time, all the time. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to lose my mind if I have to make my kid another pancake. Sometimes I feel like making my kids pancakes is the only thing that makes me feel in control of anything in my life. Sometimes I feel a deep, aching resentment that it feels like so much work to have any kind of inner life right now, to have any part of me belong to myself. But mostly I’m trying to focus on waking up every day and getting out of bed and giving my kids all the tenderness I can muster in the hopes that we’ll get through this in one loving piece.