First published by Cauldron Anthology in the Mother issue, Winter 2021 (not accessible via mobile devices)
My daughter is two, and I think she needs a break from me, that she’s had too much of Mommy. I do my best to mix things up, creating new little worlds for the two of us to explore each day, in blanket forts, in magical block towers that house her favorite Disney characters, in our dress-up costumes. Sure, she gets bored sometimes, as any toddler does—but it’s bigger than that. I worry that if her entire world is me—is that enough for her?
I have been home with her since she was born, leaving my career behind to be a stay-at-home mama. And then a week after her first birthday, just when we were starting to fill up our schedule with Mommy & Me music classes, play dates, and trips to the zoo, the pandemic forced us into isolation. Since then it has truly just been Mommy & Me. Now she is two, the world is reopening, and I have started to feel like I am holding her back. Months ago, I put her on a wait list for the preschool we chose for her, but now a spot has opened up and I can’t bring myself to complete the enrollment forms. She needs me, I think. I need her. I can’t quite let go.
At night, it is this thought that swirls around in my head until I succumb to the exhaustion of the day: Am I doing this motherhood thing right? Have I made the right choices for my daughter? Would my mother be proud?
When my mother was alive, all I could think of when it came to motherhood were the things I wanted to do differently than her, the distance I needed to create between my mother as Mom and me as Mom. I wanted—needed—to be a better version of Mom. I’m not saying I thought she was a bad mom; on the contrary—I idolized her. But doesn’t every daughter imagine the ways she will be different than, better than, the one who came before her?
And then when she died, I suddenly needed to be exactly like her. She had been a stay-at-home mother, one of those women who had always known she was meant to be a mother. She had reminded me often of the things she gave up for motherhood—she had never traveled, never gone to college, never had the opportunity to work her way up a corporate career ladder. So I spent my twenties postponing motherhood, and doing all of those things instead—college and then grad school, traveling all over Europe, building my HR career. And then she was gone, and I knew motherhood was her unrealized dream for me, and that I had failed her.
I became obsessed with understanding her, grilling my dad about the time they first met, their first date, what her pregnancies were like. But to really know her, all I had to do was read her writing. And I did—some of it. It was a lot that she had left behind: handwritten journals dating back to her teenage years, typewritten essays, some published poems, poems written for others as gifts, a finished novel, an unfinished manuscript. In the months after she passed, when my dad first handed me the haul, I poured over the pages relentlessly. But over time, I slowed my pace. Sometimes months went by where I read nothing from her.
Now I too, am a mother, and I struggle to find tiny gaps in my days to focus on my own writing. To give myself some accountability, I recently joined a writing critique group where we have to set weekly writing goals. In addition to my “real” goals—edit this chapter, write a new poem, etc.—I add another “writing goal”: type up a piece of Mom’s writing each week. This way I would get through it all, at last.
This is the first week into tracking my goals, and of course my daughter has a sleep regression. I don’t have time until Friday to sit down and focus, exhausted and frustrated by her lack of sleep and fussiness. But Friday she finally naps peacefully, and I reach into the box of Mom’s writing and pull out a few sheets of yellowed paper. The first poem in the stack is written for “George” and I skim through it, type it up and add it to my folder titled “Mom’s poems.”
The next page is dated at the top—September 2, 1986, and it is typewritten. Always, when I look at dates on these excerpts of hers, I calculate my age when it was written – in 1986, I would have been five, and my brothers would have been six and three. Never do I calculate my mother’s age but I realize I ought to. She would have been twenty-nine.
Her notes at the top indicate it is an essay that she submitted to Redbook Magazine’s “Young Mother’s Story” section. I open a browser on my laptop and search for this, discover the old description: “Personal and inspiring solutions to questions about sex roles, raising and caring for children, jobs, money, housework and marriage.” I don’t recall seeing this essay before in my perusal of her writings but perhaps I had skimmed past it because it didn’t resonate with me at the time – before I was a mother. Or perhaps I truly hadn’t seen it before. Or maybe I hadn’t needed it yet.
I set the papers on top of my keyboard and read this story that my mother felt compelled to share with other young mothers, her personal solution to a motherhood dilemma. It is titled “Too Much Mommy.”
It is an essay about her choice to become a stay-at-home mother, her belief that women shouldn’t rely on daycares to potty train their kiddos, her philosophy of raising her children by her side, at all times. But more than that, it is an essay acknowledging that her plan was all wrong—that doing it all is not the picture of perfect parenting, that losing yourself as a sacrifice to your offspring is not of benefit to your children, or to you.
She tells of how she brought her daughter, me, home from the hospital, and was shunned by her firstborn child, my older brother, for weeks, because he was so angry at her for having left him. She wrote that she had not left him for more than an hour’s time for the fourteen months before that. “I was the one person who was constantly with him since the day he was born,” she wrote, and I know I could have written this same sentiment myself, of my relationship with my own daughter. She wrote of how she intended to be “a mom who was always there,” but how she realized she had “carried it too far.” She wrote of how when she returned home after leaving her son for the first time, “it was like visiting a friend whose child was shy of me,” that it crushed her soul.
I hold a corner of the paper between my thumb and forefinger as I read, rub it gently. It is soft with age and almost translucent from wear, and I can feel her hands on it, her fingering it this same way before sending off a copy to Redbook. There she was trying to offer advice to other young mothers, back in 1986. Could she ever have imagined her reader thirty five years later would be the very own daughter she was writing about?
She ends the essay with her lessons learned; her advice for her reader: “I had given my child too much of myself. I remember thinking—there must be a way to balance time, feelings, and the needs of our entire family and still keep enough of myself for me. Being hurt like that made me realize that not only did I not have a separate life from my child, but he had not been allowed to have a separate life from me. We still believe it is important for me to be home with them. Now, we also know how important it is for me to be away from them once in a while too, for me, and for them.”
The irony of it all is that—if my mother were alive today, and she gave me this advice, I wouldn’t follow it. I might actually do the opposite of what she suggested, as stubborn daughters do. But she isn’t here; her words are. So I can listen to her in this way; I can follow her lead. And so perhaps these pages were not meant for the Redbook audience at all, but for me.
The way she felt in that moment is precisely how I feel in this one. I am imagining my mother sitting at her own desk and writing this as baby Annie napped, and here I am in a parallel world thirty-five years later, reading it for the first time at my desk as her granddaughter naps.
After she passed, I hated when people would tell me: “things happen for a reason, it’ll all make sense one day.” When I heard that, I always felt anger—that nothing would ever justify how we had to lose her, how suddenly, how painfully. But then there are little moments, like this one, where it does feel somehow meant to be, like it had to happen just this way, and not any other way.
I resolve to keep going on like this with my new writing goal, picking a stack of paper a week to absorb. If I do, will I keep stumbling upon the right story, the right message, at just the right time? At some point, I will finish them. And perhaps that is why I am drawing it out. If I only look at a piece of prose here, a poem there, can I make them last forever? Can I make her last forever? Will she guide me through motherhood in its entirety?
Ah, but if I have learned anything from her writings, it is that I also do not want to have “too much mommy.” I cannot live out my motherhood focused on being more different than her, or more like her. She is telling me in this essay, not just that I should set my daughter free of me, but that I should set myself free of my own mother’s expectations, my need for her approval. She is showing me that she didn’t have it all figured out from the start either; that we all, as mothers, need to find our own way.
