Why is “motherhood” the province of newbies?

The motherhood discourse belongs to those who just got here. Can’t we expand it, for everyone’s sake?

Alice Neel, “Ginny and Elizabeth,” 1976.

For years I’ve noted the ways that the cultural discourse surrounding motherhood is occupied by new moms. It is almost entirely concerned with pregnancy, babies, toddlers, and little kids. Now that my children are in high school, these representations of motherhood have come to feel like dispatches from another country — albeit one I know intimately, having lived there myself for years. The country I live in now? I’m having trouble finding a signal here.

Lately, I wonder: why do I so rarely read about mothering from the perspective of mothers of young adults and adults? Where are their voices? Mostly, it seems, in New York Times advice columns, asking whether it’s okay to hate a daughter-in-law or what to do about a son’s racist social media posts. They’re onscreen in some places — the British detective shows I watch compulsively, for example. Maybe that’s part of what draws me to them. Maybe older mothers are on podcasts? I always mean to get into podcasts. Recently, feeling a spasm of anxiety about my son moving away in a year’s time, I tried listening to a memoir by NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly about preparing to send her son off to college, but it was so saccharine, I made it halfway through and could go no further.

It’s disorienting and bewildering to find myself in this no-woman’s-land, to feel that the more experience I acquire at the job that is motherhood, the further I drift from its center — the less meaningful the representations of my station, the less relevant I am to the broader cultural conversation.

Let me be clear: I truly love, and think I will always love, reading smart women’s writing on the theme of motherhood. I like reading about pregnancy, as in Linea Negra by Jazmina Barrera, or Privacy, the recent zine by Molly Young. I like reading about the early days, as in Woman Running in the Mountains or Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima, Olga Ravn’s My Work, Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery, or Madeline Watts’s diaristic chronicle of the first months, which I’ve been following on her Substack. I enjoy reading about the joys and challenges of interdependence, as in Soil by Camille Dungy; or maternal ambivalence, as in Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born; about the choice not to become a mother, as in Ruby Warrington’s Women Without Kids; the pain of saying goodbye to a mother, as in Sarah McColl’s Joy Enough or Marianne Brooker’s Intervals; or navigating the legacy of a dead or hidden mother, as in Iman Mersal’s Motherhood and Its Ghosts. I like reading about bad mothers, as in The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman. I even enjoy the taboo, and consequently, little-documented topic of maternal regret — Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath is a book I’ve always thought would be funny to leave lying around the house. (I’m joking, of course). But, as narrators or fully drawn characters, mothers of teenagers and adults are rare in contemporary literary discourse.

Of course, social media knows my kids’ ages. There, I’m shown a thousand videos of messy rooms (teens, amirite?), ads for sweatshirts that say “Mama. Mommy. Mom. Bruh.,” or posts about how our daughters, with their Uggs and eye pillows and Starbucks Pink Drink, don’t have it as bad as we did (I beg to differ).

My children do call me bruh, but I’m not a novelty Instagram sweatshirt kind of girl. I want to read! I yearn for a literature about this perplexing phase I’ll call middle motherhood, and another one about all that’s hopefully still on my horizon: mothering young adults, then adults, maybe even old people. I believe we’d all benefit from expanding the conversation to include these realities.

Alice Neel, “The Family,” 1982.

*

In my forties, people ask after my children far less than they used to. The fact of my being a mother seems to have become secondary, possibly superfluous, in the eyes of others. I guess it’s simply assumed, or it has become old news. You have kids? someone will say. And though it can feel inadequate, sometimes scandalous, to flatten the psychedelic variety and complexity of this nearly two-decade-long experiment into a couple words, I just say, Yeah, I do. Two.

I mean, what do I want? Having kids is utterly banal. And it has been awhile; I’ve gotten quite used to having them. Still, I marvel lately at a new sense of being on the periphery when, at work, women who are pregnant or raising small children cluster in the office kitchen, talking in low tones about pumping and sleep training. They know I have kids too. But I worry it feels to them — and partly because of this discourse, it feels even to me — like they are the real moms. They’re definitely doing a different kind of maternal labor. Those I’m friendly with share about their experiences and I nod empathetically, but we both know I’m years out from it all. In fact, I’m paranoid that I sound nostalgic, condescending, or just out of touch when I start talking about my own experience.

This is akin to the way a young person might feel talking to someone who’s been in the same job as them for a long time. They might respect that person’s experience (then again, they might not), but they wouldn’t necessarily seek them out. The one who’s been there longer is part of a different cohort, a different time. There’s the sense they don’t know what it’s like now. This is the advantage of recency, of youth. It’s the same combination of promise and fresh authority that swirls around the ingénue.

Like other facets of middle age, this sensation is very strange. It’s a bit like the beginning of motherhood, another Who am I? Except this time, I know exactly who I am. Or I know exactly who I am in every domain but this one. Some days, mothering feels as natural as it did in the beginning. And others, when I don’t know what I think, what I should think, what I should do, about curfew, driving, or the size of a micro skirt, or how exactly I want to talk about war or genocide or rape or drugs or alcohol, it’s confounding. Mother is a category I will forever belong to, but the practice of mothering keeps changing. Is this another rupture? Maybe, but this one is tectonic.

I joked to a friend that if I were titling this period of motherhood, I’d call it Becoming Cringe. That’s because I can actually feel myself occupying a new developmental phase, taking a different place in the generational order, becoming annoying to the young. I have to be taught things — that “chopped” means ugly, that the precise valence of the phrase “main character” is variable. My daughter shows me how to do something on my phone and I can feel her watching my fingers move on the screen, frustrated by my slowness or lack of agility. A thought arises: So I’m the mother now. What does it mean — that I’m like my own mother? Or just that I occupy that space reserved for an elder who’s a little out of touch? I am experiencing middle age as a kind of withdrawal from caring about being cool. The thing is, it’s quite pleasant. I absolutely love returning to my essence. I have suffered. I know what matters. I have been clarified like butter.

And yet, alongside clarity, a wistfulness has set in, maybe forever. There can be something slightly pathetic about maternal affection as it is forced by time to adapt to children transforming. In some instances, it seems to curdle. Sometimes I hear my grandmother’s voice, my mother’s voice, in mine when I offer a plate of cut fruit or a sweatshirt. Take it! Take it! I didn’t understand this before, that you can know that this is happening and be unable to stop it.

I fear that I’m like a flower hovering just at the limit of my freshness, tilting, soon to become overripe, to smell faintly rank. I think of Catherine Newman’s novels, Sandwich and Wreck, which center around a middle-aged mother’s overzealous connection to her children. They’re very relatable, these novels, and yet her main character irritates and frightens me. “I’m an undammable river of mother love,” she thinks in Wreck. “I’m a torch-brandishing one-woman mob, and I will go after anyone who casts doubt upon the rightness of my child.” All this anxiety, pride, this grandiose fussing — it’s too much. Reading Newman, I think: Will my children’s homecoming send my heart soaring in the same desperate way someday? Will my love feel — in some moments, at holidays and gatherings — hysterical? Of course it will. Surely, it already has.

This is yet another cultural script: they push us away and we want them all the more. Still, I prefer to grapple with my earnest affection rather than try to be a “cool mom.” For me, parenthood has entailed recognizing that my coolness is about my own coordinates, the things that meant something to me in my own youth — books, music, politics — and the ways I organize my time and energies in relation to those things. I’ve never wanted to foist my identity upon my kids, or ask, however implicitly, that they carry forward some interest or hobby I didn’t spend enough time cultivating, or embrace some part of my history out of loyalty rather than genuine curiosity. It’s not their responsibility. (I’m remembering the punks I knew 20 years ago who gave their poor offspring “punk rock” names or otherwise conscripted them into a punk identity before they could decide for themselves. This always bothered me, half a dozen Brixtons running around the playground. How was punk any different than the sports these same people had been forced to play, the things they hated their own parents for?)

I’ve tried to let my kids become themselves. Still, I see the ways they are the product of their homes, their parents, stepparents, extended family. Sometimes it’s plain. Sedimented layers of experience and memory inform the way they react to a film or news item, or deal with a conflict with a friend, and I think: ah, it worked! I didn’t push it and still, it took. Other times, they’re elusive. Both behind closed doors, AirPods in, navigating the exigencies of their own relationships, their coordinates. I am but one. I am needed, but also not. Like a benched athlete, I have to show some team spirit, whether I get playing time or not. I have to hang around and wait to be called into the game.

*

Why is “motherhood” inhabited by the newly initiated? I’d like to try to answer that question. (Permit me a few generalities; this isn’t science.)

I think it’s because 1) new mothers are adjusting to profound change and have a lot to say 2) they constitute a massive market, and 3) they’re still seen as viable sex objects.

First, new mothers are closest to what I think of as the rupture. They’re the ones who’ve most recently been radicalized by the bodily extremes of pregnancy and childbirth, not to mention sleep deprivation, inadequate paid leave, the absurd cost of childcare, and, depending on their situation, myriad domestic disappointments. They’re trying to figure out who they are in a new world order. They’re also falling in love, so they’re in a state of limerence, a kind of spiritual drunkenness. As I remember it, new motherhood was bracing, shocking, intoxicating, totalizing. A time to swoon, and also to rage and cry.

Expectant mothers are often organizing their lives in relation to this coming cataclysm, feeling excitement and fear, and, if they’re carrying the baby themselves, probably texting their friends all the mind-blowing sci-fi-worthy trivia one learns during those long months (did u know ur blood volume DOUBLES?!, e.g.). These women own the discourse because they need to express themselves! That’s what gives much of their art and activism such ferocity and urgency.

The second reason is money. When we say “mothers,” we mean mothers of young children because they’re likely to spend the most. They’re targets of aggressive marketing and shopping is a temporary balm for anxiety and a way of trying to compensate for a shoddy social safety net. It’s also fun. “Nesting” definitely made me more acquisitive. To the extent that motherhood is a constructed category, its rituals are tools of social reproduction. The gathering and arranging of consumer goods is an important way the category “mother” remains intact. At a personal level, it can be a gratifying, if fundamentally empty, way to know we’ve arrived here.

Finally, new moms are fecund. Or fuckable, in the parlance of the day. After all, someone very recently impregnated them. Many aren’t yet totally embittered by the patriarchy. They’re riding a hormonal wave — but not that hormonal wave, the one meant to usher in social death. They’re tired, a little salty, a little unkempt, but still hot. And they want to feel hot, to remember who they were before. The image accompanying Emily Ratajkowski’s recent piece in The Cut about sex as a single mom comes to mind.

Alice Neel, "Nancy and Olivia,” 1967.

*

I have leaned two snapshots of my kids as babies against the kitchen counter and I look at them every day. Why have I put those photographs there? To remind myself that my daughter was once happiest inside a canvas sack? That I loved negotiating the warm, unwieldy weight of her as I walked? That the young man standing six-foot-three at the open refrigerator is or was, also or still, that little guy? That we had that time together? That I, too, was once Touched Out, as Amanda Montei wrote? Now, I sometimes long to be touched out, to have to sway in solemn darkness to get a baby back to sleep. I pine even for that exhaustion, or I think I do. Really, I pine for the attenuated connection I felt to everything else. My focus lived in another being. We stared into each other’s eyes. I cared about nature, which was suddenly technicolor and precious — our planet! I thought, after barely noticing it ever — and the baby: also technicolor, also precious. It was a drug, all of that. Clean and mystical, of the earth, of history. Would I really want to go back there? I was deeply depressed, and yet it was a relief to be freed, finally, from a certain bondage of self.

Maybe this is why I still enjoy reading books that document the rupture. I can vicariously take the trip, wince in recognition, and feel gratitude for my differently textured days. And there is overlap — a similar uncanniness when I see my adult-sized children get into a car manufactured when I was in high school, and drive off together in the morning. Another jarringly beautiful snapshot. A cosmic confusion.

I want a literature for this time, too, but literature isn’t everything. While pregnant and raising little kids, I read a lot and still felt alienated. I struggled mightily in those years. I split with my ex-husband when our kids were two years old and two months old, and took up with a man with profound addictions. (I wrote a book about it.) I loved parts of the motherhood conversation, but I found precious few records of mothering under duress. There are still too few. Mothers under real duress don’t have time to write. I was just as buoyed, challenged, distracted, and inspired by books about other things.

But this literature of middle motherhood would not only be for me. It would also be for the tired friends in the early days who say tell me it gets better. Just as I enjoy returning to those earlier phases through the art of other women and learning anew from creative renderings of that experience, mothers of babies and young children might like learning what it’s like in this phase. Learning, for example, that I can travel to a foreign city and let the kids wander on their own. That they care more now about art and music and food. That they make me laugh until I cry, and not the delighted laughter brought about by a toddler’s mispronunciations — they’re funny like grown ups. Their humor contains our whole history, our ancestry. That there are weekend days when they have plans and I go to the farmer’s market with my boyfriend, then sit in a sunny patch on the couch and read a novel. That there is, at last, a great deal of quiet, and it feels as rich with possibility as I hoped it would. That in the distance, a new intellectual horizon is coming into focus, that in years to come I might be able to really think.

*

The kids come and go with groups of friends. My daughter’s friends tell me about their dates. He wasn’t funny at all! He didn’t make a single joke and he didn’t laugh at any of mine, one told me recently. Run, I said.

What’s up, Nina, say my son’s friends, and we chat for a few minutes. I’ve known some of them since they were four. Recently, one who’d stayed over was lacing his shoes, getting ready to leave my house. He and my son had gone to a party the night before and gotten home after I was asleep. Knowing him to be a bad liar, I asked, Did you have a crazy night last night?

Yeah, he said. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

I raised my eyebrows. I appreciate your honesty, I said, and we laughed.

Later, I’ll ask my son what that means and extract the partial answer that is, from here, perhaps all I can expect. There’s the account I can request, even demand, and then there is what happened. I’m learning to let go, to accept the space in between.

Alice Neel, “Wellesley Girls,” 1967.

*

I live with the dim awareness that a tragedy is unfolding. The tragedy of mortality, of time passing, of exiting the phase of life where it’s possible to make new life. I’m trying to disentangle this experience from the sexist scripts I’ve inherited, while honoring some truth of my experience, which is that there is something sad about this time. It’s also undeniably liberating. Happily, it’s coinciding with a diminishing willingness to play dumb, make other people comfortable, and say yes to things I don’t want to do. (I think often of the bumper sticker I used to see in my childhood: I’m out of estrogen and I have a gun.) But as I anticipate the next phase, I wonder where the wisdom is. Who will I talk to and what will I read about mothering adults?

Last year, I read Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, a novel about a woman dealing with her daughter’s addiction and raising her granddaughter. This year, I read A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, a memoir that weaves grandkids’ antics with philosophical questioning and detours into years-old grief. And The Season by Helen Garner, who follows her son’s footy (Australian football) team for a season and writes about the sport, masculinity, youth and aging, and family. I was electrified by these books, thinking: grandmothers! That most neutered, sanitized, flattened role, all Kleenex and Sunday dinners. What a lie. Actually, here they are, these mothers twice over, in their full humanity, being complex, brilliant, fallible, wry. We need more grandmother lit.

Those in power have little use for grand-motherhood or middle motherhood — little interest in our competence, our expertise, or our exhaustion, let alone our existential uncertainties. We’re not the newly arrived, we don’t buy the most, and we’re meant to be in the waning years of desirability, of relevance. With perimenopause awareness on the rise, women my age have become the untapped market du jour, and new content and consumer products are proliferating. That may prove to be largely a positive development, but I wonder about the ways this medical-cultural juggernaut is already eclipsing the fact that we’re mothers at all. I hope that alongside greater attention to perimenopause, literary narratives will multiply too. I feel strongly that there’s more to say, many more stories to tell about relating to our children and ourselves through this enigmatic time and beyond.

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