The idea of mom

Let your soft animal bod love what it loves today, moms

This is a special Mother’s Day edition of the Friday newsletter. It was written with much affection for every mother out there tepidly, precariously, cynically, and/or enthusiastically enjoying Mother’s Day, while wondering how her life and the world around her became so unrecognizable. It’s for all the mothers doing the slow, hard, lifelong work of asking themselves what they want after years of filtering their desires through men, children, and cultural expectation. It’s also for anyone who knows or loves a mother.

I hope you’ll shared this one with all your mom friends trying to “follow their bliss,” or with anyone who might need some reminders this morning, before the obligatory brunch. And I hope reading this gives you a nudge to dig into the juicy pleasures of having a body not just today, but for the rest of your life, if I may be so bold!

---

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to figure out my next book, which means trying to figure out the story I want to tell about myself in this next phase of life— as a writer, but also as a woman approaching 40. The funny/terrifying thing about writing books about your life is that the line between the story you tell readers about yourself and to the one you tell yourself about yourself is constantly on the verge of collapse.

Everyone does this, though, writer or not, to some degree. Everyone tells stories about who they are, and not just on social media, but to the people in their everyday lives. We tell others what kind of treatment and love we will accept or not accept, what we care about, where we’ve come from, what we value. Changing that story often comes with a lot of risk, because as my therapist says, life is risky, especially for women who step outside the paths preordained for us. And living the life you want is not a given.

Over the past week, I spent some time thinking about Joseph Campbell — the guy best known for the story structure of the hero’s journey — and about what this one white dude has done to the stories we tell about ourselves. One thing Campbell said that is frequently repeated is that if you “follow your bliss,” the doors of life will swing open for you. If only it were that easy. The road to bliss or what he elsewhere called rapture or self-fulfillment or enlightenment or joy of whatever we want to call it is paved with all sorts obstacles that Campbell mostly ignored— much more so for those who don’t look like Campbell.

This week, like any self-respecting woman over the age of 35, I watched The Idea of You, a film about a mother trying to follow her bliss after she is betrayed by her husband, who has left her for a younger woman. This mother, 40-year-old Solène, aka Anne Hathaway, touches that bliss briefly, in her affair with a 20-something boy-band star.

Women of a certain age have collectively gasped (and who knows what else). To see a woman following her bliss, despite the backlash we know is coming for her, feels liberating. As Lyz Lenz wrote for Rolling Stone, grown-ass women like the movie not because it’s feminist or subversive, but because of its implausibility, after some very hard years.

But before long, the age-gap relationship is revealed and Solène is publicly shamed, harassed, and stalked by paparazzi. As one friend says to Solène in the film, “People hate happy women”— a zinger sure to resonate with any woman who has ever dared to feel good, or tried.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s much-evoked invitation to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, in her poem “Wild Geese,” that has made its rounds culturally with women of a certain age. Oliver’s words hit different when compared with Campbell’s “follow your bliss”: There is so little standing in the way of Campbell charging ahead; Oliver is just trying to get off her knees. And it’s incredibly hard work to stand up after a lifetime in that position— especially since sometimes, we put ourselves in that position, not knowing any better.

For Solène, in the end the very public harassment is too much to handle— she has to think of her daughter, and Solène chooses her family’s happiness instead of her own, like mothers are supposed to do. It breaks her, but she simply cannot endure the pain of hurting those she loves most, even if it means limiting the story she is able to tell about herself, and ending an affair that’s brought her so much bliss.

I don’t believe in following your bliss / doing whatever you want you even if it hurts others. Although getting off your knees without hurting those who have tried to help you get up, but didn’t really know how, is not easy. Maybe it’s even impossible.

In any case, I’m thinking about this silly movie that’s struck a chord with so many women as I listen to Stormy Daniels testimony of feeling obligated to have sex with a powerful man she didn’t want to have sex with. As I watch women say they feel safer with a wild bear than with a man. As I read about the latest erosion of women’s rights. As I read about the women and children dying because world leaders are too busy saying he started it.

As I hear about writer-friends being trolled for daring to exist, speak or write words, or have a well-stocked snack cabinet, and as I sit with the reality that every mother I know who is trying to make life more open for others by speaking or writing or appearing happy in public is likely to deal with a daily onslaught of hate mail telling her she is unlovable, ugly, or that her children will hate her someday.

Mother’s Day, I guess, now feels like a day of mourning for many of us, rather than cause for celebration. Which is maybe why even corporations are kinda like meh this year. It’s been made painfully clear in recent years how conditional the love for mothers is. We place limits on the love we have for moms based on their race, class, and identity, but also based on what they say.

In The Gender of Sound, Anne Carson writes that we judge the sanity and insanity of people based on the sounds they make, pointing out that even Aristotle thought the shrill sound of women’s voices was evidence of how evil they were. “Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day,” Carson writes.

But the limits we place on women’s speech, and on the stories mothers are allowed to tell, limits the lives mothers can lead. That door on the female mouth— on mothers’ mouths— has always been meant to keep us walking on our knees, repenting.

There are also so many limits placed on the kind of bliss mothers are allowed to follow. What if a mom wanted to spend Mother’s Day having sex with Harry Styles because she was sleeping with him after her painful divorce— would she still be worthy of a card? Breakfast in bed? Would she still be a good mom? What about if she had a Gen Z boyfriend who wasn’t that famous, rich or hot? What if she decided to take a vacation this weekend, and leave her kids behind, so she could sleep with a slew of random men, or just masturbate?

What if she was depressed, anxious, confused, not very good at pretend play, or never learned to tie a Moby wrap? What if she regretted motherhood? What if she said motherhood felt like being chewed up and spit out everyday, then left alone to wipe the mess of herself off the floor each night after the bedtime routine, lest she melt into the floor forever?

What if she didn’t regret motherhood at all, even though there sure were times when it felt impossible, and in fact she loved being a mother so much, that she was no longer interested in men or marriage or the whole economy of sex she grew up inside, and just wanted to lean into the soft joy of female friendships? What if her empathy for men ran out, so she left her husband, who was one of the good ones? What if she loved women?

What if she spent hours on her appearance, got Botox, had loads of plastic surgery, wore a lot of makeup and revealing clothes? What if she didn’t give a shit about what she looked like and most days stalked around like a sleepy gorgon?

What if she wanted an abortion? Didn’t have a home? Lost her mind? Was in recovery? Was still an addict? What if a mom rejected, in literally any way, the incredibly narrow image we have of what a mother can and should look like? What if she made mistakes along the way? Would she still be worthy of love? What if you did? Would you?

In a recent profile on Miranda July, who describes her new novel as “a sort of Lord of the Rings story of marriage and motherhood and middle age”—July says that writing her book, also about a woman following her bliss, felt like being at war with “the idea that, as a woman, as you get older, you’ll not expand and get more and more powerful.”

Even though for many mothers like myself this holiday has become absurdly warped beyond recognition, I hope every mother out there gets some space to stand up, to expand and feel powerful today, not in spite of motherhood, and not because of it, but just… because. Every mother deserves, if nothing else today, to let their soft animal mom bods love whatever the fuck they want.

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

---

Related:

The main maternity hospital in Rafa has closed. Donate here to connect families in Gaza to essential perinatal care.

The hypocrisy of a post-Roe Mother’s Day.

On the Victorian custom of erasing mothers from photographs of children being more than metaphor:

It’s almost impossible for me to say what I would do with a whole day to myself. Or even a whole morning to myself. I have lost any ability to identify what would feel good or fulfilling. Any time alone I feel I must maximize by writing or folding laundry or grading student papers or meal prepping. I have erased my own desires so that I can still be productive, in other words, enough to keep my family and my career going. I, too, must vanish from the photograph, with only my hand gripping a child’s leg, keeping the toddler balanced on the chair.

I loved this meandering (in the best way) essay on writing about children from

Amelia Morris

. One gem:

It’s impossible to know exactly how you’re impacting your kids, but right now, if I imagine either of my parents having written about me, my body relaxes.

I also wrote about that subject recently here:

“What will your kids think?”

Apparently The Idea of You is not about me and Harry Styles, sad.

My daughter and I have been watching Amber Brown, a delightful show for school-age kids about a mom and daughter finding their way together after divorce.

Upcoming Classes:

I have been teaching A LOT, so I’m winding down for the summer. I hope to see you in one of these before I disappear for a couple of months:

I’m teaching a writing class for moms— Embracing Interruption: Writing While Mothering— at the incredible organization Scribente Maternum this Tuesday May 14. It is completely fine to attend this class while being interrupted! The cost is sliding scale, starting at just $27, to make it as accessible as possible, so it’s the perfect gift to yourself if you’re a mom who needs some creative space and/or guidance for dealing with a lack of space. Sign up here.

I will also be popping into the Write or Die Write Together retreat next weekend to talk and answer questions about writing nonfiction— this one is only $39. View the schedule and sign up here.

Join me at this summer camp for writers in Iowa City to write domestic scenes and settings!