The Moms, Indeed, Are Not Alright

On taking time to grieve what's been lost, and what you found

One fear that comes up a lot for writers I work with is the fear of sounding like a victim on the page. There is a fear that telling our stories will come off as though we have not overcome them, as though we have nothing to offer (as though any of us overcomes our personal narratives ever), as though we are complaining. I struggle with this fear too, but I can also recognize—much more easily in others’ work!—when that fear is tangled with what we think our voices are supposed to sound like. It’s a fear that mostly plagues women, but it’s also part and parcel of the capitalist drive to make something of what we’ve lost, and to do it quick, before people tire of our story.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days, in some form or another— this drive to locate the lesson, this race to overcome—because here we all are. Back to the grind. Pretending as though the pandemic is over. Or, at best, pretending as though we can make due with where we are. Most of the folks I know don’t actually feel this way—like anything that was lost in the past few years has been properly mourned or grieved or recovered or reconciled, much less fixed and resolved. But we still have to show up. We have to work, make money, get our kids into community settings. We have to resist, or try, or be present for friends, for loved ones, for our communities, for ourselves.

And yet, we’re all fraying at the edges.

I have been slowly reading bits and pieces of this wonderful archive Anne Helen Petersen pulled together, The Moms Are Not Alright: Inside America’s New Parenting Crisis. It’s a collection of stories about the pandemic, written by parents. In the introduction, Petersen writes:

Six and a half million people have died, one million of them in the United States alone. We have weathered incredible, unspeakable loss, and had no space to grieve; endured ongoing fear of infecting ourselves or our loved ones; lived through confusing and inconsistent guidance on who we can see, how we can behave, and what is “best”—not just for ourselves but for the communities we call our own.

That’s enough emotional weight to cause any one person to collapse. But some  people—millions and millions of them—had to parent through it, too.

Available on Scribd— you can even start with a free trial

The pandemic is/was like a bad dream. This era rocked our most intimate relationships, our jobs, our understanding of what we had endured before this time, our identities. Our bodies and our nervous systems. Our friendships and our systems of care. It hasn’t always destroyed them, but it has undoubtedly reshaped them, causing us to truly get to the bottom of what the fuck is going on here. Post-Roe, the nightmare is now a recurring one.

This week, my kids have been very slowly recovering from a cold that I caught and am now also physically worn out by. We’ve all had to push through though, because we have deadlines and obligations and desires and needs. And because it’s not a deadly disease we are carrying around. Because basically we are okay. It’s just a nagging cough and head congestion. I guess deadly disease has become the standard for rest.

I actually think quite consciously about rest and take it where I can get it. More than I did before the pandemic. But I’m also woefully and repeatedly sucked into the tide of the everyday— into my own wants, some healthier than others. The last two weeks I’ve been working on a project that kept me afloat during the pandemic, and I think finishing it also made me sick— it hit my body, all the stuff I had kept at bay because this written thing I wanted to finish, it felt like a door to the future. But now it’s got me thinking: if I’m on some other side, in the future, what happened back there?

I posted on my Instagram this week briefly and felt the need to say that the kids—my kids—are alright, because they are anxious and cranky but happy and safe. But in fact a public health panel just alerted us to the fact that no, the kids broadly speaking are not okay, many of them are struggling. My husband teaches high school, so I’ve heard some of this secondhand. It’s not surprising. Our mental healthcare system is overtaxed/nonexistent. In California, where I live, mental health workers are on strike. We’re all still not okay, and without many resources to improve, and yet here we are, pushing through.

So while I had lots of ideas for researched essays I wanted to write this week, I set those aside to come here, show up, and just clear some space for you, for us, amid all that’s constantly incoming.

One of the things I think a lot about is that while avoiding plain victimization without any artful nuance is a good idea when writing nonfiction, sometimes readers do want to come to the page to grieve—to go there with you. This is what I appreciate about Petersen’s collection of stories. It’s a crucially important historical document, but it’s also a mourning practice to read it. I can’t read all the stories at once. It’s too hard and enraging and “close to home” as we often say. But when I need to commune for just a moment with parents who experienced a similar existential, social, psychological, and emotional upheaval, it’s a text I can reach for, to mourn.

Judith Butler has argued that mourning takes us outside of ourselves, reminding us of the community inherent in the “I” and of how open we all are to vulnerability—to being hurt by the other. It’s political work to step outside the self and mourn, though American politics is more focused on retribution and reaction, than on pausing and reflecting. It’s necessary to push back against that.

Second wave feminists, though not without flaw, understood the importance of mourning in aesthetic and political work. In 1977, Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz staged a mourning performance on the steps of LA City Hall, called “In Mourning and In Rage.” The performance followed news of the ten female victims who had been raped and murdered by the Hillside Strangler. Women gathered in mourning attire to speak publicly about different forms of violence against women— a way to show the interconnectedness of the violence and to show the capacity to “fight back.”

In Mourning and In Rage (1977), c/o Suzanne Lacy’s website

There have been some calls for moments of silence during the pandemic. Where our political leaders are concerned, these have been mostly for show. But many mothers seem to have understood the need to sit with our grief. In March, Amil Niazi wrote a beautiful little essay on mourning the mother she used to be before the pandemic. She wrote, Cassandra-like: “But once the pressure eases up, parents like me may face a hard period of mourning — grieving for our families, our kids and the versions of ourselves as parents that we couldn’t sustain.”

Here we are. Many of us. Who have we become? Motherhood remade me. It radicalized me and took things from me and reshaped me. This has been hard and beautiful. It’s part of what care does to us and also completely dependent on this moment in history and the result of an intentional violence. It’s been nothing I planned for and who I am forever.

During the pandemic, I lost a cherished lectureship, was pushed back into what felt like the vortex of domesticity I had battled in early motherhood, got sober, reoriented my career, wrote a book, failed to be the mother I’ve always wanted to be, became a mother I didn’t think I could be.

This essay has no other point than that: to make some space to acknowledge what’s been lost, and what you found.