On Sunday afternoon of Mother’s Day this year I fell into a deep depression. The day had started out well, beginning with a solo walk around a strange and large structure from a time period I can’t quite pin down. The hulking thing hugged a duck pond full of swimming turtles, as many moms pointed out. Down the road I wandered the Fort Mason community garden full of its individualized plots of roaming blossoms and wound my way down to the farmers’ market where an orange cardamom bun inside a glass and wooden case had my name all over it. I picked up a flier for an art summer camp that looked good and then went back up to the garden where I tried to read a book of fiction that would not hold my attention. I began to feel sad. I went home for a nap.
After an hour and a half of very deep sleep I heard my daughter and her dad at the door and when they came up the stairs I heard a bit of a rustle. It was the sound of paper that would wrap a bouquet that was the trigger. I felt the weight of having to perform pleasure and that felt impossible. The make-a-happy-face while receiving flowers felt inauthentic and I felt the pressure to be something other than I was. What’s wrong with flowers you ask? Nothing. It was just that I had wanted to go to the beach and Olive hadn’t wanted to come along but I wasn’t sure if it was because I didn’t really want to go because I didn’t want to be the person packing the lunch, even if it meant I got to go to the beach on Mother’s Day.
But I already gave mom her gift, Olive said, as her dad tried to convince her to go along with me.
She was right to say we had already had a wonderful Mother’s Day moment together on Friday, facilitated by her school. In their tireless task of checking off the boxes (kids should learn to read before they turn 7, they should be kind unconditionally, they should have best friends, they should wear pajamas to school at least once a semester) they had also taken the time to help the kids to make Mother’s Day cards. In mine Olive said she loved when I made yummy dinner and when I read to her although we were eating out when she gave the gifts to me. There was a pinch pot colorfully painted held by a white bag with a drawing of a big happy pink animal hugging a little happy pink animal and small white hearts radiating from their bodies.
Is that us? I asked Olive.
Yes, she exclaimed. We’re otters!
I mean, so many questions arose at this moment. I felt so happy that she associated me with the warm feeling from this video which also had brought me so much comfort. But was this a feeling we had experienced with each other or a feeling we had just both experienced when watching the otters? Has motherhood ever felt like a leisurely float? Was the feeling of maternal love something we were just now, two steps away from the otter video, having together? I decided to celebrate that Olive might see me as a relaxed and squishy soft thing with only my love and deep satisfaction with life to pass on and herself as the recipient of that stability. My heart grew with gratitude. It was spontaneous. It came easily. It had been made creatively. Those are the boxes I like to check.
It’s OK, I told them both in the living room, after suggesting the beach, I’ll just go out now and then have some time to myself at home. Who doesn’t want some quiet time at home? I had wanted that for so long and I got it one Sunday a few weeks back and then I didn’t need it any more. Now I had fallen into the biggest mothering traps and it was coming to a head and I couldn’t see how deep I was about to fall in. I didn’t know what I wanted and that made me feel bad.
My friend Kate, a few years forward from me in this parenting life, warned me about this fuck-all-the-flowers feeling earlier that week. She voiced it as a well articulated rant about all the things flowers do not make a dent in — balancing the satisfaction of receiving a bouquet with the despair of being without meaningful climate legislation, a robust public school system, universal childcare, free college, student loan forgiveness or an assault weapons ban. You know, the things that would make space for mothering from your heart actually possible on the regular. You can see why the impulse to buy a bunch of roses is a popular one. You can see why it makes all our work feel even more invisible. You can imagine why you would not want your daughter to know any of this personally.
We got through the rest of the day somehow. I received flowers but only after calling my friend Nancy and then my friend Caroline, with no kids and a daughter respectively. With them I left all the ambivalence and anger and confusion and denial. We ate dinner. When it was finally time to put O to bed she had a long shower in the side bathroom because the pipes in the regular one had been exploding this week, leaking into the neighbor's window, and so it was out of commission. I washed her hair and conditioned her hair and then I brushed it and cut out a tangle that had managed to gather together with such strength it could not have been removed otherwise. In a futile attempt to calm her nervous system enough to be ready for sleep before 9pm I gave her feet a massage with some lavender oil. There it was. An unexpected pleasure that arrived at my doorstep at the final hour.