A Terrible Mother

Next week I will go see Helen Frankenthaler’s new show at Gagosian with my friend who I recently complained had abandoned me to see an important show without me (social pressure works!). Above is Rapunzel.

Two quick notes to start this letter. First, I am so grateful to everyone who has turned on paid subscriptions in the past few months! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this support. Second, this letter is not strictly about Mother’s Day, but it deals with mothering and parenting feelings, and I know those are tender subjects for some people. If you’re not in the place to read this, skip it! I will return in my next letter with my usual critical rants on cultural and relational issues.

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I became a parent in the year 2013, just a few years after Instagram came into existence, and really before social media changed the way parents experience life. In the era that I started sharing about being a solo parent on social media, it was not the Self Help Fix-It-scape that it is today, where everything is either an advertisement for a product or a list of things you’re doing wrong, and I shared my thoughts (paying mind of course to privacy and the sovereignty of my child), and built a community, and it was great.

I was early to the party, and in the years since, many of my other friends have had kids, but they are parenting in a completely different media landscape than I ever was.

A few years ago, my friend Laney Crowell (who has two adorable kids smaller than mine) shared that the convergence of the Gentle Parenting movement on social media and the lockdown restrictions of early coronavirus wreaked havoc on her parenting confidence. She lived each day feeling like her fuse was too short or her attention was divided, and she was never living up to the standards of the guidance that was supposed to make her a more evolved parent. So she set herself free from these expectations, and began parenting more intuitively, and found herself happier, more fulfilled, less stressed. Had social media not existed it is possible that she would have organically encountered Gentle Parenting, but it wouldn’t be there every moment in a box in her hand, an albatross around her neck, to remind her what a terrible mother she is.

Parenting small children now is a completely different prospect than it was when my daughter was young. I cannot stress that enough. I don’t regret at all anything that I shared when I shared it, but the platforms have aggressively devolved to a place where their users are arriving more agitated, defensive and insecure than ever before, and it means that what I share has changed–or rather, drastically shrunk. Even if you opt out of social media entirely, you are raising children in an age in which it exists.

In sharing anything parenting-related, I’ve only ever aimed to share insight into doing it alone in the hopes of rewriting the common derisive social narrative around single moms. Sometimes that took the form of sharing beautiful feelings crammed into challenging days, and sometimes it took the form of reality checks of what it is to do this sort of thing alone. Once, in 2020, I shared a single slide post with my feelings about how the government had failed to consider solo working moms in their COVID support efforts. Already out of their minds with fear and anger, random strangers flooded to my DMs to tell me how disappointed they were for my use of the phrase “working moms” (“you’re an anti-feminist!” one said), ignoring the context that I am a solo parent not by choice but because my daughter’s other parent is dead. They were scared, and enraged, and seemingly not introspective enough to consider that their rage would be better pointed in the same direction as mine. I don’t use the phrase “working moms” as shorthand for “mothers with a career outside the home” anymore, but in the meantime the federal government sure did overturn Roe v. Wade. We have fewer rights and protections than we did even five years ago, and a lot of people are spending their time on horizontal hostility rather than structural change.

And that’s part of what has gotten so sh*tty about sharing anything parenting-related online, and specifically mothering-related. There is no social safety net for mothers because mothers ARE the social safety net, and so any jab or barb directed at a mom feels like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We are already hurling barbs at ourselves all day long, we need no further barbs, thank you.

At age 30, when I had a toddler and social media was relatively new, I felt like I was screaming alone in the dark. Now it’s 12 years later, and so many other people have had kids and found out what it’s like to be a critical piece of infrastructure and also simultaneously treated like a disposable afterthought, and when I open the apps I hear the screams of millions of women who are being told every day that they’re not doing anything right. It is so easy to feel like a terrible mother, or to make someone else feel terrible by accident.

This is a long way of saying that I rarely share there anymore, and I always hesitate to share here in these letters as well, aside from moments where the relational dynamics of bearing witness to a growing human help me explain a concept or feeling.

The age my daughter is now is an age I remember well, it’s where a lot of my sharpest memories lie, the ones you have developed yourself rather than being the byproduct of baby photos and family storytelling. I remember the concept of being a kid… but I remember the feeling of being a teenager, and with that awareness I have unlocked a new kind of anxiety, which is worrying about what my own kid is going to remember from this time period when she is forty (and beyond, god willing).

Every time we have a spat, no matter how righteous my position may have been, a vain, egotistical part of me worries about my legacy. It doesn’t change my position, and I would rather risk being remembered poorly than raise someone without values or respect or common sense, but I’m just saying I still worry about it. And this year has been filled with spats, but it has also been filled with good behavior and good health, and perfect grades, and no school absences and no latenesses, and so one morning recently I did something I absolutely never do and let her take the morning off of school to accept an invitation to Aritzia for a mother-daughter shopping date in advance of Mother’s Day.

Sometimes I feel terrible about the kind of mother I am. We have a great life, but I run a tight ship. She has no smartphone or social media. I expect a lot from her, behavior and responsibility-wise. She long ago stopped asking me to buy her popular tchotchke junk because she has already suffered through so many years of speeches about slave labor and plastic pollution and the perils of constant consumption. She has never experienced a “haul”. At age 10 she already knew better than to ever ask me for a Stanley Cup. I am a tough mom in an age when it is not popular to be tough. I am a terrible mother.

But I also remember what it was like to be her age, and to pine for things I could not have, and to look lustfully for an alternate reality to step into for just a few minutes. I remember watching the Mary-Pat, Mary-Kate, Mary-Frances, Tovah, let’s see it! shopping scene in Pretty Woman, set it’s titular Roy Orbison song. I remember how awkward it feels for aaaaallllll of your clothing to just slightly not fit when you’re a growing kid, and to feel like the only kid having that experience. So I said yes to taking the morning off, and to being late to school, and to playing dress up in the fit cabins of Aritzia with my daughter. I am a terrible mother.

Reader, no one small human has ever been so thrilled. The beautiful, stylish young women of Aritzia descended on my ecstatic preteen, who had no shame in commanding their full attention for a two story walk through of their entire product line, asking them each for advice on fit and styling every step of the way. Against my normal instinct and guidance, I let her delight in being lavished with attention, Aritzia café tea in hand, debating over the color choices of cotton tank tops. This was her Rumspringa, freedom from the tyranny of my terrible motherhood.

She lived her best movie-shopping-montage-scene life in the fitting rooms, and honestly so did I. Don’t get it twisted, she was still subject to my lecturing about choosing investment pieces and thinking about fit and growth and fiber content and UTILITY. I will only ever be able to be me. But while we were swapping out outfits and peacocking in the mirror, I could see something in her eyes that I recognized well. She was realizing the possibilities of who she might become, transported by costume to new realities she had not yet considered.

rather than try to link every single thing we tried on in this caption, I put everything in ShopMy here, where I, full disclosure, may earn an affiliate commission if your purchase something

When I was a little older than her, I used to go to the Catherine Malandrino store on Broome and just try on dresses. I had no money, and even though my mom had told me how annoying it would be for the sales staff to have to help obviously a literal child, knowing full well they would not be making a sale, I just wanted to look in the mirror at myself in an adult printed dress and imagine a life that was on the way, that only I could see and only I was capable of making happen.

That was the look I recognized in my daughter’s eyes.

In my life as a mom, I feel an enormous amount of pressure to make only the best decisions on every single topic in a cascading waterfall of topics that need decisions seemingly every 60 seconds for the entire 24 hours in any given day. The pressure to be perfect in a How-To and Fix-It culture overwhelms me, even having blessedly missed the tsunami of Early Parenting Critique on the medias, and even if I think I mostly bear it with grace.

I am also apparently a terrible mother who does not stand behind my words. I gave her the morning off of school to go shopping, and be lavished with attention, and to walk home through the park after, basking in a perfect sunshine that was indistinguishable from the afterglow of an exceptionally luxurious experience. I will go back to being a perfect mother tomorrow, and I regret none of this.

But dear god, I hope she remembers the morning when I was terrible.

***This letter is not sponsored by Aritzia, but they did gift us clothing, and I would like to send a heartfelt thanks to their whole team (especially Bella and Effie), as well as the team at Lede who extended this invitation. It was an exceptional experience that we will always remember.