A post that hurst. . . So proceed with caution
Written on May 10, 2025
Mother’s Day has been a hard holiday for my entire life. Growing up with a mom who, if not suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, exhibits several narcissistic characteristics made it difficult to feel safe with her as a child and teen. I married young in part to evacuate my childhood home, but that trauma managed to follow me.
Growing up in Mormon Utah in the 90’s prepared me to make every effort to be a wife and mother as young as possible. I was married at 19 and wanted babies desperately in my last year at BYU. But I have PCOS, and at the time no doctor in the county would give me the time of day. We spent money on fertility medication, artificial insemination, surgeries, etc. Oddly no one ever thought to run a hormone panel. We stopped at IVF because the 25% success rate and the $30K bill for every attempt was inaccessible. We were young, we were poor in the sense that money was definitely an object of continual concern and definitely not plentiful enough to just try out IVF a few times.
LDS Family was still functioning as an adoption agency at the time and their program was much more accessible than IVF; they capped their fees at $10K or 10% of your income. We could do that. We were placed quickly, less than 4 months every time (3xs), and our second and third children’s mother actually returned to us for our third without us even considering it. So much could be said about how the adoption journey has shaped me, my ex husband, our children, and the way we look at the world, at people - both positive and negative. We could write volumes. But this post isn’t about adoption so I’m gonna keep this brief. I acknowledge that the adoption experience is a mixed bag of good and bad that helps and hurts everyone involved. I don’t regret my choice to adopt, or to marry. But I do regret the numerous obstacles put in our paths by our community, our culture, and unhealthy expectations we were handed and held onto.
I regret that even tho I was legally a mother, who had my children sealed to me in the temple, I was still not considered a “real mother” by many elder women in our wards, by my peers, by those with whom I tried to create community. I was sent poems about childless mothers, from women who had no understanding what adoption meant to me or my children. My children weren’t second-best, they were my children according to the US Government and God. They were and absolute gift I was unworthy of holding in my hands. But I never quite measured up because my sex organs didn’t work like most women and it showed because my children have more melanin than I do.
I regret the parade of pandering and pedestalizing that happens in a Mormon Sacrament Meeting on Mothers Day. It was gut wrenching as a women who was deemed infertile, even after adopting thrice. The standard for Mormon women, for Mormon mothers, sits so high when ironically the bar for Mormon men is on the floor for the youngest of deacons to step over. It was a regular habit for me to go to church on Mother’s Day and cry in the bathroom (when I had no children), cry in the mother’s room (when I had children), and the cry in the car (when my children were grown). When Covid came, it was a relief to not be in the building at all, and I don’t think I’ve attended a Mothers Day at an LDS church since.
When I finally did become pregnant, I was 39. They say that when a women has a baby, the baby’s DNA remnants are left in her body and ultimately change the mother forever. They say that a woman’s brain is permanently changed when she conceives and gives birth. I overall had a beautiful pregnancy in spite of the “advanced maternal age”, the gestational diabetes, the placenta previa, my daughter’s breech position, going into Covid lockdown, and delivering via C-section and then swiftly sent home to try to heal without aid. I was unable to take my SSRI from the moment I realized I was pregnant and it made the entire experience extremely difficult. When Covid arrived, just two weeks before my due date, I was worried I wouldn’t survive either the delivery or the recovery just from the heightened sense of terror. But something did change me. Maybe it was the biological transformations that happen with pregnancy; maybe it was the psychological torture that was the Covid years, but I was radicalized. The church became problematic for me; January 6th made me sick in my stomach. I became angry at the AP CSA reports about the church, the SEC scandal, all of it. Was it because I was now 40?
I’ve heard women become themselves after 40. When the chance of pregnancy is low and the estrogen starts to wane, women become fierce monsters intent on protecting, getting shit done, and speaking up because our bodies are tired and we start to feel white hot anger in our joints. As soon as I delivered my daughter, my body felt like it went straight into perimenopause. I felt everything at such a heightened level, my joints, my scar, my hips, my flattened feet, my destroyed neck, my utter waking exhaustion - I was more alive than I had ever been because I felt ever single cell in my body. And in the wake of all that pain and exhaustion, I was also very angry.
You know what happens in a Mormon community when a woman gives birth via C-section? She’s almost considered a real mother. Apparently I took the easy way out. But anyone who has said that clearly has never healed from major abdominal surgery - she’s a bitch. It took me a full year to feel like myself again. In the meantime I had to contend with the loss of a lot of muscle. I lost my arches and gained plantar fasciitis. I developed perimenopausal musculoskeletal syndrome. I needed three crowns and a root canal.
I would do it all again, and I tried to; even conceived again - only to find a non-viable silent miscarriage at the 8-week visit. The trauma of a medication abortion that didn’t work and then a required surgical abortion after a month of bleeding and passing out in urgent care is still there. After all of it I had to accept that I was done. It wasn’t safe for me, especially soon after when Georgia adopted a heartbeat bill. That was the end of the show for me.
Why am I sharing any of this? I don’t think any of this makes me a mother; I think a mother is something that is a conscious choice, a relationship. And my motherhood wasn’t born in my struggles, but it was shaped by it. And I love my motherhood journey; I’m just sad that it also gives me a lot of pain. I’m sad that I had to go no contact with my own mother last year. After years of a very painful relationship with her and after some clear crossing of boundaries I had to end it. It hurts to reflect on “mother” when I’ve had to end the relationship with mine. But the concept of a mother for me died a long time ago when I knew I couldn’t be myself with her, I couldn’t trust her to hold me gently when I needed her to. I haven’t had the mother I needed. And it hurts to know that sometimes I’m not the mother my children need; that I may not the be the right mother for every one of my children.
As I parent my children into young adulthood, the challenge of one child with a personality disorder muddies the waters of what success can feel like. I actually feel like a failure most the time. But is there a mother in this world that feel like she’s successful at these relationships? Is kin keeping the net positive we’re conditioned to believe that it is? My story would be very different if I was born in a different country in a different time. But in these ends stages of democracy, in an extremely patriarchal and capitalistic society, it’s imperative I, and mothers like me, are isolated, lonely, and in need of commercial relief from the emotional and psychological burden of carrying an entire household on our backs. The statistics that women continue to spend more time on child and home care than their male partners even when they’ve put in 8 hours at a workplace speaks to the silent dependence this society has upon the free labor of women. It was laid bare during Covid when women everywhere had to leave their jobs to care for their children while schools were shut down and classes taught virtually. Women were expected to take one for society again. And here were are, just a few short years later having learnt nothing. We lumber along with half the population underpaid, or completely unpaid and reliant upon a partner in order to survive because not even one income is livable in this society anymore. But I’m getting off course. . .
Mothers Day hurts because motherhood hurts. Someone said that being a mother is living with your heart outside your body. That may be true for some. For me, I envision Christ on the cross, I think of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation, I imagine a Samurai seppuku. What is motherhood if not a complete relinquishing of our bodies, our energy, our time, our destinies to be entwined with the rest of humanity?
I work with at least 20 mothers at Trader Joes. Some wear it on their faces, others in their bellies; the oldest wear it in their gait, their smiles, their calculated movements not to disturb old pains and scars. I can spot the mothers of four or five by the way their hips shift, by the stiffness in their knees. I can spot the mothers of one or two by the vibrant elasticity in their cheeks. I spot the mothers of years and years by the wrinkles in their hands and the arthritic knuckles. I see them all with their top knots, their hair wraps, their claw clips and their bagged eyes waking up at 6, 5, 4am to open the store, and others staying until 10pm to close. They all go home tired, underpaid and either consumed by their unpaid job of raising decent humans, or off to another to try to keep their babies fed.
Motherhood is not for everyone, and I feel every soul of a mother as she cries, gripes, and complains about the pain, the mental and emotional agony of feeling what others feel. This is not for everyone and that’s okay. I don’t think we want parades or brunches or parties or flowers, maybe some do. I know I just want a hug. I want someone to hold me and tell me they understand. I want someone to say they see me and my body as it feels like it’s falling apart. I want someone to say they’ve felt what I felt and that there is another side to the grind and the grit and the growl in my soul. Motherhood is beautiful, complicated, so exhausting, and it really hurts.
(I will be working thru Mothers Day on the closing shift, in an effort to avoid the feels. I made a large card, bracelets for all the mothers on staff, and will be taking trays of homemade apple blossom desserts for all my compatriots. The hugs and the tears from knowing eyes is what I need this year.)
