The search for solitude
And connecting with my mothers past
My mom told the story, growing up, that she had named one of my younger sisters for Susanna Wesley, a woman who had so many children (ten who survived infancy) that she had to pull the outermost layer of her skirts up over her head in order to catch that rare moment with herself.
This memory connects me to my mother as I search for my own fragments of solitude and continue, after almost five years of estrangement from her, to try to understand who she was to me throughout my childhood. Who she is to me now. She had nine children—almost ten. Some people might assume that this meant she must not have wanted or expected to have time to herself, but I’m not so sure.
Her retelling of the Susanna Wesley story hints otherwise.
I wonder how much she personally identified with Wesley, and if she ever felt the need to sequester herself inside her own garments to get away from us. I can recall several examples of times when I suspect she had been pushed to such a point, but these are her stories to tell, not mine.
Parenting is sometimes painful. It can feel especially like entrapment when it is construed as only the work of non-male people. When men get credit for “babysitting” their own kids. When the business of running the whole house falls to one brain, one memory. Even in my house, where I am rarely put-upon in this way, the work of childcare often gets to me.
I can think I’m totally OK, even after going through something very difficult, but then my kid refuses again and again to do something basic—brush their teeth, walk, or scoot over to make room for other people to sit on the couch—and I am suddenly on the verge of losing not only my temper but my mind, too.
When it’s easy for parenting to push me to that place, I know I haven’t done an important part of caring for myself, whether that important part meant actually dealing with whatever had been bothering me head on, or giving myself the break I needed to recuperate. Or both.
The fact is that, since I had kids, it has been harder to find time to do either of those things. It’s very easy to go from obligation to obligation, ignoring even my most basic physical needs. (I’m sitting at the edge of our bed as I write this, next to my sleeping seven-month-old, who spent the morning vomiting after we fed them blueberries. They seem to have some allergy to fruit, since this reaction has happened after avocado and banana, too. So, now, I sit and wait to see if the throwing up (for today) is finished, and hope they’ll get to sleep in peace.)
As she went about her days—imagine stomach flu running through a house with nine kids!—I wonder what my own mother ignored about herself. What pains and pleasures she set aside as she underwent ten pregnancies, nine births, and many years of breastfeeding. As she mourned her last pregnancy, which became a lost pregnancy. As she ground wheat (for real), baked bread, and graded tests, since we were all schooled at home. As she cleaned the floors on her hands and knees, or stood on a stool to wipe the tops of the kitchen cabinets.
We were her whole life. She didn’t have a book club or a workout group. She didn’t go out with friends. She didn’t ignore us so that she could sit to do something simply because it pleased her. She never ended the day with a glass of wine and rarely even, in my memory, sat down.
I have had all the same tendencies she must have had. I have often found it almost impossible to relax if our apartment is dirty or if I have something I need to do (for school, work, a creative project, etc.).
This is one of my family inheritances. In watching her go about her days without rest, without pause for “idle” or “frivolous” things, I learned that this was the way days were supposed to be. That one was to spend every moment one had in work, and only once everything was done could one even hope to rest.
This means I still have a very hard time relaxing some days, even though I have used much of my twenties and all of my thirties (so far) trying to unlearn the need, propelled by decades observing my mother at work, to be busy.
I don’t want my own kids to struggle to sit, to be, to rest. Mostly, me trying to prevent this has looked like prioritizing play over cleaning. If my older child asks me to build a puzzle or read a book or pretend to be a dog who needs to go to the doctor, I try to stop what I’m doing and play. We also often paint and draw side by side at the end of the day, once their baby sibling is asleep.
Every night, for the last several weeks, we have hidden together and waited for their dad to come find us. They giggle, and cuddle into my side as we listen for his footfalls in the hallway. I hope that these are some of the times they’ll remember. That when they think of their childhood it is filled with togetherness and love and creativity, and that their memories of me include me sitting quietly at my desk, bent over my sketchbook, completely happy.
I just learned recently that the English word “parent” comes from the Old French parent (from the Latin, parere) meaning, “bringing forth.” This definition feels like a way to simultaneously let go of and hold onto my own parents: They’re the ones who brought me into the world. Maybe my expectations for them needed to end with childhood. For some of us, the act of bringing forth will last long into our children’s adulthoods (or all their lives, I hope). For others, there are hard cutoffs.
I sent my mother a voice message a few days ago—the first time I’d tried to reach out to her in years. She responded, and we’re taking tentative steps back into a relationship, though I am certain our relating to each other will always face big limitations. Maybe, as the number of messages between us grows, I can ask her about that Susanna Wesley story. And about whether, now that her kids are all grown and living on their own, she sits and does anything just for herself. Just because she wants to.
In a couple of weeks, my kids, spouse, and I will celebrate Ostara by planting seeds and spending time outside together. Each year on my kids’ birthdays, I make sure to have flowers in the house—a luxury we can’t afford the rest of the year.
Relationships, even the ones I have most expected or wanted to be consistent, often prove to be cyclical. Traditions and marking time help me feel that I’m making these cycles, for my own kids, predictable and pleasant. We wax and wane together, watching the world beyond our bodies do the same.
Motherhood, for me, showed me I was capable of so much more than I ever thought possible. As the primary caretaker and the one who carried the "mental load" (a term I could have used to describe my experience), I neglected myself and even my marriage for a couple of decades. Despite the fact that nothing has ever (or will ever) bring me as much joy and satisfaction as mothering, resentment built toward my spouse, revealing itself in my early 50's. But what I had to finally admit was that I also took satisfaction in this arrangement, the righteous anger, that I wanted to be in control, the parent who could claim the role of "primary."
I, too, have difficulty sitting still or “doing nothing.” My three children are young adults now, so my time is more my own, but often I feel like I am making up for “lost” time in that I gave so much to parenting. My children were very much wanted, so how do I construe that time as lost? Thanks for this.