Brand Mom

This is a post about mothering for Mother's Day, so please be forewarned!

Inside me, there are two minds. One that always felt like I just don’t have the personality, the synapses, for motherhood. I’m not a very emotional person. I am an internal processor and can close myself off from others. I have a Sherlock Holmesian “mind palace” that wants a lot (a lot) of alone time. I don’t enjoy pretend play. I don’t like the outdoors. I’m not a “high touch” person — I’ve figured out that I’m that friend who rarely says “I love you” or gives hugs. I give my time more than my spoken affection, but I’ve been told that kind of attention conveys love. After all, in the movie Lady Bird, Sister Sarah Joan suggests that love and attention are the same thing. I get way too incensed when one of my 10 tasks that I’m currently working on gets interrupted. I think I’m mercurial? I often have low energy (Jeb!). I mark my personality mostly by how I try to conserve my energy at all costs. I’ve always felt defective when it comes to giving and receiving love.

My other mind, the one that is already a mom to two toddlers, says that these are just myths I have told myself because I don’t fit the brand of Motherhood. I have my suspicions for why I am the way that I am, but in the end, in a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter the origins of how I see and operate in the world. What I am is what I’m working with. And who I am becoming is more important. I can’t help but say “I love you” to Saoirse and Ilaria probably…about 10 times a day. I apologize to them constantly when I lose my cool with their incessant questions or screeching. I ask for snuggles from them an inordinate amount. I love when they reach for me when they get upset. When I get overstimulated before their bedtime — and sometimes lash out — I feel immense guilt. I am constantly thinking about them. I daydream about all of my favorite parts of them that I helped to make. I think about their small, tiny limbs. Their impossibly elegant ears. I have almost an obsession with watching the ways they carry their body both awkwardly and gracefully at once; their soft curly hair that smells like petrichor and flowers; the hard-gentle ways their hands grip mine; the faces they make when their brains are chewing on new input or the subtle ways their faces change when they spot something they love.

I am very attached to them. I’ve always said that Michael and I are symbiotic; we’ve been together for more than half of our lives and I loved him at first sight. I didn’t expect to love my kids at first sight. I don’t even know if I did. But my mothering was instinctual, in a way. #Mothering did not come naturally to me. What did come naturally was mothering my children as me—as my own person, even if that doesn’t always line up with the expectations we tend to have regarding what mothering should look like and how mothering should feel.

I think many of you will know what I mean when I talk about the ways we’ve defined ‘mother’: the “Boss-Mom”; the “Mama Bear”; the “Gentle Mom”; the “Authoritative Mom”; the “Tiger Mom”; the “PTA mom”; the “Crunchy Mom” trope; and on and on and on. Before I had kids, I worried that I was not mother-material because I could not be sure that I would fit one of the prescribed types. I still worry sometimes that I’m not following the right playbook, whichever one that is. Everyone else seems to have one, right? The brand of motherhood is renegotiated every few years, but generally follows the same formula: box us in so that we feel more defective than effective.

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We’ve had a bunch of writers devoted to writing about motherhood and mothering since the advent of the blogging era. We now look down on the age of “mommy bloggers.” Mommy blogger is a pretty derogatory frame, anyways. Did you see that recent NYT obituary about a former “mommy blogger?” It was a peculiarly callous obituary, even if that person may have caused harm with their participation in the “mommy blogger” era. It’s not surprising. With “brand mom,” we don’t put much respect on the task of mothering and haven’t for a long time; otherwise, we’d have a lot more supportive policies and third spaces and support systems.

The blogger era made authenticity and talking about our messy homes more popular than before. OK, got it — let’s buck against the trend of presenting perfect homes and be more messy and authentic. We have “mommy influencers” now, in 2023, instead of the “mommy blogger.” In 2023, we’re told that we shouldn’t lose our identity to our children. OK, got it — just be ourselves outside of our kids. But, hold up, doesn’t that often feel like a performance? Isn’t there a danger in losing our identity to the constant performance of not losing our identity to our children? Moreover, because of the monetization of social media, we have life-hack Instagram reels, and reels showing beautifully beige nurseries, and reels showing a “day in the life” of a stay-at-home mom. Since everything is being politicized, we’ve started delineating certain beliefs about motherhood to particular political ideologies. We’ve doubled-down on tying the ways we mother to our class status. Brand Mother is a commodity, a narrative, a way of being. And I don’t actually seek to disparage any of the mothers highlighted in these links; they’re a part of the defining and redefining of motherhood in the 21st century. They’re doing the best they can. But why is it that the authentic identity for a mother is one that is filtered, box-checking and “quirky” in completely predictable and ubiquitous ways, while those who are just living their life are the ones at risk of losing themselves? It’s exhausting to constantly prove you haven’t lost yourself.

The way we portray motherhood is in a constant state of fad-making and has been for far longer than I’ve been alive. Since breastfeeding became the name-of-the-game in establishing how much you love your child a few decades ago, we’re dealing with the consequences of that narrative push now. We know moms are wading deep into postpartum depression just because they don’t produce enough milk or don’t have the right nipples - biologically - for feeding. Or that their children’s mouths didn’t form correctly and must be clipped in some way. I know the breastfeeding backlash is coming, and formula companies are standing in the wings, waiting, with their organic ingredient lists. Because “brand mom” is a marriage of meaning-making, fads, and consumerism so that we always feel inadequate to the task. So many of us know “fed is best,” especially when you’ve adopted a child or are fostering a child or have had a mastectomy.

We’ve internalized the messages about the ways motherhood should go and should feel, and most of them are about how we are inadequate and we should always self-help our way to mommy bliss. For now, we’ve got moms who write pieces in the NYT about how much their breastfeeding journey hurt them and created clouds of gray over the first few months of becoming a mother. These expectations—our own and those of others—can be crushing. They can seem inescapable. What else is there?

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I’m a mom. I’m also Melissa. I’ve been told to separate these two things so that I don’t get lost; as if we can actually perform that monumental task with the help of a $25/hour babysitter and a $3000/month daycare. But I would absolutely lose myself if I tried to separate these things. This—this insistence that mothers must have some “other” identity, that we must artificially separate ourselves—is how we lose ourselves. Motherhood was not some new identity that was added to the mix, jostling for position with all of the others. Our brains are rewired, our habits have changed, and we have small hands reaching for us. How could I even begin to think about “holding on to the life I had before I was a mother” or ensuring I “still have a life” now that I am a mother? It’s incoherent. Mothers don’t need a multiplicity of lives, but to live the life we have, as we are. Mothers contain multitudes. These identity obsessions are often the symptom of a bigger problem with having enough time, means, or support to cater to our needs, wants, and likes. These identity obsessions also often deal in categories that we simply do not have to prioritize in our minds or our hearts.

We don’t need to have all the answers concerning who we are. We just know who we are becoming. God has already defined us — we are divine, taking after Him. Our kids are His. They belong to Him. It’s a privilege and, as Michael has said, a glorious burden to care for another human being, especially one longing to be loved.

I really love my kids. I am trying to figure out ways to help them be resilient in a world that will deliver immense joy and immense sadness throughout their lives. My kids are magic beings. But I do struggle. I struggle with “brand mom” and I’m always looking for ways to fix myself so that I don’t mother them into ruin. I guess I write this essay to reach out to those out there who are fighting to stay upright when the box we’ve been put in has mud walls that cave in with a bit of rain. I am writing this to remind myself that it is a privilege to know and care for my kids. I am a mother. It’s part of my defining. I am writing because I need to remind myself, and I want to remind you, that for all of the ways in which Motherhood is sold to us as a brand, it is our love that creates the roadmap. Our love will make its own way.