Maternal wisdom

By Stacie Charbonneau Hess

There was a time when all I could do was mother. It was so hard. The kids were little; I was divorced. I paid the bills, picked them up from school, made dentist appointments, and tried to afford things like backpacks and good shoes. Giving them what they needed was my focus and I could never give them what they deserved, back then.

They are grown up now, in their mid- and early twenties, and we talk and text often. Now I see them care for things – not babies, yet, but geckos and Jeeps and girlfriends and plants and art a friend has made. It’s a sign of health and creativity – wanting to see things grow, feeling that kind of power that comes from nurturing something, from taking care.

Whether or not we have or want human babies, we can mother something. The earth. A drab, messy room back to life. We can prune a plant, pick up trash, wipe a shopping cart when we are done using it. Plants, birds, trees, artistic endeavors, neighbors – all benefit from encouragement, attention, and care – three motherly actions that you do not have to be a “mother” to do. In fact, when you put it that way, I know plenty of men who make good mothers, and plenty of people without children who behave as if they are building something that will outlive them.

I am teaching a book right now called Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. One of the essays in this marvelous memoir is called “A Mother’s Work.” In it, the author describes how she toiled for over a decade to make a pond on her upstate New York property swimmable for her daughters. In the process of cleaning the pond, the ecologist in Kimmerer considers all of the life that she would have to displace (the tadpoles, the algae) to achieve her goal of a clean pond for her girls. The mother in her wants not to care so much about those other creatures – she can set about the business of restoring a natural swimming pool. She realizes the tension in this task and writes, “We set ourselves up for arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want.”

When my students and I discussed that sentence, they totally got it. We justify killing a life when we consider it less important than our own. Language shapes how we feel and how we separate ourselves, but it can also restore connection when used thoughtfully.

Now that two of my children live thousands of miles away, I have more time to care for other, non-human creatures: hens, dogs, fish, cats, and the birds outside at the feeder. I can see them swirling about in early spring, feasting on seeds. I imagine they are preparing for little beaks to emerge from little eggs in nests they have created for this purpose. I want to support their work.

I have a friend who is younger than I and in the throes of motherhood. Jordan juggles working full-time with caring for her two children, Archer and Andie, five and three years old. She is not a clock-punching kind of employee. Her community advocacy work often encroaches on evenings and weekends. I asked her about this recently, about this tension between wanting to be a “good mother” and fighting for justice in our community. “My biggest challenge is setting boundaries about when work is over,” she admits. “A fear I have is the kids are seeing me work too much.” Then she reconsiders. “I also love that we as a family are really active. Our love language is activity. So that’s the memory I want them to have – how active their mother was and how actively I worked to make their community better for them.”

It’s not so much about age, as it is the awareness of the beings outside of your own home who you have the power to positively impact when you care enough to do the work. If that’s not mothering, I don’t know what is.

In the words of Kimmerer, “the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn’t end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.”