Motherscope LLC | San Diego, CA motherscope.com Cover Illustration by Alexandra Harvey | Mothershaped The Mom Salon logo by Samantha Acker | Gemini Designs Copyright © 2021 by Motherscope LLC and the individual contributors. All rights reserved. Leonard, Jackie (editor) The Mom Salon | December 2021 The Mom Salon features the writings of Motherscope’s 2021 Contributors, appearing in rotation from Mar. 2021 through Feb. 2022: Kate Bailey, Eunice Brownlee, Kelsey Cichoski, Laci Hoyt, Micah Klassen, Shanthy Milne, Alyssa Nutile, Holly Ruskin, Kaitlin Solimine, Colleen Tirtirian, Megan Vos, Melaina Williams
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In This Month’s Mom Salon: Melaina Williams | The Thesis & Speak Your Name
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Alyssa Nutile | The NICU is Not For Mothers
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Megan Vos | Smoldering
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Holly Ruskin | Raising the Future
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CONTENT GUIDANCE “The NICU is Not For Mothers”: references to time spent in NICU
The Thesis By Melaina Williams To study life watch a child chase bubbles as they brilliantly take up on air and then . . . POP! leaving a mist of soap water freckles on the skin. A very present joy and a very present longing for more.
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Speak Your Name By Melaina Williams Mama, you’re not invisible. You’re not behind the scenes. We see you stoking the fire to tiny dreams, getting up in the middle of the night just to check if that tummy is rising just right, making sure the milk is right on time. Mama, you’re not forgotten especially at the end of the day when you don’t know what you’ve accomplished and you don’t have any words to say but the house will tell it all. Oh, how you’ve baked love into the walls and prayers into the floorboards. Mama, you’re not alone. Locked up in a lonely cell. There’s other mamas with that same story to tell or the same question to ask, same frustration to face, same marathon to race. So Mama, keep showing up even if that means you bring tears into the space, a cookie too many in the middle of the day, a walk around the neighborhood to escape, a discussion with a father that’s long overdue, a decision to start a career anew or end one to find what is more true to the you
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you are becoming everyday ‘cause Mama, you are everything and not enough all at once. That’s a beautiful thing: to be the caregiver and the one in need of care. Mama is a prefix to YOUR NAME HERE. What is your name Mama? Say your name, Mama. Speak your name, Mama. Shout your name, Mama. That’s your name, Mama. Many mamas before you gathered you up to ceremony that name over you just as you consulted with them for your little ones. You are not bottles, diapers, hospital visits, work emails, discount days, spit up, breakdowns, strollers, pots, and pans. You got veins and blood and cells, Mama, and lungs and spine and heart and soul, Mama, spirit, Mama. Yes, Mama, more than us seeing you, You better see yourself. You better wake up and speak your name.
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MELAINA WILLIAMS is a poet, playwright, singer/songwriter from Inglewood California. She finds great joy in connecting with people of all backgrounds through creative arts, especially creative writing. Melaina studied Creative Writing and Theatre at USC. Her book of poetry, “Bless Your Sweet Bones” was published by the historical World Stage Press in Leimert Park. She also penned, “The Humble Commode” a chapbook. She currently lives in Los Angeles and spends her days writing and bingewatching Cocomelon with her daughter.
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Engage with Melaina’s Story: Write from the perspective of someone witnessing all the work that goes into being a mother – your daily living, the routines, the struggles, the wins. Read it back to yourself and take it all in.
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The NICU is Not For Mothers By Alyssa Nutile A low hum, punctuated by the shuffling of nurse clogs and occasional louds beeps from the O2 monitor, reverberates through the room. I whisper a lullaby to my daughter Gemma as she sleeps on my chest. Another baby cries — the noise is shrill and piercing. If I were to make a soundtrack titled “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit,” this would be it. After three weeks, this soundtrack is embedded in my brain, playing even when I’m not in this room. The nursery pod across the hall gets some ambient sunlight through glazed windows, so they can have the grounding effect of daylight shifts. But not our pod. Our windows have the shades pulled, and they only face out into a sterile white hallway anyway. Still, no amount of earthly treasure could convince me to trade. In that brighter pod with windows and sunlight are two babies who might never go home. They’ve lived in this NICU for almost a year now. At least once a week, one of them suffers a respiratory or cardiac episode, and alarms sound. Nurses and doctors rush to their bedside to help the in whatever way they can. They suction and push rescue meds and massage and reposition and reintubate. But there are limits to modern medicine, even in this state-of-the-art, world-renowned hospital. At least in our pod, we still feel some measure of calm. **** They tried to move us across the hall once. My mother and I came back from a walk and lunch, an increasingly rare luxury for a parent who spends their waking hours in the orange medical glow of the NICU. We started toward our pod, and our favorite nurse stopped us. “They moved her.” She says this with a disapproving look. “You can ask for her to be moved back.” 6
She means “back to my pod,” because this nurse has watched over my daughter from her very first week. She has cared for my daughter with an intensity that has yet to be matched by any other medical professional we have encountered. But she isn’t officially on Gemma’s primary team, so my daughter was moved. They moved her across the hall to the nursery with the two critically ill babies. Babies whose mothers used to sit with them every day. For months, they sat with their daughters, but almost a year later, they have been called back to work and to life and to their other children. One comes back to visit her daughter every evening. The other, I have not seen in two weeks. I know this because I sit here by my daughter’s bedside every day, from the opening of visiting hours until just before visitation ends. I see all the parents who pass through. I hear their hushed voices as they speak to doctors and sing to their babies. I give them a knowing look when they glance over to our corner of the nursery. I do not know their names, only the names of their children that are posted above each bassinet. I don’t have the capacity to ask their names yet. I struggle so deeply to even ground myself here. I am barely keeping my head above water. I do not have any energy to give to someone else. And since I sit here every day, I want to be with our nurse, the one who cares for my daughter, and for me, so lovingly. The one who has come to work in the NICU every day for decades now and hasn’t lost one bit of compassion or force in caring for the smallest and most vulnerable of us. The one who is familiar to me, a little speck of stability that I can hang on to in this place. I do not want to be in the room with constant crashes and alarms. I already hear the alarms in my sleep. I start to shake a bit walking back in to the nursery every morning. I cannot sit for twelve hours a day in a room that feels so devoid of hope. My mother is her own force. For over three decades, she was a nurse. She knows how to speak to these women. She knows how to navigate this foreign world of hospital bureaucracy. She finds the nurse manager. A few hours later, Gemma moves back to our favorite nurse’s pod. The nurse manager is irritated. Right now, I am the only parent who sits in this NICU all day. Usually, there is no one here to question this manager’s decisions about placement of the babies. I have upset her normal order.
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And I wonder, why am I the only one? Surely these other mothers and parents love their babies too. Surely they have more time to spend in this place. Where are the other mothers? What keeps them away? Some of the nurses lament the infrequency of visits from some of the parents. But so far, I am more empathetic. This NICU is home to multiple babies with long tenure. Their parents have to return to work to keep their healthcare and afford their rent. Some parents live hours away. Some are just trying to regain any shred of a normal life: one blown-up by the medical needs of their sick infant. There is no course to prepare parents for what it feels like to return home from the hospital without your baby. There is no description that can adequately capture how wrong the world feels when you are healthy, and your child is seriously ill. Sitting here for several weeks has already taken its toll on me. As the months drag on, I can only imagine how the wounds deepen and fester. **** The doctor comes in for rounds. Every two weeks, there is a new attending on duty. For our first two weeks, our attending was so attentive and deeply invested in Gemma’s success and ours as parents. He gave us his phone number for questions after our daughter’s initial, terrifying diagnosis. He told us we could take care of her, and that the quality of her life, no matter her diagnosis, was deeply linked to us as parents. He told us not to be afraid. But his rotation is over. This week, the new attending is starting, and he is much more methodical and much less empathetic. Instead of rounding by the bedside of each baby, he rounds in the hall with the doors closed. I am invited to come out and listen when it is Gemma’s turn, but he does not stand at her side and watch her as the nurses and other practitioners report. I understand his reasoning. In this fifteen-by-twenty-foot pod with four babies, it is impossible for him to speak quietly enough to keep me from overhearing bits of information on the other occupants. Still, the distance is felt, and the implication is understood. I’m not really supposed to be here. In the coming weeks, this doctor and our earlier attending will disagree on the best course of action for my Gemma. They will spar over her increasingly complex symptoms. They will undermine each other, one for the benefit of my daughter, the other, for the sake of his own ego.
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Perhaps that is uncharitable. I don’t know this second doctor personally. I have never spoken to him to ask about his motivations. I only know that my daughter, unaware though she is, will be caught in the middle. And I, the parent who is always here in this inhuman, sterile place, will be subjected to watching the politics of medicine play out at the expense of my own stability. Politics that usually occur invisibly with only nurses and aides to witness. Except this time, when I will be dragged in to the center of it. This place is not made for mothers. This place, which keeps our sick babies alive and growing and recovering, inflicts upon me the type of torture that I will spend years recovering from. This place, despite its best effort to the contrary, heals our babies and wounds our souls.
ALYSSA NUTILE is an artist, writer, mother of two, and advocate living on the shores of Lake Erie in Erie, Pennsylvania. Her daughter Gemma has a debilitating genetic disease, and Alyssa’s work focuses on the emotional, mental, and physical realities of loving, parenting, and advocating for a medically complex child. She’s currently writing a graphic memoir about her pregnancy and first year of life with Gemma. You can see more of her writing and artwork at AlyssaNutile.com and follow our daily life on Instagram @alyssanewt.
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Engage with Alyssa’s Story: Describe an experience you have had with a nurse – positive or negative – that left a lasting impact on you.
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Smoldering By Megan Vos JULY AND AUGUST 2020 We return from a five-week road trip to our home in Boulder. The weeds in our front yard are taller than my daughters, and the grass is charred from record-breaking heat. The color of the sky defies description. The air is thick. I cough. Do I have COVID? I wonder, as I have frequently over the past five months. “Does your throat hurt?” I ask my husband. “It’s the smoke,” he says. I hope he is right. Inside, the air is stale, but not smoky. I fall into bed, grateful to be home, but missing my parents, whom we just left. I don’t know when we will see them again. I worry about the fires burning in the mountains. I do not know then that the hottest August on record awaits us. SEPTEMBER 2020 On the first day of remote learning, my daughters dress up and we take pictures on the front step like we do every year. Then we go inside and they log on and I cry. We are all miserable. Each day is a tinderbox on the verge of ignition. My kindergartner figures out that she can close the computer if she is tired of “school,” and after five minutes most days, she decides she’s done. My third grader is miserable, but when I suggest a break, she’s too stressed about missing something to be able to step away. She sits rooted to her chair, scowling at me each time I pass. My burnout from constant negotiating is oppressive. I channel my frustration into writing letters to voters in battleground states, urging them to vote in the presidential election. OCTOBER 2020 We are remodeling our bathrooms. We might as well, we thought over the summer, when we scheduled our construction for fall. Our kids would 11
be remote for school, and we could go to the mountains and stay in our friends’ condo. Then, our district announces that kindergartners through second graders will return, and a month later, third through fifth graders. My husband goes to the mountains with our pets, and I take our daughters to a hotel since our bathroom demo will start the day third grade returns to school. The hotel is off the highway, one exit from our home. In my mind, I see us splashing in the pool after school, see myself relaxing and watching Netflix in a hotel room with a view of the mountains while I have my first break from parenting since the beginning of the pandemic. But our room overlooks the highway, and all we can see is the rise of the road and an office park across the parking lot. Road noise penetrates the walls. The pool is closed indefinitely. On my third grader’s first day of inperson school since the previous March, I take her picture on the scratchy couch in our hotel room, a generic painting of a bicycle hovering behind her head. We drive down the hill into Boulder. It’s too smoky to see the typical mountain view, a panorama that amazes me even after living here for sixteen years. Usually, the fires have stopped by October, but this year, they continue to ravage the west. Three of the ten most destructive wildfires in Colorado history happen in 2020, and in the states further west it’s even worse. I forgo the hike I was planning and climb into my bed in the sterile hotel room. Netflix doesn’t feel as appealing when it’s my only option. I write more election letters. My Google search history: Do masks protect from wildfire smoke inhalation? Boulder County COVID data Record temperature Boulder October 2020 election polls Vaccine development Average time to complete bathroom remodel NOVEMBER 2020 This feels like the apocalypse, I text my husband. Our construction is delayed. COVID cases are rising. There’s no way our kids will remain inperson for school through the end of 2020. The mountains continue to burn; ash rains from the sky and leaves white flecks on the pavement of the hotel parking lot. I worry about the fires and COVID and the election. Every night, I fall asleep between my girls in the hotel king-sized bed. I close the cheap blinds to shut out the parking lot lights, but the light 12
pierces through the edges, illuminating the girls’ peaceful expressions, which anchor me as I toss and turn. We play at the school playground one afternoon. A friend brings coffee, and we sit six feet apart, masks down, while our kids play. A small plume of smoke unfurls from a ridge beyond Boulder. I sip my latte and brace for everything I don’t know is coming.
During non-pandemic times, MEGAN VOS produces Listen to Your Mother, a live show featuring local writers’ stories about motherhood. Now, she has shamelessly embraced Peloton spin classes and bread baking, and finds solace hiking in the mountains above her Boulder, CO home. Megan loves to ski with her family and try new recipes with her partner. Her writing has been published in the Birth Stories and Radical Mama editions of Motherscope and in The Kindred Voice. You can read more of Megan’s writing on her (now rarely updated because: pandemic) blog, www.familygrowsup.com.
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Engage with Megan’s Story: Create a summary of your year by writing one moment from each month in chronological order. Try to identify a theme or growth that occured in this twelve-month span.
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Raising the Future By Holly Ruskin I have a t-shirt and it says, ‘Raising the Future’. It came with a card with the same slogan and the day it arrived I slotted it into the full-length mirror in our bedroom. Every day when I get dressed, usually while my daughter clings to my legs or demands to be involved somehow, my eyes skim over that card. Sometimes I read it word for word, and I remember what it means, but more often than not there’s no time for it to embed itself in my conscious mind. Some seasons of motherhood are tougher than others and, in the same way, some days are like their own selfcontained storm. No time for anything as luxurious as reading and really seeing what’s in front of you. But I do see those words and I remember what they mean. Because when you’re a cycle breaker and a mother, every day is a reminder of your work. Each time I respond with grace, reach out with love and resist my triggers, I feel it like a nudge to my back. A gentle prod as though saying to myself “that’s it, gently does it”. I am 37 years old and a woman who is reeling from only now really seeing her childhood and all its trauma. I’m doing the reading, journaling, breathwork and self-care in small doses. It has to fit around all the other things I’m doing and honestly, right now it often has to slot in alongside my pain. Fear, exhaustion, guilt. As a mother, my life is a patchwork of emotions and I feel heavier than ever before. There’s the weight of responsibility now and it’s not just about making sure my daughter is okay. It’s about looking after myself too. Healing the wounds and stopping the trauma in its tracks. Future proofing for the children my daughter may or may not decide to bring into this world. That’s what cycle-breaking really is; bearing the burden of creating a kinder, more open and accepting future for more than just yourself or your own immediate family. This work is for everyone. So even though I know ‘Raising the Future’ is my reminder to consciously mother my daughter, it’s also the nudge I need to recognise that I’m also 15
re-mothering myself. And so much of what we do as parents – but mostly mothers – is overlooked and underplayed by a society that would rather we do it all quietly. Reproduce without requiring anything. Usher in new generations but in hushed tones. Heads bowed and eyes down so that we might prioritise the broken system over asking for help to build a better one. Inter-generational trauma is becoming a recognised field of study in psychology and I read about it far more now than I did even two years ago when my daughter was born. Slowly, slowly there are pockets of people who are looking back in order to more safely move ahead. And I would wager that most of these people are parents, because nothing (NOTHING) has the power to make you more painfully self-aware than having children. But acting on that awareness is a choice you end up having to make every single day. Recently I told my husband that I wanted to retrain as a therapist and that my goal would be to specialise in helping women and girls. I can pinpoint the moments in my childhood that were turning points, where my future spun on a dime and refracted versions of me I imagine would be far less broken than I feel today. If we want to create real, meaningful change then this starts with helping those who will go on to bear our children. Those whose bodies carry the trauma of existing in an oppressive system that keeps them an enemy of themselves. A trauma they learn and inherit. So raising the future has actually become my reminder to live consciously. Create with intention. Work with purpose. That slogan has expanded my definition of mothering and allowed me to find meaning in the mundane. Because it’s in the smallest, quietest acts of love where I have found my biggest and most deafening inspiration to raise the our future.
HOLLY RUSKIN is a mama and lover of women’s words. A freelance writer and Film lecturer, her work includes editing books and screenplays, writing essays and poetry. Holly co-founded blood moon POETRY, a small press that publishes poetry written by women @bloodmoonpoetrypress. Her words can be found in various publications; a collection of her poems 16
on motherhood have been featured in the Amazon bestseller Not The Only One. She writes for Motherscope and Sunday Mornings at the River. Connect with her on Instagram @hollyruskin_.
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Engage with Holly’s Story: What does ‘Raising the Future’ mean to you?
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Continued Thoughts:
Every mother has a compelling story. What’s yours?
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