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 | April 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, Heather Cleaves, 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: Eunice Brownlee | Mom Guilt and Other Stories
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Kelsey Cichoski | Comfort the Mother
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Shanthy Milne | Blueberry Bowl
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Kate Bailey | The Leaf 16
Mom Guilt and Other Stories By Eunice Brownlee
On Solo Parenting “I don’t know how you do it.” I hear it all the time — usually from a mom who has one kid in a sling, a toddler climbing up her leg, and one tugging at her free arm, begging to go. She looks harried and grateful at the same time. I can tell she longs for the days of meeting her girlfriends for cocktails after work and now her greatest dream come true would be to poop without interruption. The truth is, it’s what I’ve always known because I didn’t really get a choice in the matter. You could hardly call what her father and I were doing dating. It was really nothing more than carnal indulgence to cover the pain of my recent divorce. Kids were never in my life’s plan. It was a big reason my ex-husband and I began to drift apart in the first place. I had dreams of being some badass executive in a power suit, strutting down the sidewalk with a briefcase in hand while calling the shots to my team from my cell phone. To say the pregnancy was a surprise is an understatement. I was on the pill. It had never failed me. That is, until a horrible kidney infection came along. Turns out, that thing they tell you about birth control losing efficacy when you’re on antibiotics? 100% true. He and I had stopped seeing each other months before, so to tell him that I was pregnant with his child? I’ll never forget the way he went speechless and dropped to his knees as though I had kicked him in the nuts. Maybe if someone had, we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
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A few weeks went by and he delivered the news I both expected and was saddened to hear. He didn’t want to have anything to do with us. The sting of that decision has never faded, but I reveled in joy thinking about all of the fights I would never have to have: charter school or public, helicopter or free-range parenting, and whether or not to go fully organic. I could make all the decisions and there would be no one to argue with me. I would never have to say, “Go ask your dad,” when I didn’t want to bear the weight of saying no. I would just say no and learn to be the bad guy. But I could also be the hero when I wanted to. The truth is, I do it because I’ve never known it any other way.
Sanctuary in the Storage Closet I’m not sure what evil beast overtakes our children the moment they turn two, but it seems fairly universal, otherwise they wouldn’t call it “Terrible Twos.” My daughter and I had just moved into a small onebedroom apartment. At 24 months old, she had already lived at six different addresses. I could barely afford this one, and only by the grace of the landlord, who let me pay weekly, rather than monthly. I was waiting tables at the time, in between jobs and biding my time until the hiring freeze from my most alluring prospect was lifted. We had just moved out of my friend’s million-dollar mansion, where we were living rent-free while my friend spent her days trying to shortsell the house that her ex-boyfriend had dumped on her and nights were spent serving unappreciative customers drinks that came topped with an entire fruit salad. My roommate and I shopped at the food bank while my daughter rode her new tricycle around the 10,000-square-foot unfinished basement. I’m not sure if it was claustrophobia after living in the mansion or her age, but as soon as we moved to our new 540-square-foot abode, it was like a demon took over and all she did was scream and cry. Nonstop. Bedtime was the worst. She’d gotten big enough that she had begun hurling herself out of the crib after I put her down. Worried that she was going to break something that I couldn’t afford to fix, I took the front panel off of her crib and spent at least
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