Motherscope | January 2022
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 | January 2022 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: Kelsey Cichoski | Reflections from a Photo
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Shanthy Milne | Mother-Writer
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Kate Bailey | To Whom Falls in Love with My Daughter
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Eunice Brownlee | The Little Things
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Reflections from a Photo By Kelsey Cichoski There’s a photo of my husband and I that comes across my phone’s suggested photo section somewhat frequently. It was only taken a few years ago, but we both seem to look much younger then. Every time it comes across the screen of my phone my husband says, “Now there’s a couple that thought they were at the end of their struggles.” I chuckle, but then acknowledge that it’s true. We had foster kids in our home at the time this picture was taken, and I wanted them to have some nice photos of them together during this time. We had also recently lost our first baby unexpectedly. I had felt an importance of capturing this time when everything seemed to feel so raw and tender. On this day, I smiled as the boys giggled and posed as their pictures were taken. I was happy to get a few pictures of my husband and I together as well. I wondered if people would be able to tell I had recently been pregnant when the picture was taken. Would it be possible to tell that my necklace said “Always” on it? If so, would anyone realize it was in honor of our baby boy? How I wished he could have been in those pictures with us. In some ways my husband was right. We had just been through such a hard experience. Why would we think that more hard things would be coming our way? Our baby wasn’t with us. The grief was heavy. We were full of pain and felt completely broken. We thought we had made it to the end of our hard times. When I look at that familiar photo, I think of the timeline in my mind. I say to myself, “That was right after my baby died, and right before my cancer diagnosis.” I hardly recognize who I see there. So much has happened since then. Time stands still as I let my mind wander for a few minutes looking at that
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picture. I felt such complexity in motherhood at the time. I was helping raise someone else’s boys, but I didn’t get to keep my own. I felt fulfilled in helping these siblings stay together during a time it was needed for them. I also felt angry in not being able to bring my own son home to be with us. Being a mom, as it turns out, can feel very complicated. Above all, I remember the heaviness and pain I was feeling. I wanted to keep going for our foster boys. I wanted to be everything they needed. At the same time, I wanted rest. I wanted to heal. My heart was so torn, so hurt. Months later, the boys were reunified with their family. The rest I longed for was not nearby, as I received a cancer diagnosis shortly after they moved. I was in shock and disbelief. This was not the time for a break from hard things, this was time to fight. I went through a grueling chemotherapy regimen to rid my body of disease. It was successful and I am now gratefully in remission from cancer. My perspective of that time has increased since then, as often happens with time. As that photo continues to pop up on my phone, my reflections continue as well. That woman who was so broken, was not too broken to fight for herself. That woman who wasn’t sure if she had any more to give, was able to give everything to stay with her family. During my hardest days, people would tell me how strong I was. “No,” I would respond, “I’m very broken. I just have to keep going.” I meant that. I wasn’t strong. I was so very tired. I look at that picture now and realize that maybe I actually was strong. Because I didn’t give up. And when I thought my fight was over, I kept fighting. If I had seen that strength inside of myself, I wonder if anything would have changed. Maybe not, as I took time to mourn the loss of our son. But maybe it would have helped to know that I had it in me. It might have helped to know that I had the strength to make it through. I look at other pictures on my camera roll. I have a daughter that is one now, and so many of our pictures are full of joy. We’re smiling, playing, and being silly together. I wonder what these pictures will come to mean to me. As my perspective of these photos expands through time, what will I come to understand about where we are now? When I see a tired mom
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in the pictures I take currently, will I later be able to see the strength required in this season? In the pictures I take now, I see a messy home and often a messy baby. How will this change as my perspective increases? Maybe I’ll look back and see the memories attached to each of the items in our home, instead of the tidying I didn’t do. It’s possible I’ll smile at the reminders of what this time was like, instead of worrying I was doing enough. It makes me think of how much strength we have inside of us, even when we’re feeling weak. The strength to keep going when things feel hard, to sacrifice for the strength of a family, to show up and love and give. It’s the strength of a mother. The strength of endless impact. I often hear of this strength being seen from the outside looking in, or from the future looking at the past. But what if we worked to change this? If we pause in our ordinary moments and acknowledge the strength we possess each day, it can become a part of our routine. Our strength would be in our thoughts every day. In case you haven’t seen it or felt it recently, let me remind you as I often feel the need to remind myself. You have the strength you need to face this season you’re in right now. It’s already inside you, and you’re already using it. You are doing amazing things. We are doing amazing things. This strength is inside all of us. This strength is inside you.
KELSEY CICHOSKI is a mother to two – a child in heaven and a child on earth. Her motherhood journey so far has consisted of being a foster mom to a group of siblings, losing her first baby to incompetent cervix, and then receiving a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy treatments during her second pregnancy. Through these experiences, she has found peace through writing. She hopes that by sharing, you can also feel a little bit of peace. Kelsey is writing from Idaho, USA.
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Engage with Kelsey’s Story: Find an old picture from your camera roll. One that is at least two years old. Write about what you remember from that time, and what you see now.
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Mother-Writer By Shanthy Milne I recently came across an idyllic-looking writers residency for women — a beautiful countryside cottage complete with log-fire and a courtyard garden. What made it particularly idyllic (but simultaneously inaccessible to me) was the absence of any child-related paraphernalia. This got me thinking about Virginia Woolf’s idea that in order to write, a woman requires both her own money and a “room of one’s own”. I imagine I’m not the only writer within Motherscope’s community to have put the finishing touches to a piece of writing whilst hiding in the bathroom. I can often be found writing there, leaning my back against the door and trying to ignore the paint chips flaking to the floor with each pounding of little fists on the other side. I’ve heard stories from other mothers-writers of novels completed in cars, or even inside cupboards where, if you’re lucky, you may be afforded a few minutes of peace before being discovered by your children. But despite the inherent hurdles and interruptions we face as motherwriters, I’m conscious that my writing owes its greatest debt to motherhood. I began writing about motherhood several decades before I truly knew anything of it. As a child, I turned to poetry as a means of coming to terms with my complex and often fraught relationship with my mother. A decade later, I was still writing about motherhood, this time at university where I obsessed over literary deconstructions of the mother, honing in on the ways the maternal body was altered or corrupted in gothic novels. Yet another decade later, when I finally became a mother myself, I was hit by an intense wave of often ambivalent emotions which opened my eyes to motherhood in ways that had previously evaded me. The sudden rush of extreme love took my breath away, but it was juxtaposed by anxieties and an almost incapacitating loss of identity. As a writer, the process of mother-becoming exposed me to layer upon layer, unchartered feelings 5
relating to the past, present and future of my motherhood experiences, all of which I have slowly been navigating and coming to terms with through the act of writing. In the moments when I’ve felt overwhelmed by motherhood, turning to parenting guides or manuals has often exacerbated my feeling of inadequateness. Conversely, seeking out and revisiting literary works that address the ambivalence of mother-becoming without professing to have any answers has proved cathartic, reassuring me that I am not alone in feeling as I do. In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich outlines with brutal honesty how, “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.” No baby sleep guide or gentle parenting manual has offered me greater affinity or reassurance than these words, born of the challenges of mothering from outside the mould of the idyllic, altruistic mother-figure that is so often held up before us. In writing about motherhood, writers such as Rich, Woolf and even Simone de Beauvoir address the challenge of how to effectively balance writing and creative self-fulfilment alongside the demands of motherhood. These writers powerfully advocate for mother-writers to maintain their creative practice as a means of coping with motherhood experiences and preserving their sense of selfhood. Though she had no children of her own, Simone de Beauvoir observed with penetrating insight the way motherhood, when viewed as a patriarchal construct, can rob women of their creative energies, entrapping them within a mundane sphere of repetitive tasks. Yet despite having no wish to become a mother herself, Beauvoir was not condemning motherhood (which she acknowledged as having the potential to be fulfilling) but rather, the patriarchal construct of motherhood as an institution that robs women of their autonomy and freedom to set and pursue their own personal goals. Many mothers do indeed sacrifice their dreams in order to have and raise their children, whether out of choice or necessity, but there is also another version of this story. In the alternate version, motherhood can become a door of opportunity, unlocking dreams you dared not pursue before you had children, or those dreams that life simply sidetracked you from.
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For me, motherhood provided a moment of pause from the momentum of my old life, and through the lens of motherhood, I was able to clearly identify where my purpose lay and realign my goals. Specifically, motherhood presented an opportunity for me to re-examine my relationship with writing and to recognise the vital role it has always played in my life, even when at times it has been pushed to the sidelines instead of taking its rightful place, centre stage. In motherhood, writing became a means of self-preservation, revealing itself as an antidote to the almost obliterating identify-theft of motherhood. In the words of Adrienne Rich, “For me, poetry was where I lived as no one’s mother, where I existed as myself.” Rich advocates for ending the myth of ‘maternal sacrifice’ and the idealised concept of the eternally altruistic mother in favour of a more independent, fulfilled and autonomous mother-figure. Viewing motherhood as an opportunity for positive transformations of women as individuals and not just as mothers can be a way of achieving this. However, it requires a society open-minded enough to see beyond the limitations of the idealised (yet often unfulfilled) mother-figure. As a society, we are familiar with the male-centric mid-life crisis refrain and its potential to knock men off their life’s trajectories. In many ways, motherhood is the equivalent for women. Even women who choose not to have children or are unable to do so are not immune to the pressures of patriarchy’s idealised mother-figure mould. Indeed, this unrealistic ideal is held up to all women of a certain age and the question of motherbecoming can lead to life-altering transformations even when the outcome does not involve children. Decades after feminist writers such as Rich, Woolf and Beauvoir revealed their truths, the pandemic has lifted the veil on the supposed progress we have made as a society with regards to the perceived autonomy we afford women in mothering roles. As work lives have encroached into our home lives during the pandemic, we have witnessed women bearing the primary burden of childcare on top of or at the expense of their own professional and creative pursuits. Thus the work of these literary figures remains as relevant today as when first written. I’m often asked now if I work and what I do. It’s taken me five years and
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a lot of professional encouragement to build up the confidence to call myself a writer and stop defining myself by my former career or my role as a mother. Yet when I answer that indeed, I am a writer, I’m often greeted with a blank look that immediately ignites the anxieties and imposter syndrome I’ve spent so long trying to suppress. I can’t help but wonder — would a man receive that same look if he declared himself a writer? To be a man is to be entitled to family-life and work-life and to have your needs prioritised. Even in the subtlest of glances, assumptions and acknowledgements there is power that is gifted to men and subtracted from women. Now that my son is at school I feel determined to counter these notions lest they simmer away and threaten to engulf me. I have commandeered the use of a set of trestles and a tabletop that once served as a spare for my husband’s work. Each day I wrestle these items out of our shed, and set up my very own writing space. Albeit not quite a room of my own, (ironically, the only one of our rooms with enough space for it is my sons bedroom), it is, for a small part of the day, a place of solace and creativity. Wrapped up in my son’s blankets, I sit here and write until my fingers and toes go cold. In writing through and beyond our motherhood experiences, we are liberating ourselves from the constraints of motherhood as institution. We become autonomous and are granted some agency within the transformative process of mother-becoming. In turn, our children can grow to witness the duality of our transformation both as mother-figures and crucially as individuals. Of her own mother, Virginia Woolf wrote “of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away form her to see her as a person.” Thus, by occasionally closing the door on our children and finding the freedom and space to write, we can begin to redefine our boundaries and sense of self so that we can truly be seen by the people around us — including, of course, our children.
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SHANTHY MILNE is a writer, journalist and documentary producer with ten years’ experience producing films focused on marginalised communities for UK broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4. She now resides in Amsterdam where she occasionally writes and teaches documentary film making to undocumented migrants. She also serves on the policy council of Liberty - a UK based human rights organisation.
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Engage with Shanthy’s Story: How has motherhood been a “door of opportunity” in your life?
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To Whom Falls in Love with My Daughter By Kate Bailey To whom falls in love with my daughter, I couldn’t stop thinking about you today while I laid down next to April for a nap. A small baby - only 21 months old - just a fresh, new thing on this planet. It was a cloudy day, but somehow the little bit of sunlight there filtered its way through my curtains and danced across her face. Her eyelashes, long and thick — beautiful. Her chubby, toddler cheeks, so irresistible I almost kissed her right awake again. She took a while to get to sleep today, but I just laid beside her and pretended I was asleep, too. That seemed to do the trick. She needed to know we weren’t all having fun without her. For only an instant, as I looked at her perfect, round face, I felt like I could see what she might look like when she’s older. And then, somehow, I thought about you — the person who will fall in love with her. Of course you did. Who couldn’t? Even this young, I’m certain that she is one of the funniest girls I’ve ever met. She peeks around corners and looks to see if anyone is watching before she does something goofy. She laughs at herself. She wants to be held all the time, and I’m certain that means that by the time you read this, when you love her, she’ll still be affectionate and loyal. She’s the real deal, isn’t she? And then I thought about Jane, my four-year-old, faking asleep in her room across the house. Silent as a mouse for two whole hours, no doubt trying to read her books even with the curtains drawn tight. I wonder what silent conversations she’s having with her dolls and stuffed animals, how she’s probably making note of all of the things she wants to tell us when she finally emerges from her pretend nap. What a brilliant beauty that girl is. She’s intense, no doubt, and I’m certain that she encourages you relentlessly. She’s a cheerleader, a teacher, an advocate, and she cares fiercely about things being fair. And maybe you’re the one in love with her. How couldn’t you be?
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So, let’s talk about you. First of all - thank you for loving my daughter. What a gift for her to be able to experience love. I believe you are every bit as wonderful as they are. My daughters have impeccable taste, I’m certain. They have watched me and their father love each other in a very honest and real way for so many years. We are not perfect — not even close — but we have chosen to love each other time and time again despite our many imperfections, and I can only pray that our daughters will do the same. She will expect affection, you know. A little wink across the kitchen, a tiny smack on the booty when they walk by. We hug and kiss and smooch and squeeze them nonstop. It’s kind of crazy. So, you’ll need to do that, too. She’ll expect you to stand up for her like we do. And God knows, you better laugh at her jokes. I probably should have said that first. Dance with her, too, won’t you? Make sure she has fun. It’s hard to imagine who you might be and how you might love our daughter, but it’s even harder to imagine that one day, you just might hurt her, too. Please don’t hurt her. I know she looks grown and beautiful and mature and like, maybe, she’s got it all together. Like maybe, she’ll be fine. But deep down, she is just the baby that naps next to me and can hardly put two words together. She’s still the baby who can’t put her shoes on herself. She’s just the four-year-old who says, “pantycakes” instead of “pancakes.” She’s still the little girl who talks about the booboo she got two years ago. Please — love her because you see who she is entirely. She talks like she’s tough — and God knows she is — but don’t take advantage of that, okay? Be tender with her. People always say, “Oh, you better have your shotgun ready!” and I really hate that. I trust you, but more importantly, I trust my daughter. I pray that my daughter loves you in the way you need it, too. I hope that right now, while I’m writing this and you’re just a child, that you are being loved in the way that I love my daughters. I hope that you are being held and told how worthy you are and encouraged to be exactly who you were meant to be. I hope that no one expects perfection from you, and I hope that no one mistreats you. I need you to be loved well so that you can love my daughter well. But not only that — you need to be loved well because every child deserves that, don’t they? No matter how it seems — we’re all still those babbling babies. Desperate for attention. For affection. For validation. For love. You’re still that baby, too, and I won’t let her forget that. I won’t either. After all, I don’t believe my daughter is your better half. When love is real, and I mean really real, you have no choice but to be two wholes.
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Born and raised in a small town in Georgia, KATE BAILEY is a wife and a mother of two girls, Jane and April. She works in the field of personalized learning in secondary Education. Her mission is to find the beauty in the ordinary, wonderful, and difficult moments of parenthood as a way to connect us all and validate each of our journeys.
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Engage with Kate’s Story: What do you have to say to the person who falls in love with your child?
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The Little Things By Eunice Brownlee Of all the things no one tells you before you become a mother, it’s how the little moments that annoy you will become meaningful when your kids get older. When my daughter was early elementary age, she would always wake up at the crack of dawn on Saturday and the first thing she would do was come into my room and start chattering my ear off about something. At the time, it was likely Minecraft or Beanie Boos or whatever the fad of the week was. If podcasts had been as popular then as they are now, she could have easily done a four-part series on any topic before the sun came up. I am not a morning person. And I am, admittedly, not exactly a kid person either. To have a little one encroaching on my Saturday morning snooze, the most sacred time of the week in my book, was rather annoying. I just wanted it to stop. I did what any reasonable parent would do. I taught her how to make coffee. I told her that if she was going to wake me up on Saturday morning, she had better bring me coffee first. The following week, I awoke as my little eight-year-old carefully tip toed into my room, trying desperately not to spill the over-full mug of coffee. The sheer amount of concentration she was putting in to keep all the liquid inside the rim was so cute, I couldn’t stand it. As she set it down proudly, I hugged her and thanked her and she climbed into bed with me, as she began her morning talkfest. I picked up the mug to take a swig and fully expected it would be a terrible cup of coffee. But no, she nailed it. I was impressed. We snuggled and I listened to her talk about things I definitely did not care about. After a while, instead of making me coffee, she would just crawl into bed next to me and cuddle. As she got older, she got less chatty and I really started to miss those mornings where she would word vomit on me while 15
I was still half asleep. While I was convinced that I still did not care one iota about Minecraft or how many pots of slime she had made over the course of the week, I realized that it wasn’t about what we were talking about in those waking moments. It was just about the fact that she was sharing a part of her life with me. When she stopped sharing the minutiae of her current interests with me as frequently, I started to get a little sad. Now we both slept in on Saturdays and I wondered if we were entering the phase of life where she would stop sharing things with me all together. I dreaded the day that I would be begging for her to let me in on her life. A few years later, she took an interest in sneaker culture. To be specific, she became obsessed (and I cannot stress that word heavily enough) with Jordans. Our rare Saturday mornings were now sans coffee, sans snuggles, and spent with a phone shoved in my puffy-eyed face, showing me a variety of sneakers that, to me, were all ugly. She would carry on about this style or that style and explain why this particular shoe was rarer (and therefore, more expensive) and then she would quiz me to see if I knew the difference between all of them. It was irritating and I know that I said, “Sweetie, I’m glad that you have an interest, but I really don’t care to know the difference between a six ring and an eleven,” more than once. As much as I did not care about myriad details she was sharing with me about sneakers (and I was doing it without coffee), I let her talk while I sort of listened. She was sharing with me parts of her life that mattered, and I wasn’t sure when that was going to end. I knew that by the time she became a full-fledged teenager, all these seemingly meaningless conversations would inevitably come to an end. After all, that was when I stopped sharing details of my life with my own mother. I wanted to enjoy them as long as I could. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’m a solo parent or if it’s just that I made time to listen to the chatter about stuff that I thought didn’t matter, but the conversations have not stopped. While she definitely has been more open with other kids’ parents than she has with me, she will still crawl into bed with me (some) Saturday mornings and share with me what’s going on in her life. Sometimes those conversations happen while we’re driving around town, 16
or while we’re making dinner together. They generally happen when I least expect it. I used to believe that my daughter didn’t talk to me all that much, but as I reflect on it, she shares with me a lot more than I ever did with my mother. I know about her relationship with her boyfriend, the struggles that she’s having at school, or the funny thing that happened to her at work. I know how she feels about important issues, and I never cease to be amazed that she follows current events and has opinions on that too. We have really open conversations about the “taboo” topics — things I would never have dared to broach with my mom out of fear of rejection or admonishment. We don’t spend near as much time together now as I would like us to. Mostly because she’s busy with work/school/social life, but the time we do get together is so rich and powerful because of these conversations. I didn’t realize how important those small moments of babble would become. I haven’t lost them, not at all. Our conversations have shifted into meaningful dialogue, and we discuss important topics regularly. And of course, she still talks incessantly about sneakers, and when that comes up, I just smile and nod along.
EUNICE BROWNLEE has spent her career finding the balance between her left and right brains. She is a passionate writer and writes regularly about mental health, trauma, and abuse. She’s also a solo mother, striving to raise a daughter who is strong and outspoken. Eunice has been published in The Kindred Voice, Motherscope and Spoken Black Girl. Eunice’s current project is a book about the trauma of navigating the justice system as a victim of a crime. When she’s not doing any of the above, she can be found seeking her next passport stamp and drinking wine. Follow her on Instagram @eunicebrownlee.
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Engage with Eunice’s Story: What is something that annoys you about your kids now that you will miss — or find more meaningful — once they get older?
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Continued Thoughts:
Every mother has a compelling story. What’s yours?
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Welcome to The Mom Salon. We may be separated, but we're closer than you think! Motherscope’s monthly zine is the collaboration of fifteen women united by a love of storytelling and our motherhood lens. Each month you'll connect with women from around the world, each experiencing motherhood in their own unique way. Learn from, relate to, and reflect using their stories and poetry. Your voice too is welcome in The Salon. After each piece you'll find space ready for your thoughts, inspired by and in reaction to a fellow mama. Here, there is room for everyone and every story.
Motherscope is a magazine and platform for women to write and share their own stories of motherhood. We believe every mother has a compelling story and that stories have the power to solve our world problems. Embrace your inner storyteller at motherscope.com.
