I remember learning that the journey to enlightenment is achieved once one masters these three basic skills: keeping one’s space clean and clear; learning to cook healthy nourishing clean food; and, now more than ever, being able to grow your own food. These are the basic skills that keep humans alive and well. Growing food, cooking, and cleaning. Call it maintaining, tending. I like tending, if left uninterrupted. Task interruption is painful for me. Mothers are interrupted constantly. I tend to our home so that we may be well. This is an honour as a mother. And still, even if that was my sole duty in life, to tend the home and to shape, love, and care for the children…it would be too much.
At the same rate that we are taxing Ahki (Mother Earth), we are taxing the mothers that birth upon her. Taxing economically, for certain (thirty some percent of wages paying for racist, genocidal, destructive governments running sick capitalist systems…in short, taxes pay for so much of what I would want done differently).
But taxing energetically. We work. We schedule. We think of clothing changes, water bottles (how on earth did we used to hydrate before all these fucking bottles?!), snacks, lunches, equipment, gear, laundry, next week’s playdate, last week’s birthday. Did I miss anything? It’s not on the calendar. Appointments! Make them, go to them, deal with the healthcare professionals that think you are a stupid Hippy.
Sigh. Cry. Scream. I have done it all. Nothing is changing in my world. So, now I write. I write until I can’t write anymore. I write when nobody is going to read it. I write without false hope or naïve folly that anybody cares about us mothers. Even the people I create children with (the fathers) often seem too caught up in their worlds to be very concerned about my wellbeing. Taken for granted. Men are programmed to take the work and energy of women for granted. It’s called patriarchal capitalism sometimes. It is a real system and way of doing and being. And it is neither fair or healthy; not for women or Mother Earth. I know there is never a situation where we can accurately say, “all men,” and yet…
I pray though, that I am not training my daughters to push through and do whatever they can to please the men around them. I hope I too can stop. I pray too that my son can somehow, even amidst the dominant narrative, learn to honour and respect women. Maybe we can all learn to honour and respect each other?
Dear everyone: If people only like you because of what you do for them, give them, offer, then they should get fucked. Give to yourself first, that your cup be filled. Then it can overflow onto those you love. Sounds good? But I can’t, fill my own cup. I need alone time. We all do. But my days are filled with have to-do lists. My lists overfloweth, running deep and long into the bottoms of my synapses, where there will always be another one ready to fire…a Sisyphus list, so to speak. Hard to find peace.
Easy enough to blame the partner. The other parent. But they are overextended too. Capitalism. Schools care for the children, where they go but we don’t agree with what or how they teach. We send them anyways! The horror. The pain. We allow a system to train our children to become the next workforce so that we can work (often in unfulfilling jobs) in order to pay the bills, stay warm, buy poisoned food that supports unsustainable agriculture practices. And maybe, if we dare admit, we work to have a societally acceptable break, where children aren’t constantly pulling at us to meet their needs. I know that my paid job is the very easiest and calmest part of my world.
Are there any answers? Where is the village? Is it up to mothers to build that too, on top of everything else we do? If the tone of this is angry, I am angry. In part because the cries for help fall on deaf ears, fall on people who say, think, or just vibe “You chose to have kids, not my problem!” But wouldn’t you want to help shape the humans that will shape the world as we evolve? I am telling you that I certainly can’t do my best work as a parent while constantly on the edge of burn out.
And as we plead for new and better supportive family systems, I expect that the only way change will come is if we somehow muster, from the depths of maternal love and wisdom, enough energy to build a world where real support and care is possible. I tired myself writing this though, so that is a task for tomorrow. Anybody want to help (asked the little red hen)?
Call me a whiner. Call me a man-hater. Hippy, tree-hugger, communist, radical, conspiracy theorist...Call me whatever you like. I know that I am a mother. And I feel caged by the weight of the needs I am expected to meet. I would not be surprised if almost every mother, especially during the formative years of her children, feels this way too. My mother's generation was not even given permission to speak these things...not aloud, and not even to themselves. And the generation before that worked so hard there was no time to complain! Then again, the world used to be considered safe enough to let the young ones roam much more freely. As in, the generations before us did not have to watch their children so closely. There are so many dangers (most of them digital) lurking about these days. And still, despite the known dangers, screens are being used to take the pressure off... who will clean up this mess of a society?
Sincerely,
with love to all doing their best to raise healthy families against all odds,
moi
