By Natalie Kemp
You’ll start to feel a shift in your feelings when you become a mother, and you can’t imagine hurting your own children the way she hurt you, and you will lose your ability to empathize with her.
I know you’re trying so hard, too hard, to make her see you, but she won’t, not now, when you’re blossoming into young adulthood, not later, when you’re graduating or getting married or divorced. She won’t be there helping you get ready for school dances, or ever see you march in the band, or even ask you what you want to do with your life. When she is there, she’ll usually be drunk. It will, now and always, be all about her.
In fact, when you are going through the worst of your divorce and find yourself completely alone, she’ll call you one day, and your heart will leap when she asks if you want to go on a vacation, just the two of you, to Florida. You’ll jump at the chance, though part of you will question her motives right out of the gate. But you’ll push down your doubts and forge ahead into the make-believe land she inhabits.
You’ll find yourself alone, again and still, right there in Fort Lauderdale, as she takes off on the back of a motorcycle with a guy she met on the Internet. She’ll toss a handful of twenties at you as she giggles her way to the door and tells you to get whatever you want for dinner, that you’ll watch T.V. when she gets back, just like the old days when she worked second shift and you’d wait up for her, hoping she’d remember to invite you into the living room before Dobie Gillis reruns started. You’ll wait up for her in that Florida hotel room, but she won’t come back that night or for two more days.
While you wait for her to return, you’ll take the rental car she left you and go to the mall, alone. You’ll cry as you drive down the freeway, real, choking, foolish sobs that are way more about her than they are about your soon-to-be ex-husband. You’ll be 24 and hate yourself for still not being past this, for still needing your mommy, for never allowing yourself to feel justified in your anger toward her. You’ll still be making excuses for her, still apologizing and hiding and wrecking yourself with constant grief, anguish and worry. You’ll force a smile when she finally returns, giddy and still reeking of beer. You’ll pretend to agree with her when she says she thought it would be good for you to have some alone time.
At 30, you’ll be remarried and expecting your first child. She’ll live across the country, and she won’t come. You’ll cry to your helpless, sweet husband while you’re in the throes of labor that no, you don’t want more medicine or a drink, or for him to rub your back. All you want is your mom and nobody can even get her on the phone. She’ll never lay eyes on you when you’re pregnant, either time.
Years will go by, the same, jagged patterns carving out a tired rut. You’ll have insomnia and you’ll blame it on motherhood and being so busy and some kind of anxiety thing, but you’ll know the truth. Nighttime is reserved for worrying about her. You’ll make sure your phone is on because you know that someday, the call will come, and it will come in the middle of the night, but somehow, maybe not, if you don’t go to sleep.
If you don’t sleep, you can keep your world propped up, and hers, too.
Somewhere along the line, she’ll own some of it. She’ll actually admit, in plain terms, that she’s an alcoholic, that she’s fucked things up along the way. She’ll detox. She’ll promise to stay sober, but she won’t for long. She’ll be too far gone, too lonely, too far away from everything she knew and threw away.
You’ll start to feel a shift in your feelings when you become a mother, and you can’t imagine hurting your own children the way she hurt you, and you will lose your ability to empathize with her. You’ll overcompensate and coddle your kids too much, but it will be better than her neglect, which you can recognize in hindsight now.
You’ll realize you’ve given up on her when you don’t even cringe when she has manic, hateful fits on Twitter for all your friends to see. It will be like you’ve already mourned her passing. You’ll cling to the good memories you do have of her, back when you were very young, when she didn’t correct people who thought she was your big sister.
But then when you’re 15, cigarette in hand and smirk on her lips, she’ll casually tell you that you were a mistake, one that ruined her life. You’ll try to brush it off, to find some compassion for the younger version of her, pregnant at 16, only a year older than you. “She doesn’t mean it,” you’ll tell yourself.
And maybe she doesn’t, and maybe she loves you, but she will hurt you. She is your mother and she will hurt you deeply and repeatedly until you’re broken, and then she’ll sob that you care nothing about her. Nothing will appease her and nothing will shake her from the chains of victimhood. You will have to watch yourself so you don’t fall into the same patterns.
But know this, too: On the other side of the pain, when you’re well past 30 and a mother yourself and finally brave enough to accept that you have value, when you’re so far past 14 that you can no longer remember it sharply, there is love. You’ll find it everywhere because you have a big heart and relentless, unrealistic hope, and though you will never fully believe it, you’ll deserve the love that emanates from within you. You’ll hold out hope for her, too, to the end.
And I’ll be here waiting, trying to pass some kind of motherly love back to you through time, because you need it now, at 14, and you don’t even know it.
Natalie Kemp is a freelance writer based in the upper Midwest. She is a daughter and a mother, and feels compelled to share the stories that bind us all.
Photo by Scott Boruchov
By Ellen Lesser
Stay up late on a Sunday night reading a book about a woman in medical school because you have gotten it in your mind that you, too, want to go to medical school. Not now, of course, but someday, when the kids are older.
You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose our reproductive rights, but it’s the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me … The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.”
Sometimes I must get out of the house and its “chronic angers,” as the poet Robert Hayden put it. This particular night I fought with my husband—about what? I never remember—and slammed the door at eight-thirty, just after the kids were in bed. I was still nursing. And I was so heavy, thirty pounds overweight, although the baby was six months old already.
From a photograph on my desk, my daughter’s face peers out at me. Her eyes are crinkled; her chicklets-perfect teeth are held by a wide grin. Her dark hair curls in fat, sausage ringlets. She is wearing a princess gown. She is five.
I had recently begun to mother my 17-year-old daughter Sophie with a suffocating intensity. I’d hover over her shoulder while she checked Facebook, and ask prodding questions. I’d interrogate her when she returned home from social outings, craving every detail.
“Is this your first baby?” Any woman who is visibly pregnant has likely been asked this question by strangers in the grocery store line, other expecting women at the doctor’s office, random passersby in the street.
I read my twelve-year-old daughters’ texts. I admit it. I take a peek whenever I get the chance, which isn’t that often because my kids are on to me and take their phones wherever they go, which includes the shower. I found this out a few weeks ago at the “Genius Bar”in the Apple Store where we went after one of the phones mysteriously stopped functioning. When Jeremy, our trouble shooter, asked if the phone had gotten wet recently, my daughter answered, “Not like soaked, but maybe like misted from steam in the bathtub.” Her face went red and she gave a small smile, as if to acknowledge the idiocy of her actions. I, however, stayed silent, unable to admit that I’d had a hand in it, that in a court of law, under but-for rules of causation, my own nosiness could be blamed for the broken phone.
I found this game on the Internet. The object of the game is to find three or more of the same colored squares together and click on them with the mouse. If you click, they disappear and make room for other squares to pair with their red, blue, yellow, or green teammates. Each level has more squares, goes faster, and is harder to complete.
The first time I threw myself a birthday party, my hair caught on fire. I was chatting with a friend in a West Village lounge, unaware burning candles hung centimeters away. With a slight tilt of my head to sip my lemon drop martini, my hair lit up like four out of the five rings at the Sochi Olympics.
I find myself lately wandering through the past. Sorting through layers of my life like an archaeologist, careful to brush gently so as not to damage what remains.
I never thought that a college tour with my seventeen-year-old daughter would be an emotionally fraught experience. I’m a professor, so I’m used to the campus environment. Our friends who have gone through this process marvel at the ways colleges have changed since we went to school, but I’m not surprised by mindfulness classes and meditation rooms, dining halls with vegan and gluten-free options and gender-neutral dorms and bathrooms.
I had the Zoloft. I needed to take it. But I was still standing in my kitchen the day after seeing my nurse practitioner, holding a pill so small I could barely feel it on my palm. How could this pill be strong enough to pull me out of this hole I couldn’t get out of on my own? This tiny pill, I thought, was stronger than I was.
“How many more days until my soccer camp?” Brennan asks, every day. I cringe inwardly but pretend enthusiasm.
I was not someone who was meant to have three children, a house, a husband, a job and two cats.
Here’s irony: the moments we click as humans—friends, lovers, parents, children, or siblings—often occur when we find the person to discuss the thing we can’t talk about, or at least the thing we cannot talk about easily. The courage to speak a truth less often discussed is very powerful. Intimacy emerges from the sharing of secrets. Good parenting requires us to take on the topics and feelings and experiences where we find discomfort, because being present is not possible if you can’t remain present for the hard stuff, the quiet, and even the secret.
When my kids were little they stalked me. They followed me from room to room, they banged on the bathroom door and almost never left my side. Sometimes I loved it, sometimes it made me mental, and sometimes I worried they would never successfully separate. I wondered why they wanted to be with me so much, stalking day and night. I thought it might be a little like our Labrador who follows me around every evening hoping to be fed. Yet they still seemed to want to be with me even after they knew how to open the refrigerator door. Now I find, it is me, stalking my kids.
What was your inspiration for writing this piece? Have you written other things about this age/stage? 
I look in the mirror and see my mother’s face staring back at me, the same sharp jawline, deep set eyes, high forehead, sloping nose. She’s been dead for fourteen years, so seeing her is both eerie and comforting, a kind of visitation. I never thought I looked much like her when I was growing up but now, at 41, as the softness drops away and age takes hold, what’s left behind is my mother’s face.
What was your inspiration for writing this piece? Have you written other things about this age/stage? 
From where I sit most afternoons, on the second-floor library of my son’s new middle school, I can look out the bank of windows to the outdoor courts where Will practices basketball with his sixth-grade team. Will’s coach recently said, with a note of surprise in his voice, “You sure are one tough kid.” The coach may have been surprised because my eldest loves nothing more than math and reading. He thinks for long stretches before he speaks, an angelic look on his face. But put the kid in at point guard and you’ll rack up a couple of fouls for the good guys.
When Grace was nine she broke her collarbone playing soccer. It happened days after I wrote a piece about how I wanted my children to be physically fearless and push themselves in the world. When I watched my crying daughter, through a glass window, standing in front of the ER’s x-ray machine in her soccer uniform, I was forced to confront my own biases about parenting. Did I still believe that, about being physical, athletic, confident in their bodies, even if this happened. The truth is, I did.
This past week, my oldest child lost the last of his baby teeth. It fell out, a fat little molar, without any pomp and circumstance at all. Just like that, a chapter—maybe even a whole book—in his life and mine was over. As he casually handed it to me, so far past the age when he still believed in the tooth fairy, I had to swallow back a little cry. It felt like a little moment disguising a big one, a turn in the road I didn’t know was coming up quite so fast. Not yet, I thought. I’m not ready yet.
It could be worse.
My daughter Ella was just over two on the morning of her last breastfeeding. She’d stumbled in from her own room around five a.m., as usual, scrambled up into our bed, and latched on. Humming and suckling, she slipped into sweet sleep. Most mornings, this was the method by which my husband and I got to be those rare parents who sleep until eight.
I don’t want a Cesarean. The young surgeon tells me from behind his cold blue eyes that my body just isn’t going to fully dilate on it’s own. It’s for the baby’s health and I have no other choices remaining.
What was your inspiration for writing this piece? Have you written other things about this age/stage? 
What was your inspiration for writing this piece? Have you written other things about this age/stage? 
Before my son was born, he was gifted a book called “On the Night You Were Born.” It’s one of those recordable books that lets you tape yourself reading the narration and then plays it back for your enraptured child as he or she turns the pages. It starts with this sentence, “On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered, ‘Life will never be the same.'”
This is the second time my son has left me behind in a race, but the first time my shame was captured in the local paper. When he pulled ahead at the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning, there were only a few friends in the immediate vicinity to witness my lameness. This time, my lameness was featured in a slideshow.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” you say when we offer you the smallest bit of advice. We know that. In fact, we remember the exact moment you were born, even though it was, unbelievably, ten years ago.
For years, I have kept a notebook by the side of my bed, the pages filled with my children’s milestones. With teeth cut, with words uttered, with laces tied, with pedals pushed. When my first son was born, I wanted to catch every last detail, to snare them all, like the slippery fish they are, in the net of permanence language casts so well. I wanted future access to the moments I knew would slip, inevitably at some point, through the cracks of my mind. What I wanted, I see now, was nothing less than to be able to hold his childhood in my hands, once it was gone, and to say, yes, I remember it, I remember it intimately, each fleeting drop.
I consider my daughters’ birthday to be in January. But I am the only one.
Last week, my youngest child turned one-two-three-four-five-SIX. Six. Six requires two hands, after all, as Saskia’s godfather pointed out when I emailed the photograph of her with the count displayed across her fingers.
I am a person with too many items in storage. There are reminders of late relatives, like my grandmother’s chipped porcelain tea cups that call to mind her living, breathing, sipping mouth upon their rims, the wrinkled half moons of coral lipstick still barely perceptible. There are framed photos from my parents’ lost marriage, my dad in a white tuxedo jacket and my mom with a startlingly chic pixie cut, his arm draped comfortably around her tanned, rounded shoulders, all of these souvenirs from my past that I’ve stowed until I decide what to do with them.
After my first son Max was born, I wanted answers.
Motherhood has brought about a number of changes in me. But perhaps the most unexpected change is that it has made me the most non-judgmental person on the planet.
When you divorce as a forty-two-year-old mother of two, you can almost see the trajectory of your dating life stretching out before you, as solid and real as your seven-year-old car and your century-old house. As you file away the notarized papers decreeing your solitude legal, you know with complete certainty that you will be totally alone for several months or maybe even a year with not even an occasional thought of your romantic future. You will meet no one of interest in your trips to the grocery store and the library, and you do not expect to.
There is nothing better than a baby bundle. A lump of baby all bundled up on your chest with their frog legs curled up underneath them. Chest to chest, heartbeat to heartbeat, their big fat cheeks covered in drool just begging to be munched on. Yep, nothing is better than a baby bundle.
My 13-year-old daughter and I face each other, propped against opposite ends of our worn old couch. I have my New York magazine, and she has her book. Our calves knock lazily against each other now and then, or she plants her feet flatly against the thin bones of my shins. The pressure hurts, sometimes a lot, but I treasure this contact, this skin on skin. Friends with older daughters caution that mine will likely make an abrupt break from any contact with me. My wariness of that moment (when will it happen? Will there be a sign or many signs?) makes it hard to truly relax here on the couch, but it also makes me hyper appreciative of this moment.
I’m sitting upstairs in bed; back propped up with pillows, feet enveloped in ridiculously thick winter socks, and the loving directive from my husband ringing in my ears, “Just go take some time.” He’d started a movie for the girls and they’d curled up like kittens to watch. Jimmy Fallon’s voice popping in and out, every so often followed by the girls’ laughter, tinkley layers of giggles peppered with shrieked guffaws.
Dear Son,
There are lots of words I would use to describe my seven-year-old son “Ben.” Sturdy comes to mind. Solid also gets thrown around a lot. And yet, after Ben’s recent well-child appointment, I had to throw out Solid and Sturdy and replace them with two far less pleasant adjectives—Overweight and Obese.
The first cup of coffee. A good joke. The quiet certainty that you’re not alone and that you are loved. Sunrises from behind mountains. Long runs. Chocolate.
Stop the presses and close the doors and play all the slow songs about promises and memory. The leaves are on the ground, dusted with snow. All the people walk away. Planes take off and there’s nothing to do but watch. You can’t see the moon tonight. No one is home. The stores are all closed and the letters were either lost or not written. The building’s abandoned, the window is broken, and no one in this whole wide world gets long division.
By Judy Labensohn
I stare up at the ceiling of my ObGyn’s office and wonder if a man or a woman came up with the idea of the “soothing nature picture” inset into the panel of the stark white ceiling. This new clinic has one in every examination room-a photograph of some idyllic setting that’s meant to take your mind far away from the harsh realities of what inevitably takes place inside these rooms. Today I lie beneath what should be called the Aspen Refuge photo. It’s actually quite clever and artistic, shot up from the base of the trees to give the impression that you are lying down on the floor of a peaceful aspen-filled forest looking up towards a blue sky. In theory, it’s a nice addition. Right now, however, I feel so resentfully female that I know without a doubt a man must have come up with this well intentioned, but misguided design touch. No woman who’s ever laid down, prone and naked, on an obstetrics examination table would ever believe that would work. No photo of aspen trees could possibly distract me from the ominous specter of that cold speculum sitting right over there on the table waiting to invade me. My nerves give way to offense. Aspen Refuge is just downright insulting. Condescending, even.
“Have a good day,” I said as my firstborn stumbled out of the minivan door, significantly encumbered by a giant Jansport backpack loaded with textbooks and a lunchbox packed with my own hands. “I love you.”
I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was crying.
