Girl on Girl: We Expect Too Much from Mothers

Rebecca,

You’re apologizing for the breakdown while you’re having it.

Before you’ll let yourself say “I cannot fucking do this anymore,” you establish that you know complaining is gross, that other people have it worse, that you don’t want to sound like a “whiny little bitch.” Then you give me four kids, seventeen freelance jobs, eight years of raising them without their dad, volleyball and conservatory auditions, and being so sick you made yourself a diaper out of maxi pads so you could drive an hour to volleyball practice.

And somehow, after presenting all of this evidence, you say, “I know it’s all my fault. My standards for myself are completely unattainable but I do not feel that I can lower them.” Which is interesting because one of the things I love about you is how good you are at recognizing the bullshit rules women inherit and deciding which ones you’re not going to follow.

Your gray hair, for one.

I love that you let your gray hair grow in. Not just because it looks badass, but because you seem genuinely delighted by it. You looked at one of the most deeply drilled-in rules of being a woman—that aging is something we’re supposed to cover up and hide and correct and apologize for—and said, “no, thank you.” Once you can see the rule, you can decide whether it gets to control you.

I wonder if the rules around motherhood are harder to see because they don’t look like rules. They sound like your own voice. They feel like love. Lowering the standard doesn’t feel like rejecting some bullshit expectation of women; it feels like giving your kids less.

I hear what you’re actually saying. You’re not telling me you don’t know how to rest. You’re telling me there is nobody else to drive the car when you do. If you miss the tournament, there isn’t another parent who can go instead. If you take fewer assignments, there is less money. If you say no to an opportunity for one of your daughters, sometimes she does lose the opportunity. You’re not imagining the stakes. Sometimes saying no really does cost them something.

Then you say, “I know it’s worth it to strip myself bare to provide for them.”

Provide for them, yes. Strip yourself bare? According to you.

I’m not going to tell you to rest. What I see differently is the idea that because your kids are already missing one parent, you have to make up the difference. You can’t, Rebecca. Not because you aren’t doing enough, but because one person cannot be two people. And you are killing yourself trying, my sweet friend.

I wonder if that’s the part you’re having such a hard time accepting. Sometimes your kids are going to get less because their dad is gone. That is fucking awful. But it isn’t the same thing as you giving them less.

Your daughters are watching what a mother does. Your son is watching what a mother does. We don’t want our girls growing up believing that loving their children means stripping themselves bare or our boys growing up believing that’s what love from a woman looks like.

And sometimes someone who loves you can’t be there. Mom got sick. Mom had to work. Mom had to be at your sister’s thing. Mom cannot physically occupy two school auditoriums at once.

Your kids know the difference between someone who can’t be there and someone who doesn’t love them. They learned that distinction in the hardest possible way. Missing something sometimes is not going to make them doubt that you showed up for their lives.

Maybe the work now isn’t learning how to carry more. Maybe it’s learning that putting something down doesn’t mean we dropped it. I’m saying this because I just had to learn it myself. I gave notice at my dream job.

I love the theatre I work in. I love the artists, the music, the building, the people. I’m hoping I can keep working there freelance because I don’t actually want to leave.

I spent eleven years at AccuWeather before leaving for a startup that turned out to be a total fucking nightmare. Then I found what I thought I wanted: a music venue. Artists instead of corporate bullshit, a place where I actually cared about what we were making and who walked through the door. Turns out nonprofit vibes are just startup wolves in sheep’s clothing, hustle culture carrying a tote bag. And because I loved it, every time the job needed more, I gave it more of me. Sure, I can do that. Sure, give me that too. I’ll figure it out.

An older version of me would have kept saying yes and spent the next six months working around the clock because the artists matter to me and the music matters to me and the theatre matters to me.

At some point I realized I was coming home from the theatre, picking up the kids, and doing the morning’s dirty dishes with my backpack still on. I’d make dinner, clean it up, open my laptop, and go right back to work. And somehow I was still behind.

We both keep turning our capacity into the solution. Something needs more? We do more. This time, I decided I wasn’t going to keep doing more.

Women are taught that the amount we’re willing to give up is evidence of how much we love. Kids, work, men, family—if you love it, you accommodate it, absorb it, pick up its slack, give it another hour, another chance, another piece of yourself. And then the fact that you love it becomes the argument for why this is reasonable. We keep using how much we love something to explain why it’s okay that it takes so much from us. The problem is giving more of yourself doesn’t fix the fact that there isn’t enough. It just means there’s less of you, too.

You’ve been telling me for years: “Don’t work for a man.” I always understood what you meant, but I’m adding something to it now: Don’t build a life where one person or institution has so much leverage that you can’t afford to tell them no.

I was raised to think security meant one good job with benefits. Stay there. Build a career. But lately I’ve been making money from four or five different places, and something I once would have considered unstable is starting to feel strangely secure. If one check disappears, I still have the others. Nobody owns all of me.

There is one enormous American asterisk: Cory’s job provides our health insurance. I’m not pretending I’ve escaped the system. But otherwise, I kind of love this. I know how to do shit. I go where somebody needs that shit, and they pay me. Then I do something else. I work for other people, but none of them get the power that comes with being my only paycheck (which is funny because I’m explaining to you a way of working you’ve been doing your entire adult life).

And it makes me think differently about what you wrote about Lily Allen and women supporting women who make things. Buy the ticket. Buy the book. Subscribe. Hire the woman who knows how to do the thing. When I read it, I understood that as solidarity. Now I understand it as economics. All those different ways of getting paid can add up to a living without handing one person all the leverage. Women can actually help buy each other that freedom.

It’s funny that you and I are literally getting paid to write letters to each other while we figure this shit out.

Maybe we’re already doing it.

I love you so much, buddy.

Mx