One year ago this month I wrote my first piece for the Valley News: “A love letter to the women of the Upper Valley.” It was an expression of appreciation for the women who had seen me, usually at the grocery store, struggling with my new baby and helped me in some way.
When I wrote it my son was barely 1, just starting to walk, starting to make sounds that represented words. Now, a small year later, he is running full speed through our house, telling me little jokes he has made up. He is a different person but still a child, still such a beautifully complex, independent person — and the most work of any relationship in my life.
Motherhood is the best job I have ever had, but most demanding and hardest one, too. And, for some reason, we don’t talk much about that. We don’t appreciate our mothers enough, and we don’t appreciate enough those who have been in the deep, lonely trenches of motherhood.
Since I wrote my “love letter,” I have personally experienced, and seen many of my friends experience, the greatest moments of joy, loss, loneliness, fear and pain all in the name of motherhood. I have seen deep and selfless acts of love treated as the most mundane things. I’ve seen women again and again doing what was best for their children, not what was easiest for them. I have seen this often go unnoticed, unappreciated, unknown. Somehow, we don’t all understand what it means to give birth, give life and sustain that life, often at the cost of our own. “Mom” has become almost a dirty word, frumpy, forgotten.
My son is blooming — there is no better word for it — into who he is. Tight curls and furrows of himself that were all there, contained deep inside his watchful baby eyes, are now opening up to the world and I know him in a way I did not before. When he wakes up in the middle of the night, I still get the honor of being the one he calls for. How much longer, I wonder, will we do this? I need my sleep, but I will miss him when it shifts. These are the constant tides of motherhood: In with the demands and the struggles and the exhaustion; out, so soon, with time.
I’m at the grocery store again. It’s August. It’s raining. There’s a woman in a tank top wiping down a cart for her child to sit in. I offer her one of my reusable shopping bags to use as a towel. “That’s OK,” she says, holding up her dripping shirt, which she’d used to dry the cart, trying to figure out if she can put it back on. She didn’t intend to be out in public in her tank top, and it’s chilly in the store.
I keep bumping into this woman and her toddler in the aisles. Her son is getting increasingly fussy, and she is trying her best just to finish the shopping, get out of the store and talk him out of the tantrum he is brewing up.
I see the way people are starting to look at this woman. Some get it, some do not.
She finally gets through the line and to the car, and her son is now screaming. She takes something out of her grocery bag and stands behind the corner of her minivan where he can’t see her. She is taking deep, slow breaths, steadying herself, standing in the rain, just for a moment, just for her. She then rips into a giant bag of candy corn and starts shoving handfuls into her face.
I keep thinking about this woman and how she literally took the shirt off her back to wipe down a cart for someone she loved, who then proceeded to yell at her and make her life hard.
But it’s just a moment, just one day, just something that will be forgotten as soon as the happiness and the love her son gives her washes away all, or most, of the memories of the struggle, the never-ending work that is motherhood.
When this woman gets home and someone asks her about her day, will she say, “My child drove me to unseasonable candy consumption”?
Do I tell my husband all the times I’ve buckled a screaming child into a car seat? No.
We’re not talking about what we are actually doing. Our partners, our friends and, sadly, our kids don’t understand the relentless work and love that it takes to raise our children.
So this seems like a good time — there is never a bad time — to remember to love our mothers and to return a fraction of that love with a simple acknowledgement: I see you, Mom. I thank you, and I love you.
C.S. Hammond lives in Hartland. She can be reached at ceileighss@gmail.com.