We mothers are all getting the same gift for Mother’s Day this year: Resilience. Remember when you went through labor, a C-section, delivery? Remember when you adopted, became a stepmother, loved someone more than yourself and put that person’s needs before your own? That is really when you got the gift of resilience; that is really when you gave that gift to yourself.
But now, in these twilight times, when so much feels unreal and deeply unsettling, you are getting that gift again.
In my mind I keep hearing the phrase “keep the home fires burning.” I am reading a book about World War II, about a mother trying to raise her son during the six years of that horrific catastrophe of humanity. I assumed the phrase came from that time. But it is older, apparently referring to keeping the light, the fires, the necessities of normal home life together while part of the community is away, perhaps to hunt.
Today we are suddenly, simultaneously, teachers and work-from-home professionals, or we’re still going to work with kids now home. But as mothers, our real job is keeping the home fires burning. We are being asked to do, explain, process so many things while also keeping the routine, the convivial softness of normalcy, the sanity in our homes. We have to do it for our children.
How do I tell my 2-year-old son (who I realized does not yet have the word “why” in his vocabulary) why he does not leave his house anymore? How do I replace the friends and family he does not get to see? I have to, instead, do my best to provide him with a feeling within his home that is as close to “normal” as I can achieve. I must keep the home fires burning for my son and my husband and myself. I am doing this, like we are all doing this, with the resilience I got the moment I became a mother.
Unlike many other major events in life, where there’s time to process what you just went through, there’s little time or capacity to recover from the event of becoming a mother because there’s a whole other person now to care for. It’s a privilege to take on such a monumental task, a task both hard and gentle, lovely, difficult and demanding. We do it, though, from a place of love, from a place of wanting the very best for our children.
But we also do it, too often, without appreciating ourselves and all that we give. Motherhood and doubt wrap around each other, one always followed by the other. Am I doing this right? Right now it feels so easy to doubt myself, to downplay the success of what I am doing — just keeping my child happy.
This self-doubt is nothing new. As women we are, for some reason, raised to be modest to the point of severe self-deprecation. We cannot take a compliment, we cannot compliment ourselves. This deeply ingrained incredulity that we aren’t really all the wonderful things people tell us we are, or that we feel about ourselves, this becomes our perceived truth.
My mom used to say you don’t wake up nine months pregnant. It is a slow process to full pregnancy. It takes time to grow. It takes time to forget, or to not believe, in your own power and beauty. It takes time to grow a thick layer of self-doubt. By the time we become mothers, the little girls, teenagers and young women we have all been are used to not seeing our true abilities anymore. On top of all that throw motherhood — the great erasure and rebirth of self — and we are often left with a deep self-blindness, an inability to see ourselves clearly that often leaves us asking, “Who am I now?”
I will tell you who you are, because I see you. You are strength and love personified. You are a mother. Please hear me when I say it: You are amazing. You are in the very act of getting yourself and your family through a hellish time. You are doing it. And yes, there are a lot of amazing partners and fathers, other family and community members out there, too. But today is Mother’s Day. Today is the day you need only to see and remember your own power.
We are kindling and stoking our home fires, letting the light they shed lead our families out of this time. As you are doing this work, please see the light that you have in yourself, too. Please know the spark that lit these fires, that keeps our homes together, safe and sane, that spark came from your resilient heart.
Happy Mother’s Day.
C.S. Hammond lives in Hartland. Email her at cshammond36@gmail.com.