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Illustration by Alex Siklos
At my husband’s holiday work party, each of us standing by the bar partook in the delicacies presented by well-dressed servers.
The man in a dark suit and tie across from me, talking to my husband and another guest, placed an hors d’oeuvre in his mouth and I sensed he was disgusted by the taste. Reflexively, I reached out with my open napkin and held it under this stranger’s mouth. I don’t know why I did it. He spit it into my hand and I quickly scrunched the napkin against my thigh.
After glancing around casually for a garbage bin and not seeing one, I was left standing in stilettos and a cocktail dress holding this grown man’s rejected food while the three of them continued to talk around me. No one acknowledged the absurdity of what I had just done. The fact that I reached out to take his masticated food may simply be what society has groomed him to expect from an attentive, middle-aged female. Why was I so uncomfortable holding this discarded bit of projected sexism and displaced maternal instincts while he appeared unfazed?
My parents used to say, “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” Which turns out to be from a Carl Perkins song and not necessarily the wisdom of my folks. Here is a new variation: You can put heels and a sexy dress on a woman but you can’t take the mom out of the woman. Was holding that man’s chewed food a case of once a mom, always a mom?
This is all to say that I am struggling at loosening the mom strings. After the birth of my first child, I couldn’t at first even locate those supposedly innate motherhood strings, yet now they have wound their way up from my uterus and around and around like a vine creeping into my mind.
Oxytocin and estrogen increase in a woman’s body during pregnancy, which accounts for a phenomenon called nesting. Countless medical books and pop culture references talk about how women nest closer to the birth of a wanted child and then a warm nurturing feeling envelopes them in the first few days after the birth. Nesting can take a bird up to a few weeks while a human mother can spend months buying baby items and becoming acutely aware of details around the home that need to be improved. No doubt that the bird metaphor works for me because I definitely had wings before my kids were born. Then, in two fell swoops after their birth, they were unceremoniously lobbed off. I was a bird without a nest or wings. I was a feathery blob on the kitchen floor of a house.
From that linoleum floor, it took me years to move into “motherhood” and create a kind of nest. It took even longer to grow wings again – vestigial wings. And then to search for the kind of mother culture that would allow me to scrape out some independence of my own. Eventually, I met other mothers who had been grounded as well. Yet, we all still clawed away at the immense weight that continued to pile on top of us. We formed our own flightless flock.
My children are now in their late teens and one is in university. Biologically, the strings in my uterus that are connected to the ones in my brain are beginning to naturally rot from the root; I have begun to tug at the strings that have entangled themselves in my mind. If I can start there and slowly reframe who I am without them, then I can also provide more of the worry-free independence that my children deserve at this age. Emotionally, I am working on the pleasure that accompanies taking my first and consecutive unencumbered steps on a new journey toward putting myself first more often. As for the vines, I plan to tuck them away and repurpose them when the kids move out.
Michelle Harvey lives in Toronto.
