If Mothering Slowly is Writing Quickly Then What is This?

Before I had children, during a writing conference in Lisbon, I devoured Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet in the meandering Alfama alleyways where even pigeons speak poetry. I sat on a bench and read, feeling transported to historical Lisbon — even in Portuguese, Lisboa, pronounced “Leeezboa,” transforms city to song. I was alone in Lisboa and that made time precious; my partner and I had been trying to get pregnant for six months. I didn’t know the extent of our fertility challenges. At sunset, I’d jog along the Tagus, counting the days until my period was due. I got my period three days early and cried in the arms of another writer-mother. A month later, I got it again. And Again. And Again. Until one day, over three years later, I finally didn’t.

Now I re-read passages of Disquiet, desperate to know if Pessoa had children. I seek a line like: “The baby cried and I returned to the office, a palpable silence.” I find no mention of children. Why do I care? This judgment. Why? Because he writes about time. Because he writes about nothing. Because he has time to pay attention, to wander alleyways alongside meandering pigeons. He wrote: “I don’t know what time is. I don’t know what, if any is the truest way of measuring it… I wonder if a man meditating slowly inside a fast-moving car is moving fast or slowly.”

Is a mother inside a fast-moving car mothering fast or slowly? I want the time to think about time. To hold time in my mouth like an old coin, size up its shape and worth. How to measure time as a parent?

Time: how the second born speaks sentences now (“big car car drive fast!”)

Time: the firstborn begging me to let her hike alone into the eucalyptus grove, her tiny figure shrinking as trees expand around her.

Time: her body drifting away.

Time: naps — no naps — zoo days — Zoom sessions.

Time: $25/hour, the nanny watching the kids watch Netflix cartoons.

Writing is a sacred act, a mother-friend says. You should light a candle.

I think, Okay, I’ll make an altar to the creation of bad writing.

Then I think, You won’t see children clawing at Madonna while she prays. Or will you?

Google: image Madonna praying children lap

There are many images. In most, the holy mother isn’t looking at her children. She’s removed, not the intentional woman we read about in blogs, see on Instagram, and here I am too, in the garden, or the basement, or hiding in the car, or by blue light iPhone at midnight, attempting to write because it feels like devotion to something bigger than this. Is art bigger than motherhood? As soon as I ask, I cringe. Because it still feels important while I claw my way to a quiet space. While I beg for time. Enough time to think about time. Virginia Woolf didn’t have children but needed a room of her own. I need a city. A huge, empty city with space to walk among the pigeons.

This started as an essay about the irrelevance of motherhood in contemporary American society and devolved into an obsession with time. Of course the two are connected. As Karen Russell, a writer-mother writes:

“Who gets to live a spacious hour? Who gets to spend time with their children, and time doing work that fulfills them? Raising children, writing books: risk is built into both undertakings. But I can’t help thinking that they shouldn’t feel quite this risky — that the low ceiling of dread so many of my friends and colleagues and students live under would begin to lift if health and childcare were universally available. Everyone deserves this kind of radically free time…”

Radical: paying mothers for their “free” time.

Radical: redefining what “work” means, reexamining what we “leave” when on maternity leave.

Radical: raising motherhood, and writing about motherhood, to the platform of relevance, of academic rigor.

Anna Hennessey is a friend who studies childbirth rituals. She found a consistent theme across all disciplines (from philosophy to religion), which was: childbirth is barely a subject of academic analysis but death? It’s everywhere.

She writes, “Worthy of study is how the actual suppression or rejection of birth and mothering within the academic sphere participates in a suppression of intellectual focus and publication on these matters.”

In other words: men die but they don’t give birth.

Irrelevant: Look at the roots. The classical Latin verb relevare (to raise, lighten, lessen); like relieve and relief. In medieval Latin, the adjective relevantum or relevans came to mean legitimate, valid, or pertinent.

Relevance is power. Irrelevance is the opposite. Relevé — a dancer on raised toes, lifted up. To be relevant is to be raised up. Irrelevant then: held down?

In 2020, 860,000 more women than men lost jobs. The mother in the fast-moving car still has many questions:

What is irrelevant? Motherhood. Children. Love. Caregiving. (Unpaid for life; no federally-mandated maternity leave in the U.S.)

What is irrelevant? Black mothers. (Non-Hispanic Black American women are more than three times more likely to die in childbirth or postpartum than white women.)

What is irrelevant? White men. (Mother, may I?)

What is irrelevant? Social media. Awards. Book publications. Success. (Really though.)

What is irrelevant?

“I exist somewhere between time and eternity,” writes poet-mother, Rachel Jamison Webster. We once shared a stage at a writing panel, my two month old son strapped to my chest in a sling. When we left, she placed a hand on my shoulder and said something that buoyed me. I don’t remember what she said. Just the feeling like the shaky ground beneath my feet was a little less so, momentarily.

Last week, wrestling the kids into the car, I premenstrual muttered how I worked 18 years to go to college and build a career and now I’m shuffling kids to pandemic pods and playgrounds and — where am I in this? Where is the artist in baking homemade granola the kids love, eschewing store bought? In Googling fondant techniques for a two-year-old’s birthday cake? In leaving lengthy video messages for friends while lamenting there isn’t time to write? I get it: the messaging time is the writing time. The mothering time is the writing time. No, I can’t write when they’re asleep. They take two hours to fall asleep then wake up in thirty minutes. Yes, for many, motherhood is a choice. But what isn’t a choice is the penalty. Is not allowing motherhood, all caregiving, to be the centerpiece. For mothers to unfold brilliantly in the mess, the confusion, the wanting both at once, the writing and the children, to hold them tight, to banish them to the iPad, to cuddle them all night, to scream at them to go back to sleep. I think of Madonna and her children, tender and maternal while also removed, reflective. I think of essays and chapters I write only for myself. How my daughter proclaims one day, “Daddies work more than mommies,” and I scream, “That’s not true!” But why am I lying? It’s true in capitalist terms: Work is time you get paid for. 860,000 versions of true. Are those women not working now? We do our children a disservice by pretending women have choices. That time is something other than money. That all work is paid a fair price. That motherhood isn’t work. That it isn’t “time well spent.” The irrelevant woman is made so by a series of men building a life, a system, on the backs of unpaid women.

I start hearing ambivalence when I write irrelevance.

Silvia Federici, an academic and founder of Wages for Housework, writes that in early capitalist societies, “primitive accumulation consisted in an immense accumulation of labor-power — ‘dead labor’ in the form of stolen goods, and ‘living labor’ in the form of human beings made available for exploitation — realized on a scale never before matched in the course of history.”

Mothers do real work just as much as nannies, caregivers, nurses, and educators do real work. And yet this “work” is often denigrated to a quaintness, certainly a job that pays little in the “free market” — it is work that merely lifts up the work of others. Work that provides a back for someone else to stand on to reach the highest apple on the tree.

I start reclaiming that work. “I worked all day today,” I say to my husband as he’s talking to a colleague about his busy day and I was at home with the kids. “I’m working,” I say as I prepare my son’s lunch.

My daughter asks me to linger during drop off to her pandemic forest school. She’s usually begging me to leave, but today she grabs my hand, wants to show me trees that are dear to her —

“This is the tree we climb!” A gnarly bud-less specimen her school friends glide up effortlessly. Hand-in-hand, she escorts me further into the overgrowth, trodding through a patch of shin-high (thigh-high for her) weeds. She points out a flat eucalyptus whose arm extends against the earth. “This is our boat!” she says.

I see it. How much I cannot see unless she shows me. How much I’ve forgotten to see, how to really use my eyes.

I tower over her small body, think how terrifying I must look to her. I ask, “Since I’m so big up here, does it scare you when I yell?” I think of monsters. Of storybook creatures. The raging mother, medusa hair and alligator teeth.

“No, it doesn’t scare me,” she says, and she’s about to say what it does to her when a cherry blossom flower drifts to our feet. “Here,” she says, picking up the bloom. “Keep it in your pocket to think of me.”

But I betray her — as soon as I’m home, I open the old journal I haven’t written in since the pandemic began (one entry: “March 15, 2020 to Jan 15, 2021: COVID COVID COVID!!!”) and place the blossoms on the blank page as gingerly as I can; but as soon as I tape them, flattened and dead, they lose their splendor. I never understood the beauty of pressed, dried flowers. I always prefer the alive, vibrant specimen.

I write: “Blossoms you asked me to keep for you. March 2, 2021.” I dream of her finding this journal when I’m long dead, reading these pages, and making something beautiful of this disjointed, sporadic narrative of our time together. And then, I think, maybe motherhood will be relevant. When we reclaim time, when we extricate time’s value from capitalism’s hold. But there’s still a question mark lingering, a desire to make the flowers come alive again.

Top image credit: https://useum.org/artwork/Virgin-and-Child-Joos-van-Cleve/download/nojs

Second image credit: https://useum.org/artwork/Madonna-and-Child-Filippo-Lippi-1460

Third image credit: https://art.thewalters.org/detail/22808/madonna-and-child-19/

KAITLIN SOLIMINE is mother to Calliope and Rafael, author of award-winning novel Empire of Glass, cofounder of Hippo Reads and Hippo Thinks, and a childbirth and lactation activist. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Guernica Magazine, LitHub, and more. She lives in San Francisco where she is at work on a second novel, The Blue Lobster, which explores themes of midwifery, climate change, and New England Native American history, as well as a book of essays on home and motherhood.