The Sacred Everyday Vs. the Special Day

A Special Mother’s Day Pocket on How the Special Might be Overrated

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose. Happy Mother’s Day! A warm welcome to new subscribers. In this episode, I reflect on mothering and how my experience of it has changed over the years. I’m also taking a close look at celebrating the sacred of the everyday rather than focusing on the special day. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, so please share with your friends, or your moms, or the people you know who are mothering us all. If you find yourself savoring these pockets each week, you can support the publication by becoming a paid subscriber. A big thank you to my existing paid subscribers. The next paid subscriber will be another milestone for me, and I will use the funds to support another writer, who like me, is pursuing their passion.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Meet Roxy! My 16-year-old daughter is also a mom to this tiny crested gecko.

So, I had this idea of writing a pocket for Mother’s Day, which focused on the beauty of the small and ordinary. Of course, because this post was for Mother’s Day, I wanted it to be really special. I wanted it to honor the many authors I cherished as writers and mothers and also the many women who have shaped me. For the last week, I have been lugging Mary Oliver’s Devotions, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass back and forth to work with me in my backpack in the hopes that their ideas would maybe, I don’t know, synthesize themselves. As my body nearly tipped over under the weight of the books and my expectations, I think I finally realized the irony. I was thinking pretty big for a post that was intended to honor the small.

So, I took a breath and read Sara Petersen’s Substack post, Fuck Mother’s Day. Good stuff! Sara pokes a lot of holes at the messages society sends us about how we should think and feel as women. “Congratulations for doing the “hardest job in the world” and doing it without any cultural respect, remuneration, or systemic support, none of which you should need if you’re a good mom, because you got this mama!” Sara satirizes ads on a regular basis, and one that I particularly resonated with this week especially as I lugged around my brick of a backpack was a pic of a mom holding a baby on one hip and a giant Yeti bag on the other with a caption below the pic that read Tough as a Mother. “You know what would be even better,” Sara writes “than a “high desert clay” colored cooler purse? Asking “Mom” what her name is and not forcing her to carry so fucking much.” Sara’s post helped me reset my expectations for myself and for the day, but because I’m stubborn, I decided I still wanted to write a special post for Mother’s Day. I wanted to write something, which considered how we really feel on special occasions rather than how we think we should feel.

I had a lot of feelings on my first Mother’s Day as a new mom, but they were drastically different from what I thought I should be feeling. If only I had Sara’s words sixteen years ago.

Anna was born in February and by May, Dan and I were still living in the upside-down world of new parenting. We were newlyweds when we discovered we were pregnant, still figuring out how to be married, which one could argue is what married folks do for the rest of their lives. However, at the time, it was a lot. On Mother’s Day, I told Dan I wanted to go to church. I think I thought that was what we were supposed to do. It was the first time we had been to church since Anna was born. Taking a newborn out into the world is hard. Taking a newborn to church is just a bad idea. Church, in my opinion, is a bit of an unfair parent ask, it is difficult and loaded so it kind of sets us up for failure from the get-go. We think if we don’t go, we are failing our children, and perhaps neglecting our duties as a parent. If we do decide to go, though it’s with a lot of hope and prayer…that our kids won’t start screaming amid all the silence and singing. So, needless to say, rather than relishing in each other and the life we had created on that first Mother’s Day, Dan and I were both stressed out of our minds throughout the service, looking forward to when we could make a clean exit. At one point, the priest actually asked for the newest mother to come forward. The newest mother at the service was most definitely me, all the other newbie mothers, had the good judgement to stay home. It was meant to be a celebration, but I kinda just hid. The woman in the pew in front of us kept nudging her chin towards me and then toward the priest seeming to suggest that I was disregarding a direct order from God himself by not going up to the alter. But I didn’t want any more attention drawn to me and I didn’t feel like rejoicing, I felt like crying. I still had so many hormones coursing through my body, and my emotions confused and overwhelmed me. For the rest of the day, all of my well-meaning family and friends called to wish me a Happy First Mother’s Day, but I wasn’t in a place of joy, and that made me feel even worse.

When I read Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s books, I think she would relate with my experience. In An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, she writes, “when I was a schoolgirl: I tended to dread field-trip days, all the excitement while getting our coats and lining up…the museum exhibits that we were supposed to look at and learn something from, that curious feeling of detachment, and the guilt that I wasn’t enjoying it.”  In that same book, she explains that “there are proponents of New Year’s Eve, and there are proponents of regular Tuesday nights.” Like Amy, I am hands down a Tuesday night gal, but before I read her book, I’m not sure I realized it was okay to be this way. I think my reasons for choosing Tuesday night are obvious and come back to my feelings about expectations versus reality. Expectations for an ordinary Tuesday night are low, so often they are exceeded, whereas expectations for birthdays, events, and holidays, like Mother’s Day, are much higher, and so there is greater risk of disappointment.

When I was still talking to my therapist (check out this pocket if you would like to learn more about why I am no longer talking to my therapist), she told me it must be really hard around the holidays with Mateo gone because holidays with little kids are magic. (For new readers, Mateo was our foster son who lived with us for almost two years but was reunited with his birth family this past fall.) I am thinking my therapist might be a New Year’s Eve kinda gal. Because holidays with Mateo never felt like magic. They were hard, harder than regular days because they did what holidays do to all of us. They broke open his trauma and caused a little ache between expectation and reality. They reminded him more of what he was missing than of what he had. Because he hadn’t figured out what to do with his heartbreak, it tore him up, and then he tore things up, literally and figuratively. Holidays with Mateo kind of sucked.

So, I don’t find myself missing Mateo on the holidays, but I do miss him on the other days. I miss the ordinary moments where we sat next to each other snuggling, reading, puzzling or building Lego sets, where he let me teach him things, like letters and numbers, or how to ride a bike, or float on his back in the lake or make chocolate chip cookies or cook scrambled eggs, where he gained the courage to draw his own pictures and tell us what they were, when he participated in a family game with pride, without worrying about winning or losing. I miss the joy of these little wins, which were actually not so little, after all, in light of everything. I really miss Tuesday nights.

And while my first Mother’s Day with my kid was a bit of a flop, being my kids’ mom has been anything but. There have been many Tuesday nights to treasure, like the time Seabass and I rode the bus with Anna because she needed a little help navigating the system and then we just spent the day, riding the bus around, laughing and talking, stopping at the Plaza to buy Takis, even though we were close to home and Seabass telling me the owner must be having a hard day as she is usually much kinder to him. Or the time we took Seabass to get his haircut, and he showed the stylist what he wanted his hair to look like. He pointed to a character in Pokémon Go, and the stylist told him the problem with anime figures is that they don’t have to deal with gravity. Or the afternoon, Anna and I spent side by side on the couch, drinking tea and creating the Christmas calendars, laughing uncontrollably at the pictures we probably should not include.

Speaking of the small and sacred, I found this guy in our laundry room and rehomed him.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal wrote at the beginning of An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary…This is my story.” Amy gives us courage and permission to write our lives, however mundane and ordinary they feel to us. I think perhaps in doing so, she is suggesting what Mary Oliver suggests in “Going to Walden,” when she writes, “Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult trick of living, and finding it where you are.” It is only by looking at the small, that we can grasp the big. Perhaps, in doing so, will even discover that the extraordinary was right in front of us all along.

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Amy’s books are sacred in our family. She wrote a children’s book called Cookies, Bite-Size Life Lessons, which I read over and over again with each of our children. Our copy includes an inscription of love to Anna the year that Seabass was born from her aunt and uncle. The book takes important concepts about kindness, love and compassion and breaks them down into meaningful mouthfuls. “Open-minded means, I’ve never seen cookies like that before, but, uh, sure, I’ll try one.” Amy’s book is better than church, and you can take in the messages from the comfort and quiet of your own bedroom. “Fair means, you get a bite, I get a bite…Unfair means, you get a bite, and now I get the rest.”

Amy’s life was cut short by cancer in 2017, which feels so unfair. 10 days before she died, her essay, “You May Want to Marry My Husband” was published in the New York Times. On morphine and unable to eat real food, she is still able to paint a beautiful portrait of the everyday love, she and her husband experienced for 26 years, and the sadness she had that they wouldn’t have 26 more years like she thought they would.

When we lived in Maryland, we lived within walking distance of a quaint wine store. When Dan received a special award at work, I bought him a nice bottle of wine. We saved that bottle, intending to open it with family at Christmas, but when the family came over, we forgot about it in the chaos. When we moved from Maryland to Madison, we took the bottle with us, saving it again for a special occasion. The longer we had the bottle, the more special it seemed, the harder it was to open it, so it sat on the shelf. When we moved to Spokane, we took it with us again. This chianti had made its second cross country trip. One night, the four of us were outside on our porch laughing and eating aglio e oglio, when Dan looked at me and said, “You opened the bottle.” On a random weeknight, maybe a Tuesday, I had accidentally uncorked the wine we had been saving for just the right occasion. And unintentionally, I had found just the right occasion. The wine was delicious and so was the evening spent in the warm air, around the table with my family.

I didn’t fit in all the things I hoped I would in this pocket, and I think that’s fitting. We can only carry so much, and sometimes we can’t fit in as much as we had hoped. I will save my seeds on how my attitude toward motherhood has changed and how the earth mothers us all for a future pocket. For now, I will end this one by asking you to join me in raising a glass this Mother’s Day. To Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tuesday nights!

Please consider joining us for some conversation in the comments. What resonates with you today? Have you read Amy’s books? Are you Team Tuesday Night or Team New Year’s Eve?

Happy Mother’s Day Mom! Smart fit! Good to know my commitment to wearing things upside down started at an early age.