This Is A Story About Your Mother

Think of something you know about me. Something you know for sure.

My mother wanted to be a librarian and in the version of the story that I thought I’d always known, she gave up that dream to become a parent. She was in fact still in school when she put that ambition out of mind – her own widowed mother did not have the resources to support it. Did my mother ever feel remorse about not having had the opportunity to do both? No, she said;pursuing a personal career goal while mothering was something she simply wouldn’t have thought to do in Aotearoa New Zealand at that time. Still, she told me, it was a life she enjoyed and to my mind she excelled in her role as our mother, providing my sister and I with a wealth of love and attention.

In my thirty-ninth week of pregnancy, I was neither nesting nor getting ready for baby, but trying to finish an article on literary journals. Writing had, for the longest time, been my why – a compulsive, urgent habit, and one of the things that made me feel the most like ‘me’. I hadn’t thought out how parenthood would intersect, only that I supposed it would integrate seamlessly with my writing life as though in a merging lane. Ha! I want to say to that past self. Ha-ha-ha!

They say this is easy: the most natural thing in the world.

My experience of early motherhood feels like a complicated mess of emotions – not one definable thing or another, but a myriad all at once. Isolation, physical and mental pain, sleep deprivation to the point of mania, and a kind of betrayal in finding that ‘the village’ was not necessarily there. I remember walking my baby in his pram around the neighborhood on loop, looking down at my legs and thinking whose feet are those? I felt almost outside of my own body, as if I was inhabiting a strange and alien vessel. I remember telling myself that I should not be so ungrateful, that some women would do anything to be in my shoes. And I remember drying my baby off after a bath, laying him on the lounge carpet, the sun pouring in through the large window, his joyful smile and his dancing hands as he looked up at my face. The feeling of holding his small form in the crook of my arm. Not one definable thing or another.

I doubt I will be a good mother. I might be a terrible one.

When my son was 10 months old, I started him in daycare for a couple of days a week to begin a PhD in Creative Writing. Technically, I did not need to do this;I was in the very fortunate position where I could have stayed home fulltime. I wanted to do it. Writing was a desire all of my own and something I was still hungry for. Some mornings I near skipped out of the daycare center with a whole six hours ahead of me to drink hot coffee and write. I know that it made me a better mother in the time I did spend with my son, where we would roll and cut shapes from Playdoh or drive toy cars around a city mat. Other mornings, as my son became older, he would sometimes cry, raise his small hand and reach out, howling mamaaaaaa as I left. And yes, I still left. Those days were much harder to enjoy, though the daycare staff would assure me he had stopped crying minutes later and begun to play. I would tell myself I needed to work extra hard that day, to make those hours count. I hoped I was not causing irreparable damage to our attachment. That one day, he would be able to see all this as a positive. I loved him and I loved being his mother, but I also wanted to show him that I had dreams and was pursuing them.

But, I know how to move now. I know how to breathe.

What is the answer to the question I kept asking:was I a good mother? Or, in other words, did I get the balance right? I don’t have one, just that I’ve been the only version of ‘mother’ I could possibly be, and the one that’s been best for me. In those early years, there were short contracts or speaking opportunities I turned down due to the extra strain it would have placed on my family. I worried that people would stop asking and that they would stop sending those sorts of opportunities my way. But they didn’t, and the good thing about dreams is that you’re often able to pick them back up later, reshuffle them or adjust. Of course, I write from a position of privilege – the world is getting harder, seemingly crueller by the day. You’re doing a great job, my mother always used to tell me in the newborn days, which isthe best thing you can say to a new mum. And we all are, all in our own way. I did eventually finish the PhD, and over that time the various facets of my life seem to have somehow wound themselves together:writing, community, love, work and parenthood. Seven years on from becoming a mother, I marvel at this abundance. I’m thankful for what it offers. The idea that one day, I might get to look back with my son and my husband, and say, wow, look at what we did.

I am ready to sail with you.

*The title and sub-headings in italics are from Wallace’s 2023 poetry collection This Is a Story About Your Mother, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, New Zealand.

Louise Wallace is the author of four collections of poems, including This Is a Story About Your Mother. She is the founder of Starling, an online journal showcasing the work of young writers from Aotearoa | New Zealand, and the editor of Orongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022. She is a recipient of the Biggs Prize for Poetry and a Robert Burns fellow. Ash is her first novel.