By Erica Hoffmeister
Don’t think about how much you hate parenting. Not being a mother, not mothering, not your children—you love those, you do, really, you do—you just hate parenthood. The menial, daily, repetitive tasks that send you into a spiral. So, tell yourself it’s natural to hate sweeping the floors six times a day. Tell yourself no one enjoys doing other people’s dishes for zero wages or applause. Tell yourself hating these things does not make you a bad mother, does not make you love your children less. Don’t think about how much you often hate breastfeeding, the constant tug and pull and smothering of your skin and parts. Don’t think about how much you’ve actually always hated the company of children, even as a child, how you find them overall insufferable and annoying. Tell yourself your own children are excluded from this blanket opinion. Tell yourself you will do crafts with them tomorrow, like your mother did with you, like your husband’s mother does with them. Tell yourself you’ll build a fort with them, play dress up, teach them their letters and numbers by singing to them, banging on a ukulele. Remind yourself these things are supposed to be fun, not annoying. Not a chore. Look on Pinterest for ideas, plan a social media post to keep yourself accountable. Don’t check that friend of yours that became an “affirmation coach” and don’t think about how stupid you think all of that garbage is. Don’t think about lighting a candle and doing it yourself. Tell yourself you don’t need positive thinking. Tell yourself you’re a realist.
Don’t think about how much you miss not having children. Not being someone’s wife or mother. Not belonging to anything but the earth. Not being anyone’s every or any need. Don’t separate those feelings by dividing memory by before and after so you miss yourself before. Don’t think about how wonderful it would be to see a movie alone, whatever movie you want at whatever time of day. Don’t think about all the times you’ve cried cathartic in the back row of a movie theater because you didn’t have to share the popcorn or the drink or wave little toys around a child’s face or walk a toddler back and forth from the bathroom twenty-seven times, distracted through every important scene. Don’t think about how much you want to get in your car like you did when you were twenty-three and drive down the highway until your gas bleeds half dry, then drive back just for the hell of it. Don’t think about the fact you no longer own a car, how you traded your first in for your husband’s city bike and drive a family car now that only gets 10mpg so you can’t afford spontaneous highway drives, anyway. Don’t think about the hours you’d spend as a teenager locked in your bedroom staring at the ceiling, how much you loved silence, no one touching you, or speaking to you, even before you understood the value of boredom. Don’t think about the unread stack of books in your nightstand. About your chewed finger-beds that bleed into rounded stubs, years from your last manicure.
Don’t think about the guilt imbedded in all these fantasies. Tell yourself this guilt is proof you love your children. Don’t try to pinpoint the guilt’s genesis, when it starts in your life along the timeline of regret. Don’t think about regret. Don’t think about the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt you are. Don’t think about your useless degrees, your nonexistent career. Tell yourself you’re taking this time to raise your children. Tell yourself this is your choice, that you chose this. You chose this. You chose this. You chose this. Don’t think about countries that have paid maternity leave or affordable childcare. Don’t think about your credit card debt you lived off of because you are not a citizen of one of those countries. Don’t think about how it’s really not the country’s fault you drank and snorted your way out of grad school and then didn’t write a single thing for six years. Don’t think about the karma you earned in that fruitless interim. Tell yourself it wasn’t fruitless, that no experience means nothing as a writer. That it was all for the greater good. Don’t think about how you made all the same mistakes the second time around. Don’t consider choosing your husband over everything else a mistake, think about how you should have prioritized yourself and your career and your future over him when you met instead of falling in love instantly, and rearranged everything to be with him. Don’t remind yourself how many times you’ve done that in your lifetime. Don’t think about how you aren’t published yet. Or at least not enough. How much you hate yourself for wasting your kid-free years not banging out fourteen novels, or something, because now you write in the lost corners of some morning hours, lucky to get even ten uninterrupted minutes and you really think that whole story about how Stephenie Meyer wrote the Twilight series by the pool while watching her kids swim is a goddamn lie. Remind yourself that you have, in fact, published a lot, and that not it’s not profit, but the act writing that makes you a writer. Don’t think about how you are going to stretch fifty-four dollars for a week’s worth of groceries because being a low-level technically-published writer means still working in a bar. Don’t think about the men that hit on you while you serve tables. Don’t think about how you are still, after seventeen years, still serving tables. Don’t think about why. Tell yourself it’s nice to get out of the house. Tell yourself it’s nice to talk to adults. Tell yourself anything while you do it so no one can see the pain and regret and annoyance and hatred on your face so that you still make at least 20% in tips a night.
Don’t think about the guilt or the shame or regret. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t make new friends and don’t maintain old friendships so you won’t risk spilling it all out over coffee, or a more likely, few drinks.
Don’t think about how the world is ending anyway—stop reminding people of this in person in general. They know. We all know. Stop feeling guilty for having children and helping the world end faster. Stop trying to de-age in general. Stop thinking about all the things other people your age have done in comparison. Don’t think about your empty passport pages, your children’s hand-me-downs, your WIC card. Don’t think about your mom, and how she’ll never retire, or how she takes out credit cards to pay for Christmas presents. Don’t think about how poverty is a cycle, is insidious. Don’t think about how you may have escaped it, but now how everything tastes like Shit on a Shingle.
Think about this instead:
Wrap yourself in the memory of how the sun felt pouring through an open window while driving down Highway 1, feel this sensation when your baby snuggles beside you, her big eyes swallowing the sky whole. Or, the first time you witnessed your toddler perform on stage, exuding more confidence than you’ve had in your entire lifetime, how she unabashedly shares her mind, and how you think of her when you’re scared to tell the truth in public spaces.
Think fondly of before:
The lowlight of city sidewalks on an October afternoon as you hazily held the hand of a new lover and made him your whole life. How you repave entire cities and worlds to find your own path, how unapologetically courageous it is to head into things straight-on, even in the hard times, when you crave stillness. Seek for stillness in the long nights, the tufts of the baby’s hair between your fingertips, your husband’s toes between the arches of your feet to keep them warm. Imagine how your spaghetti sauce tastes only to your daughter, how she’ll spend the better part of her college years missing it with such fierceness, she’ll visit you twice as often—don’t tell her your secret, that it’s canned tomatoes and jarred garlic—so that she’ll keep coming home to ask for it.
Think about your smallness, your bigness, of the impossibility it is to have known it all before, just to have it all then.
Think about Paris in wintertime, the streets slack with moisture, the sound of your heels clicking across cobblestone the night you turned thirty. Think about how that memory will never fade, never disappear into the disintegrated soapy sponge, worn from overuse, how your sense of self has not really been suckled dry by breastfeeding your children, how your abs are still there, below the torn muscle from giving life. That your skin still glows between stress wrinkles, and by God, that your talent for cooking dinner is unmatched, and how no one does that for their families every night anymore but you.
Think of your own mother, the way she looked so tired and faraway, and yet, still held your hand in a gentle squeeze, still rubbed the back of your hand when you were sick, still loved you before and after all her past lives gelled together into yours.
Think of the universe, and stardust, and blackholes, all the shades of green that grass blades can be, how Montana’s horizon looks like a curved earth when it swallows sunset at 10p.m., or the skin of a ripe plum off your childhood tree. How nothing, and everything is just as hard as it always was—how nothing and everything is still inside you, no matter how many times you’ve swept or neglected to sweep the kitchen floors on any given day.
Erica Hoffmeister teaches college writing across the Denver Metro area and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019), but considers herself a cross-genre writer. She has had a variety of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and essays published in several journals and magazines, earning several accolades. She’s obsessed with pop culture, horror films, cross country road trips, and her two daughters, Scout and Lux. You can learn more about her at: https://www.ericahoffmeister.com/
Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option.
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