Motherhood didn’t ruin my ambition. It rerouted it through every stage of grief.
I had to retrain my brain to be a parent. It took a decade because I was going through the five stages of grief. For me, the longest stage was denial, because as long as I kept working full time I didn’t have to deal with the reality of my new life.
Something I learned from Z losing his hearing in the car crash is that the five stages don’t come in a specific order. This is jarring at first because we all want to see ourselves making progress.
But once I realized that the order is variable, I went back and saw that my second stage of learning to be a parent was bargaining. I tried a million different ways to work while I was raising the kids. I told myself that I was the exception to the rule and that other people were simply not as good at working as I was. This was wrong.
Which left me in my next stage: anger. This was when I was doing all my research so I could scream at everyone about the realities of life. I researched where to live, and I realized that all that research is predicated on what makes us happy. I researched why women quit work and men don’t, and I realized it’s because most women choose to quit. The women most uncomfortable with quitting are autistic women because they’re happiest at work.
So. Much. Research. I don’t even know how it helped me, except to see that asking the question of what makes me happy was not the right starting point.
Acceptance came next. I accepted that I was choosing to take care of my children and that I couldn’t be good at work and good at parenting. I wanted to be good at something, so I chose kids. I watched my yearly earnings decrease every year for a decade. I started at about $300K. Acceptance was very expensive.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I’m in the depression stage. Not technically, because I take medicine so that I can’t get too depressed. I guess it’s a theoretical depression. It’s a disorientation, like I keep thinking I’m holding a scalpel, but really it’s a spoon. And maybe that’s okay. Moms need spoons. So why do I always reframe to find what’s bad instead of what’s good?
This is supposed to be the happiest time of my life: women whose kids are grown. That scares me, because maybe it’s true. Every time I thought the research didn’t apply to me, I turned out to be a data point that proved it right.
Some time ago I asked ChatGPT what we have learned about people from so many of us talking to AI. The answer was that we are all worried we’re not doing enough that matters. I don’t want to live my life like that. I want to feel like what I do is enough.
So I guess the grief I experienced from losing my work self to become a mom was actually the grief we are talking to ChatGPT about at all stages of life: we don’t know what “enough” feels like.
I am sitting across from Nino right now. He is reading and I am writing. Then we will walk the dog through the harbor. Then we will go to a hip hop open mic. I don’t think I could ask for a more perfect day. So maybe this is the best time of my life, and maybe I am in the acceptance stage. I just don’t know what it looks like.
I always wonder how else can moms sell the ‘mom experience’ to their daughters or the ‘family experience’ to their boys. now millennial moms are selling reels and tiktoks.
My mom didn’t exactly sell me the mom experience is a must have in life. she sold me the part you find a life partner you can get yell at when you have kids. And then when I realized I can’t use my husband as a substitute for grief – that’s when my anger showed up. I was under the false promise that adults like yelling at other adults all the time.
I can’t yell at the kids, I can’t yell at the kids’ dad, I can’t yell at my mom. I still have no idea how to get through my day without an urge to yell other than taking more medicine.
Say, I went through the stages as regards missing having a relationship with my parents as a child.
When Buffy the vampire slayer was cynical about having a life that matters, instead of telling her “don’t suicide” a guy told her the thing is “you have to live, just live.” It’s on the album for the musical episode.
The research about being happier when kids are gone is not from maturity or getting tougher, I don’t think, but from stressors being gone.
“Gone” meant my parents were happier when the kids were grown because not only were the kids gone, but the yard work was gone because they downsized to an apartment. Gone was extra room cleaning.
Dad retired so preparing his clothes and lunches were gone: no more ironing shirts and stretching socks on sock shaped steel hangers. No more shift work in their lives.
(I never buy clothes that need ironing, my steamer is gathering dust)
When I visited I never heard them screaming at each other. Not like in the growing years. And if they never screamed at me, and seldom criticized when I visited, it wasn’t because I was a better person, or that “they were faking it,” so I wouldn’t walk away, but rather because they were genuinely less stressed. So they were easier to be around. In due course, after I got over some anger-estrangement, I would visit every day when I was in town on holiday.
I guess, Penelope, life will be better as you are letting go and having boundaries for your kid’s lives.
God bless my Puritan/Jewish ancestors, but lately, as a metaphor,
I’ve been telling myself that I’m entitled to a glass of red wine without saying it matters for my cancer health, or mental health, or to recharge so I can work the next day, or because I’m “s’posed to have a life so I can be a non-fascist better citizen,” or to build wine-knowledge for the future, for any other excuse that the wine matters. Here and now, sometimes, I just want to live.
Penelope, this post really resonated. I wonder if you know that one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s longtime colleagues and co-authors, David Kessler, petitioned her estate after her death to officially add a sixth stage to the grief model: meaning-making. With her family and foundation’s blessing, he introduced this idea in his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. It’s such a powerful reminder that we do get to decide what meaning we give to our life’s work, and that meaning can evolve over time.
As someone who’s been reading your writing for over 15 years, I can tell you that your work has meant so much to me. It was actually one of your posts – the one that said if you’re a woman who’s been reading your work for years, you’re probably autistic, that helped me finally self-diagnose. It allowed me to understand myself in a whole new, very meaningful way. Keep up the great work!!
Thank you for telling me that it helped you to know you’re autistic! It has helped me so much to know and I just want everyone to gain the insight. And sometimes I think I’m just annoying people with my relentlessness.
Happiness is a strange thing. I used to think I would have been much happier if my parents hadn’t ridiculed me for being too stupid to be a career woman, and forced me into college anyway when I didn’t particularly want to go. There I earned both an advanced degree and a Mrs. degree, the latter to their consternation. When I became a parent, I used to think I would be much happier if my parents would stop telling me I had ruined my life. When I decided to quit work and become a homeschooling-SAHM, I used to think I would be much happier if my working mom friends would stop admonishing me for being lazy and crazy. But in the end I think I’m actually happier for having achieved a satisfying life despite the negativity. And now you tell me that still more happiness possibly lies ahead of me. But perhaps the post I really want is that my life will get harder. Anyway, if I had had the power to set the terms for my happiness, I would have lost something. Thanks for your wonderful and powerful parenting posts. They are always a joy and I’m happier for reading them. I think!