Five Years and Parenting

When my son was two, my mom’s friend said to me, “You are a great mom, I can tell.”

I replied, “Check back when he’s 10. Then we will know.”

I said this as a joke, but I was only half joking. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I figured at the time, I hadn’t had the title very long. How do you become a good mother over night? What even makes a great mom?

I don’t know. I still don’t know.

I was on a panel online, probably in 2021. I was a new mom. My kid was one and it was about motherhood and writing. These, for me at the time, were two opposing forces in my life. I wanted to be a good mother, but I also wanted to get lost in my writing. I knew the answer to this was having a strong community, but I became a mother during lockdown.

My writing wasn’t informed by my experience as a mother. Not in the early days, it was too new. Most days, I was drowning.

Those days ended, even when they felt like they never would, and time moves on. I don’t wake at 2am to change, feed, swaddle, soothe, and then write until 7am—and thank all the writing gods for that. I cannot tell you how I managed it, only to say I did. Hell, one of those stories is Eilam is Forever. You might be wondering if this made me creative, it didn’t. My notebooks from those days lack story ideas where any other times I have 100s, jotted down so I can work on them later.

If writing is informed by our experiences and what we take in, then maybe I have dozens of horror stories about being locked inside, yearning for spicy noodles, just waiting to leap out of me.

Once time moves on there is more to sit and deal with. I don’t think I have started to write the first word about grief from last year. The memory is a sticky ball inside my chest that makes me feel like running, that same strange emotion I felt in his hospital room.

One day I will explore it.

So much of being a parent, or maybe just being an adult person, is about letting go. Not just letting go of those who passed on but letting our kids be their own people. My kid started public Pre-K. Since his birth, I have known every person he’s with and now he’s taking a first small step of independence. Our parents, caregivers, and teachers teach us how to read and write, but it is up to us what we do with our words, and what we put out into the world.

I hope I’m a good mom, but at the end of the day, that’ll be up to my kiddo to decide.