Owly

My boobs hurt.

Last night, Tosha stretched on me just wrong and I yelped like her little paw had sliced me open.

This morning, as I get dressed, I hesitate. In that pause I almost remember what it felt like to nurse from my mother when I was a baby, and at the same time, I can imagine what it feels like to be a mother nursing a child…even though I’ve never been able to feel that as I never got to be a mother.

I thought I wanted children. I ended up having none.

A half hour later, Tosha trips over her leash, and another tiny moment flashes through my memory.

Twenty years ago, walking my 4-month old shiba inu, Sukha, with my first husband. He has the leash, and doesn’t notice when she trips over it, only she didn’t recover. He keeps walking, dragging her by her neck, completely unaware.

“HEY!!! You’re dragging Sukha by the neck!”
“She’s fine, she needs to learn to keep up.”

I grabbed the leash from him, he huffed at me and continued walking. I let him go. As I watched him power-walk away without looking back at us, I had a momentary existential crisis.

I cannot have children with this man….I won’t ever be a mother.

But, I swallowed the pain and grief of that loss, because that’s what mothers do.
This was the best thing for my never-conceived-unborn-child.

Now, twenty years later, waiting patiently for Tosha to regain her footing, I get an odd familiar twinge. How is it that I have never carried a child, gone through labor, or given birth, but somehow, someway, I know what it feels like?

Standing at the stove, waiting for my morning french press coffee. I catch my index fingernail on a hangnail of my thumb, and it rips. Picking my cuticles. Something my mother does too. I don’t know why I do it, except that it is a habit of hers that I couldn’t unlearn, just like how I stick my tongue out to lick my upper lip after every single sip of coffee.

I am my mother’s daughter.

That tiny death brings a flash memory to my mind, Hobbit’s son getting out of our car, angry with us for refusing to drive him to his drug dealer’s home. How was I supposed to know we’d never see or speak to him again? Turns out parent alienation and adult child estrangement is a thing our society doesn’t talk about much…a secret treated as insignificant as my cuticle picking habit.

I pull off the hangnail and pour my coffee, pushing that painful memory back in its tiny little box.

When I settle down to drink my coffee while reading a Substack article about Gloria Steinem, I notice my feet rubbing together just like my mom does when she reads Winston Churchill. Her father, my grandfather, did it too, while reading Edgar Cayce.

As my feet rub against each other, I am not blind to the friction my mother faced to give me the things she couldn’t have. She took me to the bank to open my first checking account on my 18th birthday—a thing she wasn’t allowed to do herself until she was thirty. She drove me all over the Midwest to visit colleges, letting me choose freely, even though her father chose her college for her, told her what to major in, and ignored her desire to be an architect because “a woman’s job is to tend the house and children.”

Mom got her first full-time career job in her late 40s, when I started college. She paid my tuition in full, in cash, with money she earned drafting blueprints for a local architect. She helped me move into my first house when I was 25—just me, no husband, no co-signer. She scrubbed the floors with me, unpacked every box, made it feel like a home. When I opened my own business a few years later, she stood at the grand opening, proud in that quiet way she does. She never owned a home herself. Never ran a business. But she walked me through every portal—holding the doors she didn’t have access to long enough for me to step all the way through.

She raised me to question everything, to speak clearly, to take up the space that she was never allowed to claim.

I am my mother’s daughter.

And I could not give her a granddaughter.

Does the foot-rubbing end with me?

Maybe, but the mothering doesn’t end with me. Because as the childless mother, I nurture the motherless children.

I was a stand-in mother for high school students whose own mothers couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be there. I’ve nurtured women who lost their mothers too young. I’ve supported lost, overwhelmed, over-feeling mothers to find their ways back to themselves.

Motherhood moves through me, not in one direction, but many.

Mother’s Day is a strange holiday to have no children, but have mothered so many.

Mom’s in her 80s. Still sharp, still steady, still doing her crossword puzzles in ink. I celebrate her.

I take Mom out to brunch, and buy her flowers at the local nursery. I give her whatever she wants, because it is her day.

And yet—I feel a grief so sharp it aches in my breasts.

I feel like a ghost mother. Real and present, but see-through.

At the end of the day, I curl into bed to watch tv with Hobbit and Tosha. . . the sharp edges of The Handmaid’s Tale don’t feel fictional anymore.

It’s like the world has forgotten who bore it.

Women have always been the ones to stretch and break and rebuild themselves so that something better might be born. We have mothered this society—breathed life into it, held it together, soothed its tantrums—and now we are being silenced. Again.

I turn off the tv before the closing credits, and roll into the warmth of Hobbit. He folds around me like a comma, and I lift his hand and place it gently onto my tender aching breast.

Because the mother in me—this soft, strong, invisible woman I’ve been all along—just wants to be held in the quiet, wordless way she’s always offered to others.

Hobbit

I don’t claim to know precisely how Owly feels when she talks about wanting kids.

But I will say this—I feel her feels, a little, in my own fuzzy father-y way.

I have two adult kids. It sounds strange to pair those words together—adult kids. Technically, they are kids who became adults. And kids are not possessions. Parents often say they’re having kids, but we never really have them. We share our stories with them for a while until their own stories branch out.

Together Owly and I miss these two adult kids like stories with chapters that ended and suddenly went blank. Yet their stories continue in a different book, in another city.

Meanwhile: I laugh at how freaking easy Owly expresses love to people. The words I love you fall out of her mouth.

The other day as she got off the phone she said “I love you” to someone. I asked if she knew the person. Not really, it turns out. She was someone else’s client, but that’s how she gets off the phone with people she connects with. And she is constantly connecting with people. That’s just an example from Tuesday.

Owly made noodle pudding for my son Rainy seven years ago. She calls it “heart attack on a plate,” but it’s really a hug in the form of a midwestern hot dish. He gobbled it up when she served it to him warm. She sent him home with leftovers. He didn’t know at the time that he was eating food where every noodle was a tiny megaphone saying I love you—clearly, gently, and loud enough for the one in a hoodie sitting in back to hear.

We tease her and honor how she gushes love, which is her superpower. She cannot hold love back from someone who receives it.

So: when that ache swells under her breast this time of year, when lilacs are opening, you can imagine what an island volcano feels when it feels like exploding all of its hearts but can’t—its lava still goes somewhere.

It seeps down to a place deep within her breast, where soft lavender pressure grows in blossoms of heat.