Am I Your Mother?

Some mornings as my dog and I take our first walk of the day, the occasion coincides with drop-off, and we are enmeshed in a cacophony of laughter, excitable shrieks, toddler tears, the soft patter of tiny feet in even more improbably tiny shoes. The children waddle toward the administrators, who wait by the door to sanitize their chubby hands.

Now and then, an intrepid explorer approaches Olive, my hound, sounding out some word—doggie, woof, arf—and she responds in kind, loving babies as she does, offering them a gentle sniff. She contains her thrill but still startles some of the little ones who, nevertheless, are cowed by her mass, them knowing as if by instinct her capacity to overwhelm ones so small as they.

The pain comes sharp and hot: mother-want; baby-fever. Three years ago I began to supplement my hormonal regimen with progesterone, vainly, in the hopes of fuller breasts. The drug has likewise intensified other intuitive yearnings of my body, hewing it nearer its inner cycles and rhythms. Progesterone hypersaturates my sex drive, refashioning some senses as nearly hyperreal. With the pleasure comes, too, the old blue emotions, drenched as if in Technicolor—Dorothy waking in Oz. My longings acquire specific shape; gain centripetal force: chief among these my wish to have a child of my own.

I will not have a child of my own. I “cannot conceive,” which is the politic phraseology I deploy to articulate that my body is not built to, being wombless. When we fuck—make love, my boyfriend corrects, laughing—I like for him to come inside me, but there is nothing doing; I am my own end point. And though I have no interest in diagnosing my transness as tragic, I feel, even so, this drive to make of my thwarted desires a story.

I write often of impossible longings, worrying at times I am stuck in the morass of an interminable beat, or that I manipulate my art to stitch up the seams of experiences I yearn for but believe I will never have. I emotionally foreclose them; preemptively shut a door to elide what might in future approach it. When I was younger, I’d politicize such disallowances—posture as if it were radical to renounce what I—and many women who are, at times, like me—have been culturally exiled from.

I am older now. I bristle against the sense that I should deny myself pleasures and experiences simply because they are denied me. Motherhood is, I believe, an aspirational futurity I lately labor at narrativizing to loop it ever closer to my orbit. Some stories are happenings you tell to draw them small, enclose them, make them survivable; perhaps others you must conjure, witch-like, rendering them real. Shifting my focus from a fantasy of motherhood to a long-term logistical coordination which may make it my reality—by whatever magic—has preoccupied me through this long COVID winter.

Perhaps I have been distracted, too, by thoughts of my own mother, who I have not seen, at the time of this writing, for 15 months. Knitting my missing into this fantastical future arc of my possible life. I am also wondering: when was I first able to see my mother as entirely a person? I don’t mean in the sense of her being alive, and human, but of her being a woman with a history, desires and dreams which were and are wholly her own; desires which lived in the same house as me.

In Anne Sexton’s “The Double Image,” a poem I often turn to, the narrator figures her mother as her “cave of a mirror,” “my overthrown / love, my first image”—the “stony head of death” she must outgrow to ascend to maternal maturity. The poem imagines three generations of women in triplicate; they are each other’s beautiful and terrible likenesses; anchored ineluctably to each other by the contours of their faces, which stare blankly back at them from hanging wall portraits.

Such mirrorings often animate mother-daughter literature. I think how perhaps it is not until I was able to surrender to the grief of letting my mother be an other—and also to be someone who I have grown more and more like, with age—that she and I found a more generative, mutual expanse of empathy—one that feels entirely bound up in my mother-want. Perhaps it wasn’t until I conceded to my desiring motherhood that I was able to reckon with her in toto, woman-to-woman, beyond the mystifications of experiential and power disparities which distort and alienate encounters between mothers and daughters.

That this desire continues to thread itself through the lives of women my age, particularly those among us for whom motherhood cannot transpire as happenstance, might surprise. It has never been more obvious how many challenges most women face in being or wishing to be mothers. More, for millennials, we have spent much of our adult lives being told it is irresponsible to bring a child into an increasingly precarious and inequitable world. This critique cannot be dismissed out of hand.

As of 2019, millennials owned just 4% of real estate, and our net worth has decreased by 34% in the last 25 years. This is not even to speak of our insuperable accumulations of student loan debt, or the debilitations of the American healthcare system. But I am not drawing up a manifesta toward a reclamation or reinstantiation of the boomer’s capital-hoarding fantasias; I wish only to wrestle with the fact that as our politics veer further left, we are meanwhile shuffled off to familial obsolescence by the very ravages of the violent system we rail against.

Perhaps the nuclear family really does require abolishment; still, the de facto insinuation that only wealthy, white, cis women can or should access motherhood should be seen for what it is: a traumatic capitulation. We may rationalize it ideologically, but it nevertheless feels exactly like that—less.

More, the pandemic has exacerbated gender and racial disparities in the employment and domestic arenas. Women—particularly Black and Latina women—account for the vast majority of jobs lost across the year between March 2020 and March 2021. Not only are many industries which disproportionately employ women, especially women of color, hit the hardest, it is also primarily mothers—particularly in cases of two-parent heterosexual households—who have stepped down from their working roles to be home with and to educate their kids following school and childcare closures.

As Shanita Matthews, whose wedding-decor business went under during COVID, relayed to Vogue, “I cannot go work at McDonald’s for $10 an hour because my babysitter’s $10 an hour.” The burden of navigating caregiving responsibilities with job losses during an economic and epidemiological crisis has fallen largely to women—as of the fall’s census report, a third of women reported unemployment as a result of childcare demands, while only 12% of men reported the same. Crises such as this pandemic and its consequent economic recession seem likely to predict ongoing and future disasters, particularly as the effects of climate catastrophe become increasingly clear—under sudden pressure, the patina of equity wears away, revealing the old specters.

And so imagining motherhood as a pragmatic concern, one approached from the margins, is a different beast altogether, which refocuses contemporary desire for an allegedly “naturalized” role as a question of who even is discursively facilitated into motherhood. For whom, that is, is it practically feasible in economic, legal, and culturally imaginable senses? To long for the things we don’t or cannot have should not be drawn only and ever against an easy diagnosis of contemporary narcissism, but be reckoned with as symptomatic of broader social ills. The lacunae of our lives underscore structural failures—who among us is able to live the life they long for, and how.

Still, I think, what does it mean to want to raise a child in a dying world? Such labor of desire strains against the apocalyptical ante upping itself with each successive day. Yes: perhaps cocooning into this desire is one more wriggling struggle to stave off death, and us all so kin now to it—we, with our dailinesses veiled in the perpetual memento mori of the last year’s time-outside-of-time.

I lose my self some days; this long absence from my money-work (bartending) evacuating me from the social; the border separating my interior from the world growing thin, on occasion, dissolving. There are days I return from my walk, unharness Olive by habit, and find myself at my kitchen sink, having begun, without being entirely conscious of it, the task of washing stray dishes, putting the dried ones in their particular crannies. Weeping, which I am prone to most particularly when overwhelmed: an indeliberate eruption; an uncoiling of emotional pressure. James Elkins notes that “humans are almost alone in their weepy habits,” but that we “cry at absolutely everything.” I promise I am trying to be better. I’ve become the sort of person who busies herself with domesticities and manual distractions—knitting, mending, keeping four dozen plants—these, my balms.

Some months ago now my boyfriend casually dropped in to a conversation the fact that he’d been researching adoption processes. I never thought I’d end up here, as content as I am. As overcome in love. No man I’ve dated has ever considered seriously the possibility of our raising children together. And here he arrives as if sent in the midst of a pandemic, and me at the end of my romantic rope, ready to be out of the game altogether. I cry, again, at his confession; him acknowledging how simply tears spring to my surfaces. Yes, I say; yes, how wonderful, yes.

Jamie Hood is the author of how to be a good girl, named one of the Best Books of 2020 in Vogue._ Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in_ The Rumpus, The New Inquiry, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and The Nation. She lives, writes, and bartends in Brooklyn.