Motherhood and the Search for the Self

Last updated on: May 13, 2018 at 6:36 am by Anne Kennedy

Motherhood and the Search for the Self 2018-05-13T06:36:47-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Oh good, it’s Mother’s Day, and Fake Ascension, but let’s face it, mostly Mother’s Day. Indulge me, since I am a mother and all, with some patience (the chief one of all my own virtues) as I complain about it.

While it is important to honor mothers, since everyone in one sense or another does have one, the whole business of Mother’s Day has become a serious bore. Long ago, like maybe in the early 2000s, when Mother’s Day rolled around you called your mother and sent her a card. If you yourself were a mother someone took you out to brunch, or maybe it was the one day all your children joined you in church without grumbling. Someone handed you a carnation and if you were lugging around guilt and insecurity, you shoved it deep down and just smiled and said, “Thank You.”

But then some seismic shift occurred without us paying very much attention. Some fathoms deep cultural insecurity set about wrecking the consciousness of each one. All Americans everywhere began to wonder, really, who they were and how to know who they were. A hundred years of the self distilled into the scrolling of the finger, the anxious and jealous gaze searching the highways and byways for virtue and meaning. Who am I? Am I a cat lover? A book lover? A student? A SAHM? What are my sexual preferences? Am I glued to a glass of wine? Or a cup of coffee? Do I baby wear? Do I homeschool? Have I gone green? Do I eat donuts and flaunt it? Who Am I Really?

Indeed, two weeks ago, the Unitarian church sign read, “Searching for the Self, 10 am.” I drove by all week and wondered how they were getting on. Did they find anything? Everyone’s been looking, trying to identify, to mark out the perimeters of identity and, be it ever so christianish, purpose. But the quest, conjoined to social media use, has left a nation of anxious, insecure, wondering people who don’t, as yet, know how to know who they are.

Drag onto this shiny, meme laden, caustic stage The Mother and watch her flail. Where once she went about the business of shoving herself and her children through life, now it has to be her whole self. Motherhood, indeed, is the chief marker of her person. She is Mother, but really Mommy or Mom. Her personhood is subsumed under the weight of this singular identity, foisted upon her on a Sunday of all times, and many other days besides.

If she gives in and embraces it, she feels guilty about all her friends who so desperately wanted to be mothers but couldn’t. If she fights it she feels guilty for probably not loving her children enough. If she ignores it she feels irritated. When she remembers her own mother she feels lonely. At some point, she hears a sermon or a lecture about the value of her sacrifice, how she is probably the pillar that is holding up civilization, as long as she is doing it right. And so the long day wears on.

Incidentally, even on Twitter, the wide world doesn’t seem to expect this level of self-consideration from fathers. On Father’s Day, you buy the guy a grill and yell at him for being so awful. Here’s your stick of jerky, don’t abandon your family. Being female is a much more complicated proposition. And also Motherhood, more than Fatherhood, is expected to be the chief identity of the self, or else you are a bad mother.

Whereas, it could be that you, in your inner being, could be a complex and enigmatic person. You could possess an identity that holds together many different threads, weaving them together into a peculiar and unique coherence. Better yet, it could be that the chief source of your identity is that of being tethered to the Father, through the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. You could be a Christian, marked out by Christ. Then, as you wander through the wasteland of each week, climbing up to your Sunday pew to sit and wonder not so much who you are but who God is and why he bothers, you could rest from the fraught and anxious pursuit of self-knowledge. God, after all, knows you well enough, perfectly in fact. And so if no one else knows you in any multidimensional capacity, it will be ok.

You can be a mother with no name other than Mommy. You can be childless and lonely. You can be a disappointing father. You can be a worried teenager. You can be without job and without purpose. You can be widowed and grieving. You can be mourning the loss of a child. You can be stressed and wondering how to make ends meet. You can be a person who sits there and looks up at the one who came in the poverty of affliction, the loneliness of the cross, the disappointment of rejection, who took it all into himself so that you could be known as you really are in yourself.

But if you come to Good Shepherd, someone will hand you a flower if you’re female and, in the most embarrassed way possible, mumble something about it being Mother’s Day. But only after Fake Ascension has been duly noted.

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