I’m OK Being Known in Motherhood as a Lot of Things, but Don’t Call Me Selfless
mostly because I'm not, ya know? and also, maybe no one was going to anyway.
Welcome to this tiny corner of the internet where an off-duty psychotherapist keeps the conversation going on how to make sense of this life thing we’re all doing. If you ever wondered what your therapist does off the clock—which, who among us hasn’t?—this is like that. Think of it as the adult equivalent of seeing your elementary school teacher at the grocery store picking out lemons. 🍋 (If that imagery alone, feels sticky for you, this would be the time to jump on that off-ramp) I typically oscillate between long-form psychoeducation pieces and narrative essays—sometimes I smush them together. I also do a biweekly podcast with my husband, roundups and most recently started a segment of brisk thoughts on music, TV, and film.
A couple of things before we jump in, I will be talking about mothering today and I show up very much as myself here. If either of these things—a therapist speaking candidly and/or mothering—feel like too much to your system, that is absolutely is OK and this may not be the best particular newsletter for you this week.
It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything scouring the depths of my feelings around parenting. I’m in a particular place where this role in my life feels equal parts all-consumingly hard and fulfilling. Which made me think a little dialoguing pit stop may be in order. Even if this moment is fleeting, I want to remember it.
One of my biggest regrets from my postpartum haze/dungeon/pit of despair, among a million others, is failing to write what I was feeling down in one place. For instance, maybe I didn’t feel the way I just described all the time but I honestly can’t remember. I did write things down, but in classic me fashion, I jotted things down in a frenzied way, in 20 different places, like on any rogue unopened mail I could find on our counter or typed into my phone with one hand while bouncing a infant on my hip.
This desire to comment is quite the change of heart, because around Mother’s Day I couldn’t even write about mothering. I had real “I can’t even look at you” energy toward it.
Something has shifted since then. I suspect it’s probably because I gave myself space to feel that way toward it for a bit. Common in the ebbs and flows of motherhood for me, I went from feeling repulsed by the identity to feeling spaciousness within it.
As is often the case, my son, Archie, gave me fodder for this week’s topic.1 He said to me multiple times over the last few days I’m the coziest person he knows. I’m not exactly sure what this means—I asked him what that meant to him and no further clarity was provided.
I do know what I felt when I heard him say this. I felt warm. I felt calm. I felt like enough, and not because I’d done something to be so. It came from how I organically move through the world—as a cozy ass lady.
For months, I’ve had some unfinished thoughts in my notes app about how I’m seen by my child. It’s been on my mind ever since I read
’s (, Touched Out) piece for Elle, I Wanted to Teach My Daughter Bodily Autonomy. Motherhood Taught Me To Value My Own. While the title is enough to bring me to my knees, what shook me to my very core came later on. She says,“My kids will likely not say I was the most selfless mother. But why is this something to which I ever aspired? They will know I loved them deeply, and they will know what was important to me—as a mother, but also as a person.”
As I read that, even now, I start to cry—in public, no less. Stares by strangers, be damned! It’s fucking worth it.
That passage illuminated how deeply a part of me believes in order to be a good mother, a better mother, a person worthy of being a mother in the first place, I need to be absolutely and completely selfless—and my son, above all, needs to see me that way. Even though I would tell any mother who came through the doors of my practice they didn’t need to be selfless to mother, this grace didn’t quite make its way to me. I needed to be what made up that word. Selfless: a person with less self.
Of course this part didn’t choose this belief system off a menu. She was handed it. She inherited it.
Deep in my subconscious, where all my relational fractures exist, motherhood and selflessness are synonymous. In there, the belief is if I can be selfless, it would prove it is possible and maybe then something in me would be healed.
Giving what we didn’t get certainly doesn’t hurt, but it’s sometimes not enough to truly be unburdened of these limiting beliefs. The wounds we carry are often only partly ours.
What moves me to tears every time I read that is feeling the generations of mothers before me who have felt the weight of this bind. And for me. For that first lonely year of motherhood, when I truly tried to the best of my ability to be selfless. It was lonely for a myriad of reasons. One of them was simply because there weren’t many people around me, but more of it was because I had abandoned myself. I rejected the part of me who wanted needed more than motherhood. The part who couldn’t truly be selfless. She was bad, bad news. Bitch was gonna blow my cover.
Every time I needed a break, lost my patience, or did the wrong thing was re-aggravating of a wound.
Except, what if it didn’t have to be? Was it possible to untangle the needs of being (and continuing to become) a full, complex person without failing as a mother?
Like a lot of people, I have some mommy issues. Or like lots of them, maybe. For a decade or so I had a lot of anger AT my mother. I felt so frustrated she couldn’t see me for what and who I was. Why couldn’t she just accept me? Why couldn’t she make space for all my big feelings? If I’m brutally honest, at times, I wondered if she hated me.
I can now see, on good days, it wasn’t because she didn’t love me enough or I wasn’t a good enough daughter. It was the conflict she was battling. The impossible task. The polarization of the parts of her—one who felt she needed to be everything for someone else and the other one who was fighting to be seen as a whole entire human being. How could she possibly see me if she wasn’t allowed to see herself?
The pain caused often wasn’t because she wasn’t mothering me—the woman did a lot of mothering, probably too much in retrospect. The pain was a side effect of how little mothering—in the truest, ideal sense—she had received from others and from herself. This led me to sense her resentment.
Thank goddess for Esther Perel teaching me the other side of resentment is envy. Every time I demanded she understand how hurt I felt, I had unknowingly brushed up against something she had never fully been granted herself.
As a therapist, it’s part of the gig to explore how people see their parents. There are those who experience them as mostly unknowable, elusive, difficult to understand. Some of that is because it's not really the job of a child to understand their parents, but damn if we don’t work hard at something not in our job description. Others experience their caregivers as quite predictable. Sometimes, it’s a revolving door of those and everything in between.
Most of all, I see time and time again how hard it is for clients to really own the sharper edges of how they see their parents. In Internal Family Systems (IFS), this would be a kind of “parent-protector” part. The piece of us that always defends them, no matter what. This part feels it is their job to keep a pristine image of them in our mind’s eye. It’s too threatening to see them any other way. They did the best they could, after all.
Well, of course they did, but and what about the harm caused, the beliefs passed down.
What if acknowledging your parent wasn’t absolutely perfect or you’ve been hurt by them didn’t have to be threatening to the relationship? What if it could be welcomed? What if it could be an inherent part of it— breaking the cycles that no longer serve us?
Even at 4.5 years old, while I can tell he wishes it were possible (e.g., direct quote, “Don’t ever make me mad. OK, momma?”), he doesn’t seem to really believe I should be perfect or, the word of the hour, selfless. What he seems to want most is to feel seen and for me to take accountability when I’ve hurt him.
Which, fair enough.
When I inevitably do emotionally hurt him in some way, I try to do all the things that have become more a part of parenting in my generation—e.g., get on his level, make eye contact (if he seems to want it), create a metaphorical container big enough to house all his feelings, ask what he needs. If I do all that and tag a genuine sorry on there, he couldn’t be over it faster. Like, he would prefer to never speak of it again. He’s not like me, harboring passed down resentments decades later, although I’m sure he still will have his own fair share someday.
He often tells me things like, “You’re a little bit mean sometimes.” Which is true. What am I doing arguing with that? Is it my whole identity? Of course, not, but is it really worth my breath to say I’ve never been mean. The more I deny that, the meaner I can get. The more stuck I become—defending my honor, or something.
Here is the thing though. He’s not the one who thinks I’m a piece of shit if I mess up. My conditioning is. I don’t need to defend my character to him. That’s not the part he needs help with.
Amanda’s excerpt got me thinking. If I could be a good enough mother AND I didn’t have to be selfless to do it, what else could I be known as?
Someone who loves to read and nap more than most things. Someone who can rest and bust her ass in equal measure. Someone who laughs and cries easily. Someone who gets overwhelmed by the simplest of tasks, but eerily calm in a crisis. Someone who is incredibly fulfilled by what they do for work. Someone who hates to be late, but struggles with time management. Someone who can’t pass up mozzarella sticks on a menu. Someone who is always up for going for a walk. Someone who is most at home being by water. Someone who got sober first and foremost for herself. Someone who oscillates between surrendering and controlling. Someone who needs a lot of time by themselves. Someone who struggles with this high wire act of mothering and being a person. Someone who loves people, and shows it freely and often.
Because that is who I am.
If I heard him describe me as selfless, I would feel a pit in my stomach. It would come over me suddenly that I’d never shown him who I am.
If one day he says, “She’s sensitive, likes to do Pilates, and her picture of bliss is reading in a hammock by water. She was bursting with Self and she shared some of that self with me. Sometimes she isolated and that was hard for me. She struggled with motherhood at times and she loveddddd me.” I’d be OK with that. Because it would, at the very least, be true.
Let me be clear, much of this is not in the form of a info dump titled, “A Brief Oral History of Your Mother: Origins, Beliefs, and Peculiarities.” As I like to talk—this endeavor is called dialoguing for a reason—this was a humbling realization for me. Without even recognizing it as such, I thought my role in his life would be more instilling wisdom (I now realize this is a coded way of saying lecturing). I thought I’d be so convincing—not in a controlling way, of course 🫠—about things to do, to try, to embody.
Surprise, surprise. He doesn’t seem to be too interested in my agenda. Any influence I do have seems to reside more in the realm of what I model and what within that he’s innately drawn to. It’s like telling a kid to be kind versus treating them kindly. I’m guilty of doing the former, of course, but it never has the intended result.
Similarly I could tell him to be himself or I could be myself near him. Of course I always knew this on some level, but what can I say? I forgot—or perhaps, it’d be more accurate to say I thought I’d be different. I’d be the one parent in the history of parenting where the kid wanted to be proselytized to. lolz.
—The cold hard truth is we don’t get to decide how our kids see us—
I have no doubt he will be on some therapist’s couch someday talking about how he saw me and likely not always in the most favorable light. Honestly, I hope he does. I hope he says it all, without flinching. Because I am all the things. I’d take it even further and say, I sincerely hope he brings what infringed on his ability to be fully himself to my doorstep so I can hear it and he can pass back to me what was never his.
In the end, not only am I not selfless by nature, I couldn’t be on principle. My self isn’t just looking out for #1, she’s actually quite generous. Especially when I tend to her and feed her. I have a large sense of self that I don’t intend to be without anymore.
I’m realizing my son does’t need me to be without it either. In fact, he needs the opposite.
It evokes this line from Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents."
Damn, Carl. Don’t pull any punches or anything.
I hope my son will continue to know me, not because he has to effort to make that happen or he feels like he has to in order to get by, but because he will witness me growing alongside him. Maybe I could be courageous enough to let him really know me.
Maybe, just maybe.
Questions for you:
Do you see motherhood equated with selflessness in your socialization as well?
What is your relationship to selflessness and selfishness?
Do you feel like you really knew your parents/caregivers?
You can find more info and my full disclaimer on my about page here. Abridged version: I’m a therapist, but not your therapist—even if you are a client of mine ~hi, dear one!~ this isn’t a session. dialoguing is an educational and informational newsletter only, not a substitute for mental health treatment.
Any comments, questions, suggestions, please feel free to email me at dialoguingsubstack@gmail.com—or if you’re reading this via email you can just hit reply and send me a message. Love hearing from you for any and all reasons!
Lastly, the summer tends to be a time where things slow down for my practice. I’m excited to announce at this time I have space on my caseload for 1 or 2 coaching clients. Check out my about page (near the bottom) for more info.
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Another insight into how he sees all this was when we were listening to Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, obvi, and he said to me, “Singers can be mommas.” While I don’t believe Sabrina is a mom nor do I know her feelings on the role, it was so delightful to hear him say he didn’t see any reason those two identities should be mutually exclusive.
I’ve heard Glennon talk about this on "the pod" and it has always struck me. Why is it that we’ve deemed "she’s so selfless" to be one of the highest compliments we give women (because who ever described a man as selfless??). We praise women for being "without a self" which seems the worst sort of erasure imaginable. Who wants to be without a self?? As someone who hasn’t fully decided whether or not to have kids yet it’s one of my bigger fears about motherhood. Will I lose my SELF in the process? Be forced to shrink it down in order to make space for this new little being? And where will I put all my big emotions then?? Your essay gives me hope. As always, thanks for writing and sharing Kaitlyn 🙏
"I sincerely hope he brings what infringed on his ability to be fully himself to my doorstep so I can hear it and he can pass back to me what was never his." This!!! Ugh, so good Kaitlyn. I think my biggest fear of having children is that I know I'm too selfish to be "the selfless mother" society seems to cherish. Your writing is so validating and informative, always grateful for what you share with us. 🙏🏼