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

Amanda Montei

’s (

Mad Woman

, 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.