A Cat Mother on Mother's Day

For many years, Mother’s Day had been fraught for me. The thought of a beautiful Sunday in May devoted to celebrating motherhood gave me ferocious FOMO, and I spent the day itself imagining how everyone but me was doing something lovely and fun with their families and their mothers. I felt like I didn’t get to have a mother—not a biological mother that I felt connected to—or be a mother, and the whole idea of motherhood was painful for me. It’s taken me a long, long time and many good therapy sessions to come to appreciate the ways that I did get to be a mother and have a mother, although they didn’t happen in the usual “normal” ways. All the mothering I would have given children of my own leaked out the sides, with other people’s children, friends, pets, small helpless animals.

I’ve been a kind of mother to my ex’s kids and my friends’ kids, showing up and nurturing them in any way I could. This Sunday, I’m attending the graduation of one of those kids. I am part of his family, and he is part of mine.

I’m on my third generation of cat children. All my cats have called me Mama. I know, of course, that I am speaking for them, but I’m sure that if they could speak, they would call me Mama—they hop onto my lap and stare meaningfully into my eyes, cuddle up beside me on the daybed while I pet them. I had a dog named Spot for a while. I inherited him from an ex and took care of him until he was old and deaf, mostly so that my ex’s kids could stay connected to him. It was clear that Spot thought I was his mother; whenever something scary was going on, he would run over and sit right next to me.

I’ve mentored many people, including the many students and clients whose deep longing to write and writing projects I’ve nurtured as a teacher. I’ve mothered boyfriends or tried to—usually not the best idea, but sometimes hard to resist. I’ve felt motherly toward practically everything in the world, the lost kittens my friend fostered for the animal shelter, baby bunnies I’ve tried to rescue, even the mice that wandered one by one into my house one year—I captured them in a salad spinner bowl and carried them to the end of the street and released them, relieved to know they were no longer being tortured by my cats in my kitchen.

The mothering I have received over the years has mostly happened with friends. I have many close friends, most of them women, but a few of them men. My friends and I have exchanged mothering with each other, sharing meals and birthdays and holidays, comforting each other when we needed comforting, talking through our problems, and exploring solutions. I’ve done that with and for many friends and people I sponsored in my Alanon program for a long, long time.

After many years of being single, I have finally acquired a partner who is always there when I need him. I can honestly say there’s something motherly about the way he shows up for me and helps me whenever I need help. And there’s also something motherly about the way he refuses to let me expend my energy trying to be his caretaker.

When someone suggested I try to imagine a biological mother for myself, I concluded that the mother I could picture and would like to have would be myself. I know that I would be, would have been a good mother. There’s plenty of evidence—all those mice, bunnies, friends, other people’s children.

I’ve done my best to be a mother to myself. Picturing myself as my own mother is beyond my powers of imagination. But I’ve learned to take good care of myself over the years. And in some ways, I suppose I’ve learned to love myself. I can look at photos of myself as a kid and love that child. I’m never mean to myself or speak to myself critically.

And there’s always next year, always the future, to learn more about loving myself and various other kinds of mothering. For now, I’m just happy to be happy on Mother’s Day, to accept my life as it is.

Source: Mary Allen