The Mother conundrum

TW: child loss.

As I become more comfortable flexing into my grief and stretching out into this space, I want to share all the ways that my art is informed by my loss. Certainly, art is healing. Art is a companion in grief. Creating glass art has been a balm to my anxiety. But art can’t protect us from the endless onslaught of holidays.

Here is the heart of it all: I am a mother, but I am not a mother.

There are a lot of ways I’m technically a mother. I was pregnant, I carried my baby for six months. My husband and I announced him, celebrated him, planned for his future, until a routine scan discovered anomalies. After weeks of testing, the doctors told us the birth defects were not compatible with life. There wasn’t much we could do besides say goodbye. So our parenting journey ended in termination for medical reasons, a term I’ve grown to understand means I’m part of a very sad club of mourning parents dealing with complicated grief.

Am I a mother? I gave birth, in a way. We planted a tree in honor of my son and we’ve watched the tree grow while he’s been gone, just over a year now. He is present in our story, if not in our daily lives. We yearn for another chance at parenthood. But does that make me a mother?

A lot of platitudes on the internet would testify that I am a mother. Friends who’ve experienced loss, they tell me I am a mother. Well-meaning family members wish me a Happy Mother’s Day, because I’ll always be a mother to a heavenly baby, an angel baby. People tell me I’m a mother– if I feel like I’m a mother.

But I don’t feel like a mother. I’ve just begun my second year of grief and I’m discovering how much worse year two is from year one. The shock has worn off and now the emptiness in my arms is heavy, sinking me down into myself. Every “Happy Mother’s Day” message stirs a new emotion, but they’re all negative: annoyance, anger, bitterness, hostility, tears. I can know intellectually that they all mean well, they’re my support team, but that doesn’t mean my emotions correlate.

I don’t feel like a mother. I desperately want to feel like a mother, someday.

I booked a weekend trip away with my husband, knowing this Mother’s Day weekend would be tough. We went to the mountains and toured in Blowing Rock, NC. Our view from the AirBnb was of Grandfather Mountain, the most serene expanse of rolling green. We visited The Martin House, my favorite art gallery. I coincidentally came across an oil landscape by Christine Code, a Canadian painter living in the Midwest, called Cracking Light. The pale sliver of sunlight peaking out from underneath the heavy lavender-grey clouds struck a chord with me, and I burst like a dam in the middle of the gallery. It felt good to release some of the emotion that stays trapped in my chest.

I think the whole point of writing about the intersection of my grief process and my art process is to let out some of this trapped emotion. If it helps even one person to give themselves grace, or to seek opportunities to create as a form of healing, I’ll feel like I’ve done something supportive with all this emotion.