12 Moms on Their Secret Strengths
Moms spend a lot of time cataloging their failures. This Mother’s Day, revel in your talents.
Every evening at bedtime, I pick one of my 4-year-old’s numerous kitty stuffed animals and do an extended call-and-response of meows and “I love yous” in high-pitched feline voices. Even though she has so many plush toys perched next to her she can barely fit on the bed, I know every single animal's name. Kiki, Giselle, Lottie, Leona and Hope are the current favorites, and I know the order that she wants them arranged and trotted out during our extended bedtime ritual.
This perhaps seems like a small and insignificant part of my parenting day, but it always makes me proud, because it tells my daughter: I hear you. Because you are 4, your kitties are essential to you, and so they’re important to me, too.
And that’s what this series of essays is about: moms saying something nice about themselves, for once. Especially this year, it seems as if all mothers do is talk about our perceived failures: how we’re failing at remote schooling, or making the wrong choices for our kids when all the options are bad, or not being the “fun mom.”
Here is a chance for mothers and mother figures to take a moment to actually revere themselves, and all the big and small things they do for their families. Ideally, mothers can read these beautiful and generous reflections and feel good about themselves — not just on Mother’s Day, but every day, even if it’s just for a moment.
When I snuggle my preschooler and her stuffed animals, I feel that deeper connection we have forged on a daily basis, of call-and-response, meowing into the darkness, and know that it is building a foundation of listening and acknowledgment that will last us forever.
What’s your secret strength? Tell us in the comments so we can celebrate together.
Giving My Children Confidence
My mother is a small person with a tall personality, which she owes to her near-delusional confidence. It would be properly delusional if she didn’t spectacularly live up to it. She’s so charming, her brain so zippy, that even in a high school snit, furious and scribbling down a list of her flaws, I still revered her. I knew that if we were not related, and I met her at some kind of imaginary teen/mom party, I’d want to be her friend.
Fortunately, she replicated her confidence in me. We moved too many times to count; I entered too many rooms full of hostile children. But the force field she built around me — her firm pep talks, when she told my brother and me that we had more to offer than any other kids in the world — was the protection I needed to navigate them.
I’m the first to point out there is no basis for my confidence. I haven’t cured any diseases or won a single award. But Mum was always careful to repeat that liking myself wasn’t about what I’d done, it was about who I was: a good, reliable, curious person, even if a little strange. Strange is interesting, she said. And who wanted to be boring?
Now I look my own two children in the eye every day and repeat it all. I loudly marvel at my luck: The greatest kids in the world ended up in my house! What are the chances? My son rolls his eyes, and because I am as relentless as my mother, I say, “But I’m right.”
Knowing that women need even more padding, I double down with our toddler daughter. “You must be so proud!” I say now, instead of “I’m so proud of you,” This refrain follows her around as she sits on the potty, pours water from a glass into a smaller glass, and eats yogurt without getting it in her hair. I wonder if any of it gets through. But then she tears down the hall screaming, apropos of absolutely nothing, “I’M THE BEST BABY IN THE WORLD!!!!”
I try to high five myself, but even delusional confidence has its bounds. That is simply not possible. So I clap.
Priyanka Mattoo is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker. She is working on “Sixteen Kitchens,” a memoir in essays from Knopf.
Making the Sugar Sing
When the sugar begins to burn, on the cusp of unruly dark bubbles, I slip seasoned chunks of meat into the pot and watch them sizzle and brown.
Once the meat turns golden, in go the chopped onions, then the rice, pigeon peas and a fistful of cubed pumpkin. They will simmer in coconut milk and broth and herbs until the liquid is gone and the pelau sits slick and happy on the hot stove.
“It smells like Granny’s house!” my 8-year-old says from virtual class in the nearby dining room as I putter away on stolen time in the kitchen.
It is my mother who taught me how to navigate fire. When I go to her in Trinidad, she packs her fragrant green seasoning into an old coffee jar and wraps it in newspaper and masking tape before my return flights to the United States.
Her people came to our southern Caribbean island as indentured laborers from India more than a century ago, bringing their pulau rice and meat with them. The meal mingled with African food traditions, the smoky stews of my father’s people.
In an ordinary world, I would be at work and my children would be at school. But this is a pandemic, a time of midday cooking and closed borders that keep us from family.
On this Mother’s Day, it’s been 496 days since we have seen our matriarch and our people. The days have been isolating; the news has been wrenching; the kids have absorbed it. Some things I cannot protect them from.
But I can sneak into the kitchen to make the sugar sing, so that scent surfaces memory and a young voice rises in remembrance of those who came before.
Kari Cobham is a writer and editor in Atlanta, and co-founder of Media Moms for mothers in journalism. She is from Trinidad & Tobago and runs The Carter Center’s Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.
Feigning Interest in Minecraft
My kids love Minecraft. They live for Minecraft. If they were given a choice between one million dollars and five more minutes playing Minecraft, they would choose the one that does not assist me with their orthodontia bills. And as much as it pains me to admit it, they’ve had plenty of time to get better at it during the pandemic while they’ve run wild and their bewildered parents have had to work from home.
This means that when we are together, the conversation often turns to what is happening in their respective worlds — the place where they build shelters, craft tools, and try to “survive.” My son, for example, might tell me that earlier he used “redstone dust” to make armor to defend against “the creepers.” Or my daughter may recall that she spent the afternoon building a “safe room” in her mansion basement to protect her pet ocelot from wolves.
Now, I don’t know what redstone dust is or why my 7-year-old is using her wild and precious life to protect a pixelated cat, but this is when my superpower shines. I smile! I nod! I force my face into the same arrangement I use to discuss sports or my neighbor’s new kitchen backsplash. Wow! I say. Fascinating.
The good news is my kids have no idea my brain has gone to lunch during these rousing exchanges. The bad news is that lunch makes me very sleepy. That is why I have also perfected the art of “horizontal listening.” Oh yeah? I’ll say, lying down and closing my eyes beside them while they talk to me about mooshrooms and obby swords. Tell me more.
Kate Baer is a poet and bestselling author of “What Kind of Woman.” Her new book, “I Hope This Finds You Well,” comes out in November.
Teaching My Daughter Spanish
Growing up, my family was of mixed views on our Afro-Latino heritage. My father was in the fierce camp of: “You’re in America. Speak English.” My mother, who loved her country and her culture, spoke Spanish whenever my father wasn’t home. I could understand, but I didn’t really learn to speak with confidence, and to read and write Spanish, until high school.
When my daughter came along, I was determined to raise her to be fluent in a way that I was not. Then she was born three months early, at 1.5 pounds, and I just couldn’t do it. As I sat in the NICU for weeks and months on end, I couldn’t bring my brain to speak Spanish.
When she finally got home from the hospital, I was too tired and scared to focus on language. I spoke to her in Spanglish, the language I’m most fluent in, for the first few years of her life. But I wanted her to know more than a few phrases. We lived in a university town, with a lot of bilingual speakers and professors. Again and again, people told me that I should give up on the bilingual thing. It was already “too late.”
But I didn’t give up. There’s a Spanish phrase: La vida es dura … pero yo lo soy más. Life is tough, but I am tougher. I found a bilingual preschool, then a Spanish immersion elementary school. I signed her up for after-school and summer camps in Spanish, ballet en Español, cooking en Español. We took family vacations to Mexico and Spain.
And now at 14, her Spanish is even better than mine. She read all the Harry Potter books in Spanish; and we watch films like “Nosotros Los Nobles” in their original language. The confidence and the sense of connection to our heritage that the language has given her is almost impossible to convey.
I look back at all those people who said that I had “blown it,” that it was “too late” when she was a micro-preemie and everything was terrifying. The textbook timetables don’t always apply in parenting — or in life. Teaching my daughter Spanish was an important cornerstone of rooting her in our heritage. I think when we show our kids what really matters to us, however imperfect our efforts, the intention needs no translation.
Veronica Chambers is the editor of Narrative Projects, a team dedicated to starting up multi-layered series and packages at The Times.
Singing in Difficult Times
When I was a baby, my mother, a singer, songwriter and teacher, created a lullaby that she would hum to soothe me. It was a wordless melody with a hypnotic rhythm; a warm, soft crooning in the form of three descending notes that repeat. As I got older, there were many things I was too cool to receive from my mom anymore — public hugging, fashion advice, any conversations whatsoever about sex — but the song was never one of them. It never failed to calm me down, even as a teenager who was breaking up with bad boys, or as a lost young adult who felt as if the world was breaking up with me.
When I became pregnant with my own daughter, I would hum this same song to her in utero every night before sleep. After giving birth, I’d sing it to her through the most difficult times, for both of us; through teething and the end of breast feeding, through her first skinned knee in the park and through the horror of a yearlong pandemic that has left so many feeling so alone. Last summer, my daughter and I marched in the streets in Brooklyn over police brutality and at night, she would ask if we could sing the song together and give it to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, to make them feel better, wherever they are now, so we did.
My mother’s lullaby was not just something I was passing down to my daughter to soothe her, but was something I was recycling for me, to self-soothe. I am forever grateful to my mom for giving my daughter and me this lullaby, which is more than just a song we sing; it’s a melodic vibration with intention, now passed down through the voices of three generations.
Amber Tamblyn (@ambertamblyn) is an actress, writer and director.
Wrestling As a Family
You’d think that, a year into the pandemic, my family and I didn’t need to be any closer. In a home with one bathroom, four humans, two dogs and a bunny all smooshed into less than 1,000 square feet, physical distance away from one another would be what we craved most of all. But rather, each night, before we all roll up the stairs and plop into our beds, we get even closer, bodies twisted into conjoining pretzels, cradles, half nelsons, single leg takedowns and double arm bars.
Which is to say, we wrestle. Each person gets in their corner on our rubber play mat, and there is a countdown: 5-4-3-2-1. The goal: Pin someone down for three seconds, and if you get pinned, you have to sit out and count to 30. (This is how my youngest learned to count to 30.)
As a pacifist, I never thought this would be my jam or something I’d encourage my kids to do (“Give him the half nelson!”) but there are so many benefits to wrestling: each person moving their body in tactical ways, the kids teaming up together and learning how to really defend themselves. When we wrestle, we vent our frustrations and get out our yayas, and more than anything, we laugh together, rather than everyone staring at a screen in different zones of our home.
Wrestling dissolves any taboos about physicality among the family, but also it teaches rules and boundaries and consent. It is a healthy way to channel aggression. Our little pandemic pastime also shows my family that I, their mother, am not just a woman in an apron or hunched over a computer all day. I’m also physically strong and playful, and at times I cannot be beat.
Mira Ptacin is the author of “Poor Your Soul” and “The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna.” She lives on Peaks Island, Maine.
Letting My Girls Be Vulnerable
Memories of the day I found out the boy I loved was loving on someone else are stuck on my brain like some Technicolor scab. The moment stays vivid not just because of my own misery, but because of my mother’s reaction. Upon witnessing me clutch our house phone and dissolve into a heap of tears, questioning every little thing I might have done to drive this boy away, she yelled at me for crying.
My mom, Bettye, was part of a generation of superwomen who stood in the crook between the feminist and civil rights movements; she was Black, very much a lady, invisible. There was neither time nor room for crying, so she didn’t do it and demanded the same of me when I was growing up in the ’80s. Buck up. Get over it. Focus on what matters.
“Don’t you ever let me see you crying over some boy!” she said. I hurriedly wiped my tears, sucked up my snot and went back to watching “The Cosby Show.” From that day forward, I knew to tuck in my emotions around her. Superwomen don’t cry.
Grown-up Denene does cry, though. And my daughters have had an open invitation to lay their heads in my lap and let it out — the tears, the worries, the vulnerability. Around me, they know they’re safe to express their full range of human emotion — to buck this ridiculous notion that Black women all wear capes, and are much too busy slinging around that good grit to cry or let doubt sit them down for a spell.
And so, they do what my mother told me not to: They cry. Just last week, my older daughter called with a warble in her voice, only to burst into a full-on bawl when I asked what was wrong. Graduation is coming. Her thesis was soon due. She’s got two jobs and the MCATs were hanging over her head. And the pandemic has her missing home. She had to let it out or combust. “I don’t know why I always cry when I talk to you,” she said. I do, little girl. I do.
Denene Millner is a New York Times best-selling author and the publisher of Denene Millner Books, an imprint at Simon & Schuster.
Keeping Calm in a Crisis
Since I’ve become a parent, I’ve developed an almost eerie ability to conceal panic. If, say, my daughter, Sylvie, rushes toward me with blood jetting from her finger, I immediately go reptile-still. Internally, I’m screaming, but in a pleasantly businesslike tone, I’ll say: “Huh, look at that. Why don’t we head to urgent care? They have good lollipops, if I remember right.”
Panic is contagious, especially with kids. So I’ve honed my acting skills — perhaps drawing on my experience of coolly lying to my parents as a teen — and can somehow redirect the energy from my spiraling fear into a flawless performance.
When a boy broke his arm on the playground and I saw its unnatural bent as we awaited paramedics, I began to feel woozy. I could sense Sylvie eyeing me uneasily, so I quickly sat on a park bench, set my bag on the ground and put my head between my legs as I pretended to rummage through it. “Now, where did I put my keys?” I said blandly, while surreptitiously taking deep gulps of air.
Our cat once brought a large, struggling mouse into Sylvie’s bedroom as she woke from a nap. “You had a good sleep, honey,” I said evenly, while blocking the view of my husband as he wrestled the cat and its prize out of the room.
While I’m feigning “I’ve got this,” I always think about how I’m a nervous flyer. If the airplane hits turbulence, I carefully watch the flight attendants as they take a seat. If they’re idly leafing through Us magazine as the plane shakes and dips, I relax, too.
Similarly, Sylvie trusts what she sees, so when she’s fearful I tell her: “Do you see me freaking out? No. Then you shouldn’t, either.” Although one day she’ll hug me, feel my hammering heart, and the show will be over.
Jancee Dunn is the author of “How Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids.”
Celebrating (Un)birthdays
The year I turned 35, a friend threw three surprise birthday parties for me. I was incredibly embarrassed because twice, it wasn’t my birthday and I had to pretend it was and say “thank you” to every well wish. It was a good laugh and I needed good laughs in that season of my life where I was ending harmful relationships and coming to terms with the power of my words to hurt or to heal.
Before then, I believed that the truth was a gift and even compassionate lies could never know it. Unbirthday parties became my way to settle an incongruity and to do what I love — celebrate, despite the weight of everything. It is my Black joy. I won’t surrender. And these celebrations are my small way of saying, this marker is a lie but it’s also true that I’m glad you were born. Let’s clap it up!
Just the other day I threw a surprise party for my son, his third 14th birthday party in the last nine months. We laughed, and he lit up at the sight of his balloons.
During the pandemic (and before), I’ve enjoyed random parties at home with family, whether it’s somebody’s birthday or not — whoever feels down or needs to know they’re special. I’ll order balloons, birthday hats and a cake. I even have an “Emergency Birthday Party Pack” to deliver to friends. It’s ready all year round and includes everything one would need, down to a gift that’s appropriate for all ages and one that’s not — a birthday-cake-flavored pre-roll (a marijuana treat that’s perfectly legal in California).
If the party is near Christmas and a friend is suffering holiday blues, no problem. I’ll leave two boxes — one naughty and one nice.
It makes me happy to celebrate others. I think I’m good at it. As mothers, our gifts are delivering the harmony and joy we also deserve, even if it’s an unscheduled birthday wish.
Natashia Deón is a criminal attorney, mother of two and author of the forthcoming novel “The Perishing” (Nov. 2021), available now for preorder.
Arriving on Time
I don’t often think about what I’m good at, because despite what you’d think, doing this would be exactly the opposite of working hard to not think of what I’m bad at, which is a goal I have. Besides, my mother told me from a young age that parenting is a thankless job. (I don’t know why she was telling me that from a young age. For another time, I guess.)
However, the skill I have that I am most proud of is the one I think is the most important: I am punctual. I am a precision machine that delivers and arrives on time. You can set your clock by me. You can time your race by me.
I am in the front row for the end-of-the-year performance. I am not late for basketball carpool; I am even not later for basketball practice. I don’t wander into the gym 15 minutes after tipoff; I am in the front bleacher 10 minutes before it. My kids don’t miss doctor’s appointments. My kids don’t walk into school after the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t enter the party mid-magician. Because I’m on time, so are they.
I would say I’m punctual to a fault, but that would be to think there is fault in punctuality, and there is none. It is worth everything it costs: the tension in the house as we try to get out the door, the blood pressure medication dosage I will surely be on very soon. It is worth it to be considered a trustworthy person. It is worth the calm you feel when you are waiting, as opposed to rushing.
Now, I don’t know if I’m teaching my kids this value when I yell to get into the car because we don’t want to be late. I don’t know if I’ve landed this ethic when I am treating soccer practice arrival like the landing of a space shuttle, and surely not when I’m screaming. So I’m not saying I’m great at all aspects of punctuality, just the arrival time. I can tell you from years of deadline work — very often, that’s enough.
Here is the thing that makes me wistful: My children run so on time that they don’t know what it’s like to wait outside a library after it’s closed, with no idea when a person might see the headlights on a certain Volvo station wagon finally arriving 20 minutes after the last mom has said, “Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” (Again, another time.)
Instead, my kids look over my shoulder at my Instagram account, where other moms are invested enough in the displays of motherhood to bake bread and post animated sayings by Brené Brown and memes about getting through the day. My kids saw the color-coded daily pandemic schedules. They see the parents making a rainbow cake or using something called fondant. They want to know if perhaps we can learn what fondant is.
I tell them no, I’m sorry. I have a piece for the Parenting section to deliver and I’m never, ever late. I tell them maybe one day they will be grateful for this, but it’s OK if they’re not, for, luckily, I have already been warned that mothering is a thankless job.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributor to the Culture desk and the author of the novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” (Random House 2019).
Building the Frame
Early in the pandemic, jigsaw puzzle sales soared 300 percent. As I pick up yet another stray piece from our carpet and attempt to discern which of the boxes on our shelves it belongs in, I am certain our family is solely responsible for this increase. My kindergartner is obsessed and, it turns out, naturally skilled. Our toddler (nickname: Torbellina) is uncharacteristically reverent of puzzles-in-progress, among the precious few items she won’t destroy as she whirls through the house.
We’ve pieced together unicorns galloping on a mystical beach, a map of migratory patterns of birds of the Americas, and fairies partying in a pink-flowered garden — all leading to our triumph, a 1,000-piece scene of a wolf mother nursing six cubs on a bed of psychedelic neon flowers. My daughters’ puzzling follows their young attention spans; they move haphazardly among sections that intrigue them. Meanwhile I instinctively seek straight lines and corners. I methodically sift through the box to dig out all of the edge pieces. I build the frame; my kids sort out the stuff in the middle.
It’s a decent metaphor for my mothering: I establish the perimeter of our world and set my girls loose inside it. Practically, setting boundaries helps me accept what I do and do not have control over: I cook a meal, they eat it or they don’t.
Some days I worry that my predilection for structure makes me a drag, an unfun mom. But the world is an increasingly complex place to navigate, even for the most fortunate children. So I carry on and hope that my daughters see me as someone who is open with and trusting of them.
I explain, as gently as I can, that there are people who would hurt their beloved Apu and Lola just because they are Filipino, a reality they already know to be true for Black people. It’s imperative that my children see the bigger picture and I excel at helping them understand structures, both intimate and public, that we live within. I hope to help piece together the world, to be the scaffolding on which my daughters hang every question they have — every question they will ever have — as they roam, curious and free, the spaces before them.
Angela Garbes is the author of “Like a Mother” and cohost of the podcast “The Double Shift.”