Expecting

I expected to like being a mother. 

I expected to be good at being a mother.

I expected to raise children who would appreciate that I wasn’t an embarrassment, not obese or out of style, or driving an old beat up Buick.

I wanted to enjoy baking cookies with my children. I wanted to have their reluctant help clearing the table after dinner. Maybe they’d tell me about their day while I washed the pots and pans and they dried them for me. I thought I’d have kids who sought out my attention. When I was kissing them goodnight on their foreheads, they would say, 

Wait, Mommy, don’t go yet. Sit with me a while longer.

I expected to enjoy being a mother. 

I imagined I’d hear whispers after school about their crushes and playground antics and that I’d always know who their best friends were. 

I imagined my children would trust me

with their secrets hopes fears dreams wishes 

and not keep it all bottled up 

and when it can’t all stay inside anymore

and it rips them open as it all pours out

and they shake and cry and hyperventilate and need me

for just one frightening night, when they can’t breathe

because they’re convinced  no one likes them 

and believe they have no friends

and think they should just not be alive.

I guess I should have expected that when I became a mother.

I thought being a mother would come naturally to me. 

I thought I would be pregnant more than once. 

I didn’t think I would try to jump out of a moving car 

late in the second trimester because 

everything inside was telling me that 

I shouldn’t be a mother. 

I wanted to fight fiercely for my children, to do anything necessary to protect them and give them what I didn’t have. I wanted them to see how much I was trying for them. I don’t know why, but I expected them to appreciate how much I gave them. Ridiculously, I expected not to be taken for granted. 

I imagined I would get a chance to be a stage mom, that one of my children would enjoy performing and I could hem costumes if needed, pin their hair into a tight ballerina bun, and someday sew ribbons on pointe shoes.

I expected them to love being the center of attention as much as I did. 

As I do. 

But my children aren’t really like me, at least not in that way.

I expected to feel seen as a mother.

I expected to identify as a mother.

That I would feel more like a mother than

a writer

a wife

a sister

a friend

a muse

a dancer

a mentor

a thrifter

a woman

a lover. 

I expected to feel more like a mother than anything else, but

I don’t. 

Sometimes I think I wasn’t meant to be a mother. Instead I did what was expected. I knew no other way to be a woman because when I grew up, and where I grew up, to be a woman was to be a mother. And so I became one. 

I didn’t expect him to ask me, at age seven, why I was addressing his sister’s graduation announcements. 

You’re not even her real mom, he spat out.

I’ve been her mom longer than I’ve been yours, I spat back. 

I didn’t expect our daughter to lose the attention of both her moms when she maybe needed us most, one to geography, one to her baby brother. He took so much of me and I felt I had nothing left to give her. I didn’t mean to leave her so alone, even if she thought she wanted it. 

And now they’re both grown. 

I didn’t expect him to say he hates me so often.

I didn’t expect to scream at him to fuck off.

I didn’t expect him to look so much like me and resent me for it. 

I didn’t expect to feel so isolated.

I didn’t expect to feel so different from other mothers.

I didn’t expect to feel so displaced.

I didn’t expect to still be Liz.

I thought I would enjoy being a mother.  

-Liz Wasson Coleman

Liz Wasson Coleman (she/her) holds a BA in Arts & Literature from Antioch University, where she merged her experience in dance performance with spoken word and presented her thesis, 'Spilling Silence' in 2015. Her writing includes creative nonfiction, lyric essay, memoir, and flash fiction, and explores themes of inherited mental illness and multi-generational trauma. Past work has appeared in The Write Launch and Prometheus Dreaming, among others. Becoming as a stepmom in 2002 and a biological mom in 2006, today Liz lives with her family in Seattle's Central District.