What Does it Matter What Mom Wants

My toddler is standing next to my bed. Again. I swing my legs out of bed. “Lie down,” I whisper. He rushes back to his makeshift mattress on the floor, lies down, and waits for me to tuck the blankets around him. Again. At least he’s not screaming at me about this routine anymore. We’ve done this back-and-forth battle two nights in a row now. If I don’t give in, the worst should be behind us. I just hope my husband doesn’t sabotage all my efforts by allowing him to crawl into his side of the bed. Since I’m awake I might as well write about it.

My dreams of motherhood began as a raw moldable child. They were realized at the sprightly age of 21 when my marriage was still green. I had an associate's degree from Snow College and no desire at the time to do anything but have babies.

The youngest girl in a large Mormon family, I had six older sisters who were all married and had children. They did it in various ways, of course, although my young mind was shielded from the improprieties at the time. Marrying before kids was the right way. The role of motherhood was emphasized in my mind to a great degree. All roads led me in that direction. Motherhood was the ultimate aspiration, marriage was the penultimate. You couldn’t (mustn’t) do one without the other.

I do remember being told I could do anything I wanted to do, but it seemed an afterthought with an undercurrent of but what else would you ever want to do? Nothing’s better. I believed motherhood was everything I ever wanted. Don’t get me wrong, I had a natural inclination for motherhood. As a baby I loved my baby dolls. I cuddled with them, dreamt about them, and my older-girl dolls became the babysitters for the baby dolls.

 I began writing about my imagined world at the age of 15. I wrote one entire version of the story, but it was raw and unrevised. I wrote more in college, and majored in English. But I met my husband and fairytales became bedtime stories written only by other people. Writing them myself was too dangerous. I had to choose to neglect either my children or my writing. My children took precedence, and my dreams became a sleeping dragon.

 When I had two young sons, my husband encouraged me to return to school. Stressed about being the only provider, he wanted help. I fought him. Men provide. Women nurture. So it says in scripture. My life had revolved only around my first two babies for four years. I couldn’t leave my babies. Eventually, I gave in. I put my babies in the daycare across the street and took a semester while pregnant with my third son. I had forgotten what it felt to be required to read and write. Writing was like receiving oxygen after having weak lungs for years.

My third son was born between semesters. I left him with a babysitter and felt the strong cords of my motherhood tear. My first two babies had been permanently attached to me like extra limbs. Leaving this one…well, something broke and I didn’t like it. I didn’t go back to school the next year.

But I never regained what was lost. I had become a different kind of mom. Not so deeply and personally involved with my children. They became more individual, separate from me. It was painful at first. How could it be ok to leave my kids? Who says I could have a life away from them? The very thought felt sacreligious. I resented my husband for making me break my motherhood by leaving my children. The dragon went back to sleep.

The mothers described in my childhood were glorified for being closest to God when they lost themselves in serving their children. If a woman wanted to do anything else with her life, the assumption was she wasn’t a mother, therefore, she wasn’t fulfilling her predestined role as a woman. Motherhood takes over your life, or at least it should.

I focused hard on mothering my young boys, refusing to dream, to write. I wanted to grow those iron-clad chords around my children again. But they wouldn’t grow.

Almost ten years into this mothering gig, I was growing tired. The desire to escape filled me with temptation. I had briefly tasted the freedom of leaving that mother-persona home. I could enter a classroom filled with educated conversations far beyond E, I, E, I, O. The sleeping dragon was stirring. When my fourth son was six months old, I registered for classes again.

I was saturated with guilt. I was going against what I’d always been taught a mother should do. I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything I wanted. Moms don’t get what they want. They shouldn’t even want to get what they want! I wasn’t supposed to think about myself. But I was determined to finish what I’d started. Giving up was not an option for me. I poured myself into reading and writing.

College courses taught me I learned to see the world through language first instead of the other way around. It bent my perspective in new ways to comprehend how the mind associates meaning through language and how meaning would not be concrete without language. It awakened a passion inside me for learning, a thirst I needed. I’d been so consumed by motherhood, I had not realized there was more to learn in the world. Did this realization make me evil? There wasn’t supposed to be more in the world beyond motherhood.

It was my second semester with four sons. I had a year until graduation, and I found out I was pregnant.

The dragon’s nostrils smoked with fury. Shameful! Mothers don’t get angry about being mothers! What was wrong with me? I must not be a good mother.

I took a year off school for my baby. My youngest. My only girl. And my husband got a vasectomy. I reveled in the baby-ness of her, knowing she would be the last. I saturated myself in motherhood, bathed in it.

Then I put her and her brother in the campus daycare and I returned to finish my degree and satiate my growing thirst for knowledge. Once I’d picked up that part of my mind, I never wanted to let it go again. This was me. The dragon was awake. It would not sleep again.

I sat typing out essays or critical analyses on my computer. My 3-year-old sat on my lap sucking his thumb and twisting his fingers in the skin of my neck until it left red welts. His sister, 1, sat on my other knee, her thumb also in her mouth, twisting her hair in her fingers with her free hand.

I could have won an Oscar. I imagined Julia Roberts or Cameron Diaz couldn’t manage a stunt like that. But the applause was only in my head. I’d look down at the sad sleepy expression his blue eyes always got whenever he sucked his thumb and felt the guilt pinch. He only started sucking his thumb after his sister was born and I was busy with school. He wanted more attention.

But those semesters produced some of my favorite memories of motherhood. Unlike the other students, going to class was my break. Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, I dropped off my oldest three at school, my youngest two at the university daycare, rushed to find parking, and managed to arrive at class only slightly late. For a few hours, I got to pretend I belonged in a world where I only worried about homework and my social life. No one even knew about my motherhood in this space. It became sacred.

It was all a ruse. I would graciously refuse study groups or clubs after class, and returned to pick up my two little ones and my three elementary-age children. Then it was after-school snacks, settling arguments, cheering on efforts, cleaning dishes, tying shoe laces, and picking up toys, coats, backpacks —telling them to pick up, demanding they pick up, giving time outs unless they pick up!— taking two to karate class, one to soccer, another to a psychologist, and there’s the speech therapy, the pediatrician visits, eye exams, parent/teacher conferences, IEP appointments. Somehow I had to fit in more reading. More writing. But that was the easy part. That was what I’d rather do. Why did that make me feel guilty?

The common sermon at church on Mother’s Day glorifies the impossible angel mother who loses herself for her children. Why can’t I be a great mother without forgetting myself? Eventually, depression of mothers apparently began to register in the church consciousness and conferences began other attempts to better support women. It’s ok not to be perfect, the church started to say. You don’t have to feel guilty, the church repeated. But they missed the point.

So many mothers felt depressed, not because we thought mothers had to be perfect, but because that Glorified Mother who gives up who she is for her children is still heavily praised. Not only on Mother’s Day. Mormon mothers feel like we should be Her: The mom so many have spoken about with reverence and gratitude.

The Stake President stood at the pulpit with tears streaming, “She never thought about herself.” What a good woman, those in the congregation thought. I could be Her if only I could give up one more thing, forget myself just a little bit more. Then the church gets confused when mothers have a guilt complex over eating chocolate without sharing it with their children.

I wasn’t Her. Did that make me unfit? When I came out of the daycare, arms free, running to my car exhilarated by that freedom, did that mean I wasn’t a good mom anymore?

I loved the soft squishy feel of my babies as they clung to me. Baby fat was everything. I loved the look in their eyes when they saw or learned something new. I loved sitting a baby on my hip. I loved helping a toddler climb out of my car. My dragon roared for writing, but it also roared for my children. Human beings (meaning mothers too) are complex, contradictory and multifaceted.

I’m in the middle of a thought, typing at the computer when my husband calls us to the dinner table. He hates it when I don’t come to the table right away, but I hate it when I get interrupted and lose my train of thought. I try to type as fast as I can to get the thoughts out, then join the table with my family. The boys are twirling their plastic cups and plates on the table-like tops, and trying to steal them from each other. One of them shouts at another about poop. “If you use potty talk, you have to go in the bathroom,” I tell them sternly.

Marty’s sudden high-pitched shriek sends Jimmy’s hands to his ears in agitation. I mediate about the stolen plate and direct everyone to fold their arms for prayer. “Oh, look how reverent Zachary is being,” I say. The words are like magic. Praise is the most powerful motivation. Everyone is silent, folding their arms, eyes closed. Everyone, except Rosie in the high chair. She sits with eyes wide and sparkling. But the silence never lasts throughout the entire prayer. I can hear them wiggling and poking each other before we say amen.

-Danielle Palmer

Danielle Palmer is a sister of seven, a mother of five, and a writer of many. She grew up a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and remains active in her church. As an active member of the church, she shares her testimony of Jesus Christ while also advocates for loving treatment to all members of the human race. She is a mother, a writer, and a professional who believes social roles are not assigned, but chosen. She graduated in English, Creative Writing, in 2018 from Utah Valley University. Her work The View From Above can be found on Amazon. She is also currently continuing to write the fictional story she began at the age of 15.