Motherless — a personal narrative

I think I finally decided I was never going to be a mother while crying in the bath. It was during that odd transitional phase between high school and college where everything is changing so you have no idea who you are, and time tends to blend together later on. And ironically, my period cramps had plunged me into the shallow depths of boiling water. Already miserable and incredibly emotional, I sat there bent over myself and falling victim to the endless supply of content on my small half-charged phone. It was there, in my boiled pink and vulnerable state, I heard the headlines. Something along the lines of only a few years left before we caused irreversible damage leading to a mostly uninhabitable earth by the time I was in my fifties. Scary.

I had entertained the idea of being a mother before. At the time I had been dating a guy from a traditional family and as previous family history and growing up in small town, Oklahoma suggested, I was supposed to marry whoever I met in high school, settle down soon after, and have a family. Most of those things I didn’t want, and before this I had entertained the idea of not having children, flipping the idea back and forth like a coin, debating on what I want versus what was expected of me. However, sitting there in the bathtub, now in a new relationship and still freshly knighted an adult, I mourned the children I would never have, reminisced over the family names I would never pass down, and worried for the future and also myself. 

Was there something wrong with me? Why did I not want to be a mom, was I being selfish (an idea that was often preached to me by those who couldn’t have children), was I a horrible person, a freak of nature going against, what I was told, was my natural biology? Why was the urge to nurture another human, carry and grow it, simply not there? And often I think it is ultimately rooted in my own maternal figures.

I was the kid who hated making Mother’s Day gifts. I disliked the pink and red hearts, the cherry blossom and carnation pink construction paper, foam sticker letters that we, as sheep-minded children, would stick to the paper and decorate with lace to wish our superhero moms a “Happy Mother’s Day.” While everyone argued about whose mom was the “super-est,” I always begged to be left out. Almost always cried, always pouted, always wondered: why should I have to do this? A self-diagnosed “daddy’s girl” suffering from maternal abandonment, it didn’t make sense to me; why celebrate my mother’s lack of responsibilities? I just don’t believe in handing out participation trophies; they only get thrown out years later.

The last time I saw my mother I was five. She was crying, she was apologizing, she was a lot of things I had never seen her like before. She said goodbye to me as I left her, her new-ish husband, and half-brother behind at our mobile home. Being abandoned by my mother isn’t something I had considered when I was younger. I had understood that my mother and I, in simple terms, didn’t click. That’s why I was fine not having a mom. I didn’t need someone to teach me to fix my hair or have someone to let me wobble around in her heels and smear her makeup across my chubby toddler cheeks, or whatever the little girls in movies always seem to do. I was okay being motherless. It was easy for me. I became accustomed to it. After all, she wasn’t the type of mother to nurture, to show up, to do anything deemed “motherly.” I had never given her much thought, that is until after she died.

As I got older, I found she had begun to slip into my work; my art, my poems, my essays and I wondered, did she want to be a mother? Was it a simple matter of accidental circumstance? Probably. A twenty-year-old woman stuck in the Bible belt, one unexpected pregnancy later she found herself strapped into societal expectations with not only a newborn baby boy but a new marriage. However, as it seems with my mother, the marriage didn’t last long and after two marriages and one divorce (just with my father), I was brought into the world, a blossoming baby girl with a thick head of dark hair and an apparent, inherit, dislike of my mother. But, having never truly met my mother, not even in those eight years between the last time I saw her and her death, I never gave my relationship with her much thought and likewise, never her own life. What did she want to be? A cowgirl, she talked about being a model before being a mother; turned to lassoing fence posts and barrels rather than wrestling children and found passion in grooming horses instead of fixing my hair. But motherhood and marriage found her juggling shifts at gas stations, convenience stores, and Tractor Supplies while barrel racing during the evenings and weekends. For years after her death, even as I write this, I’ve found myself tearing through her obituary, looking for a sprinkle of information that might provide some sort of spark she carried for something else. Something to explain why she didn’t want to be a mother, or more frankly, why she didn’t want to be my mother. I’ve never visited her gravesite, instead limiting myself to the images shared online through the years, reading the curly engraved letters across her headstone:

Loving Mom. Daughter. and Wife.

Despite my apparent disinterest so many years ago, I now find myself struggling through the many complicated layers of our relationship. Knowing nothing about her and knowing I will never really know anything about her. I don’t think I was the issue; I think I was another product of accidental circumstance, the results of what two people believe should happen after marriage and divorce and marriage. But there are a lot of assumptions I can make and a lot of memories I can attempt to break down and fail only to revisit again a year or two later. Maybe my mother was a loving mom, a good mom; maybe she was caring, maybe she remembered me and talked about me and maybe she was too scared to reach out after all those years. Maybe she attended all my brother’s basketball games, maybe she dressed him for prom, maybe she cried at his graduation, maybe she wished I was there. Maybe I will never know, but a message from my half-brother sits unread in my inbox: June 7, 2023, how have you been?

This essay was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2024 Leigh Holmes Creative Nonfiction Contest at Cameron University.