No Cure for Motherhood
By Kaitlin Barker Davis
@kaitlinbarkerdavis
Two blocks from the Pacific, the doves are cooing in the garden of our Airbnb, and every so often a massive pelican floats overhead. San Diego’s expansive blue February sky startles me, unobstructed by the rainclouds or towering evergreens of my own Portland sky.
Travel has always been my cure-all. And leading up to my family’s San Diego getaway (our first flight since the pandemic), I’d built up a mountain of expectations for how it would cure my mothering weariness. I would write for hours! Run every day! Sleep wonderfully! Complete a conversation with my husband!
A week into our trip, however, I’ve realized something obvious: There’s no vacation from parenthood, especially parenthood with a 4-year-old and 7-month-old. Sunshine doesn’t make your baby sleep through the night. It doesn’t create magical extra hours of not being needed in a day. And so, it isn’t just the sky or the sun that’s startling. It’s this rare swath of time to myself—my husband at the playground with both kids—to be a writer alone with her words.
At home, I have to strategically and aggressively arrange my day for time to write. On one of the three mornings a week that my daughter is at preschool, I lay the baby gently down for his nap, pull the door softly closed, then dash directly upstairs to my desk, ignoring the dirty dishes, the pile of laundry, the toys all over the floor, the dog who wants a walk. Most days the nap lasts a maddening 34 minutes.
In the garden, I stare at my laptop, willing my mind into action, desperate to not squander my precious two hours. And then I think of her, that mother seal I watched nursing her pup a few days earlier.
While my husband snuck in a few hours of work, I gathered my energy and courage, as well as the diapers and snacks and sunscreen. It’s always easier to stay home with the kids, but I want to nurture their curiosity, so we were off to see the seals in La Jolla—blowouts and tantrums be damned.
Maneuvering the stroller down the ramps to the viewing platform, I congratulated myself on finding a place with both shade where my daughter could watch the seals and a bench where I could nurse my son. When he finished, gazing up at me with a satisfied grin and milk dribbling down his chin, we joined his sister at the wall. A baby seal scooched across the sand to give its mama’s belly a forceful nudge. The pup prodded again and she rolled over, exposing herself, giving up her body, her time. It latched on, began sucking with all its might, its sleek little body pulling on hers. Draining her.
I wondered: Did that mama seal have anything else she wanted to be doing? Do animals just fall naturally into the role of motherhood, the biological duty of their bodies? Are humans the only ones who wrestle with our competing selves? Like trying to be a writer and a mother at the same time—or anything and a mother at the same time?
And then I wondered: Are these normal thoughts to have while watching seals on vacation with your children? Am I okay?
At my son’s 6-month pediatrician appointment, the nurse handed me the routine postpartum depression screening and proclaimed, “This is your last one!” As in: You’re out of the woods! I filled it out the same as always. Am I enjoying life as much as ever? Of course. No trouble sleeping? Sure, when I get the chance. No anxious thoughts? No inexplicable crying?
Now, just a few weeks later, those answers no longer feel true. Maybe they weren’t true then either, but I just didn’t want to see it. Postpartum motherhood is a profoundly tender time. It is also not for the faint of heart, with its potent cocktail of sleep deprivation, physical healing, and anxiety over keeping a small human alive, not to mention the loss of personal time and shifts in identity. Add a pandemic, and it’s a miracle any of us are still standing.
After the seals, I had a night of insomnia, awake for all but two hours and not because of my baby—just me and my endlessly swirling anxious thoughts. Then I had a day of uncontrolled weeping, and when my daughter asked me to play tag with her in a sun-soaked lawn at Balboa Park, I didn’t want to. I chased her, but the place in my soul that should want to play was empty. And that made me cry some more.
I’m spiraling, I texted my group of mother-writer-friends that evening. I’m on vacation and I should be happy but I’m not. They responded immediately with solidarity, one of them with this gem of truth: There’s no cure for motherhood. This is hard, she meant, and I’m in it with you. And she’s right of course. There is no cure for the heart-stopping, life-altering, all-consuming love of motherhood. I guess I don’t actually want there to be.
I’m tempted to interject here, to make sure you don’t think I’m a bad mother. Convince you of how much I love my children. But why? Does that mama seal ever think she’s a bad mother? Ever worry what the other seals think of her? I doubt it. She might’ve been a little annoyed to interrupt her sun-bathing to nurse, but I bet she never felt guilty about it.
There’s Instagram Motherhood (where you always look like a good mother) and then there’s Real Motherhood. What I’m saying is sometimes you can be in sunny, shimmering Southern California watching the seals with your beloved kids and the clouds will still descend. Nobody else will see them, but they’ll eclipse your joy. Dim your heart. Obscure you from yourself.
And then a few days later, you’ll watch the sunset with your baby in your arms and your husband by your side, while your daughter writes her name with a stick in the sand, and you’ll realize that the clouds, inexplicably, have lifted. They might come back, they probably will, but all of it is motherhood. There is no cure, but there are plenty of sunny days.
Guest essay written by Kaitlin Barker Davis. Kaitlin is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Her essays on travel and motherhood have appeared in Nowhere Magazine, Narratively, The Rumpus, CNF Sunday Short Reads, The Best Women’s Travel Writing (Vol. 12) and elsewhere. Subscribe to her infrequent newsletter Field Notes and find her on Instagram or online.