I'm glad to be motherless

Building love and relationships without a maternal blueprint

The year Joe and I got pregnant, my psychic told me, "You need to release your need to be mothered" with a mother's authority. Maybe mine was speaking through her.

The only trauma my mom left me with was that of not having her. She died when I was seven, leaving behind an ornate silver powder dish, green eyeliner, and a floral greeting card expressing her love.

As a child, I wished she'd given me a three-ring binder with instructions on womanhood, love, and life. Does the eyeliner go on both eyelids or just the one? Which one? It was the 90s. But I’ve found that the information we need exists inside us already. We all know how to be who we are.

Now, at 33 – the age she never reached – I've decided I like being motherless. The self-taught are considered amateurs, which is apt – I love my life. So I must love my lot in it.

But I still wondered what the psychic meant. How could someone who didn't know mothering need to stop wanting it?

Growing up motherless, I missed feminine wisdom like "boar hairbrushes give you shine." But I also missed hearing, "All that activity will be good for your figure," and seeing the silent admonishments reflected in mirrors. I didn’t inherit insecurity.

I noticed early that my confidence, compared to conventional beauty standards, exceeded that of my friends. They'd believe a guy wasn't responding because they weren't attractive enough. I'd assume he was anxiously wondering how to charm me. I sometimes wondered if I was deluded. But I decided it wasn't me who had been brainwashed. The information we don't need gets in the way of being who we are.

Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez (1647-51)

Mothers are mirrors. They notice, and help. They recognize our feelings and guide us back to ourselves. But no mirror is perfect. Some mothers give their children too much of their own self-image in reflection. They show us ourselves through the lens of their own insecurities and expectations.

(​​Which is completely understandable. Looking upon another, especially when life starts spinning, can make you lose your balance. That dizziness feels worthwhile because the whole time you get to look at their little face. But if you don’t look away now and then, to ground yourself again, the walls can feel like they’re falling.)

I didn't have that mirror. I had love, beyond enough, from my dad and family. But my womanhood, and my view on romantic relationships, were constructed without reference points beyond observation and experiment.

Feminine idealism still found me, of course. But I missed the private moments. I tried to find them through my mom's artifacts. Dressing tables became symbols of a routine I never witnessed. And I was convinced that perfume was an obligation to children's memories.

But how couples in love maintain that love? I knew nothing.

I knew the stories of how my parents met. That community center party my dad crashed. She walked through a door, red curls in a halo around her head. They honeymooned at Lake Louise. They smile in holiday photos. All I have is the outline of a marriage's origin, not the day-to-day.

Whether that helped or slowed me on my jagged path to marriage and parenthood, I can't say. I knew love well enough never to question the feeling when I had it. The details of maintenance, though unknown, might've been easier to discover without someone else's reflection in the way.

While pregnant with my first, the same year as that psychic call, I felt that familiar absence of knowing. I wanted to mother right. I kept looking for guidance, a reflection to mimic. I spent hours selecting a signature scent — a search for maternal identity. But looking outside ourselves only obscures what's already there, waiting to be recognized.

Curiously, my life parallels hers without her blueprint. Like her, I'm a mother of two children. I studied her same field without knowing that aspect of her life. Would I have arrived at the same destination with her guidance, with fewer detours? Or would her presence — her particular mirror — have made me someone different entirely?

It wasn’t till I became a mother myself that I understood what the psychic meant about mothering. I'd been looking for that comfort of being seen when I felt lost. My mom needed to tell me one last time – through another woman – that all I needed was already within me. I couldn’t find myself in another reflection. Nor the right scent. Nor the correct application of eyeliner.

When you accept you don’t need answers from anyone, you’re left needing to accept yourself. It was never the mothers who stood in the way of us being our best selves but our own reluctance to love, trust, and care for ourselves.

I don’t look for mothering now. Well, usually. But having a mirror is comforting… if only to remind you you're really here. Alive. Free to love and be loved. I think Happy Endings is that for me, and maybe you too? It’s the binder I wished for, open for anyone needing intermittent reflection.

Thank you for reading. Love your loves today.