I'd Like Some Magic, Too

My less than perfect first Mother's Day and the reason I said something about it

At the end of my first Mother’s Day, I found myself sitting on the couch in our bedroom, having just gotten the baby down to sleep. I was exhausted - our house was still in the middle of recovering from a nasty cold that had been working its way through everyone, and a full day of activity had more than taken it all out of me. My husband was lying on the bed about to open up his book, when he caught sight of me and immediately noticed that something was bothering me. I told him I was just tired, hopped in the shower, and started thinking about how to articulate what it was that was really on my mind. Because he was right, something was bothering me. It was the end of my first Mother’s Day, a day meant to celebrate me and the immense task I’ve been given in the role of motherhood, and instead of feeling celebrated I just felt kind of let down. And I was really determined to figure out why.

My Mother’s Day was, truly, very lovely. Our seven-month old had a great night’s sleep and was up around 6:45 am, which is my favorite time for him to wake up. I fed him, we got him dressed, and we loaded up the stroller to walk to the neighborhood donut shop to get coffee and donuts. This donut shop is a fun little piece of our parenting story - the morning I went into labor, my husband went there to grab a coffee because I told him that I was likely too nauseous to deal with the smell of brewing coffee at home. When he got there, he excitedly told them that his wife was in labor, and they gave him a free donut in addition to his coffee. That donut ended up coming with us to the hospital and providing him with a midnight (or 3am? I don’t remember) snack after a long and arduous delivery process. When we came back home after our son was born, he went back there a few days later and told them we’d had the baby. They sent him back with more free donuts, a little gift to our new family. Starting our Mother’s Day there just felt right.

After the baby went down for his first nap, my husband went to church and my parents made their way to our house so we could get the cars packed up and drive to a local farm that was having a plant sale. My husband and I are starting a few little vegetable garden raised beds this year, and we were excited to pick out our assortment. My mom also loves doing gardening and outdoor related things for Mother’s Day, so it was a win for everyone. It was still early in the day, but I already noticed a prickling sense of disappointment. Yes, we had gone to the donut shop, but at my suggestion. The day had started with my husband wishing me a happy Mother’s Day and then immediately saying he was going to go downstairs to have some cereal, and I had to be the one to propose we do something a little nicer. His going to church and my staying home with the baby had always been the plan, but it felt entirely like any other day. Which, to be fair, it was. Planning things with a baby is tough. I thought that maybe a productive nap would make me feel a little better, but the baby woke himself up with the lingering cough from his cold barely 25 minutes in and wouldn’t go back down. I’d barely even settled on the couch with my book before I was back in mom mode.

By 10:30 am I already felt burnt out. The short nap meant the baby was cranky, and by the time we were ready to get in the car for the 20 minute drive to the farm he seemed like he was ready to go back to sleep. My husband asked me how I wanted to handle it, but as I was answering his question revealed that he had already plopped the baby in his sleep sack and started the sound machine, so the question was a little hyperbolic. Another prickle. I thought this was supposed to be the one day where I didn’t have to run the show. I knew what I wanted - I wanted my husband to bring the baby downstairs, dressed in his cute little jacket with the unnecessary pockets. I wanted him to grab the diaper bag (that he would have already inspected to make sure we had everything we needed) and put him in the car seat and say “let’s just go, and we’ll figure it out! If he gets tired, we’ll abandon ship, but maybe he’ll be fine”. I wanted him to say “this is what you want to do today, so we’re going to make it work”. And then I wanted him to drive us to the farm, to bring us to a cute coffee shop to pick up lunch to bring home, to go home and discover that he had planned a sweet little gift or surprise for me, or for him to say “go take a bath, you earned it”. Instead, we picked up the plants (which was really fun and satisfying), piled back into the car (the baby fell asleep almost instantly on the drive home, so all napping drama was avoided) and exhaustedly debated whether we should stop at the Taco Bell drive through or just reheat some leftovers when we got home.

This is where I pause my own story to relay a very important element of all of this, and that is the fact that no one was more surprised by my own disappointment than myself. I’ve talked a big game in the leadup to parenthood, and in the ensuing experience, about the fact that not only do I not really care about gendered parenting roles but I actively seek to avoid them. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to do for my first Mother’s Day I, quite genuinely, answered that I didn’t really have any designs on the day. I truly hadn’t thought about what I wanted, and pretty much assumed that I would be fine with it being a relatively low-key day, because why would I want everyone to fuss over me just because I’m a mom? For someone who writes almost entirely about motherhood, I really do believe that in a two-parent household both parents play essential roles and are equally deserving of praise and celebration, so why did I suddenly find myself feeling like I was being slighted by not having a day that was all about me?

This is what I was thinking about in the shower at the end of the day (the rest of which was made up of planting our new vegetables, my husband running an errand and coming back with a bottle of Fernet and a 12-pack of Miller High Life for me, a family FaceTime with my sister, and a lovely dinner made by my parents that we all enjoyed together at my home) and I came up with two reasons.

The first was that while I do believe that both my husband and I play essential and praise-deserving roles in my son’s life, my first seven months of motherhood have revealed something to me that goes a little bit counter to what I wanted to think and that is the fact that there just are parts of this whole experience that are harder on me. I’m exclusively breastfeeding, and this is the caloric equivalent of running a 5k every single day. My brain has rewired itself to be oversensitive to my son’s needs, so when he wriggles around at 2am or spits his pacifier on the ground and whines about it I am instantly awake while my husband snores away. Our household income differences mean that, as is often the case in heterosexual partnerships, the finances made sense for me to take a step back from full-time work rather than put our son in daycare, so I am home with the baby four full days a week as opposed to my husband who is only home full days with him on the weekend. This means I know more. I know which of his clothing items go in the dryer and which ones get hung on the line. I know where the blankets for the stroller are, and the right cycles for each stage of washing his cloth diapers, and how to mix his rice cereal, and when he is ready for a nap versus when he just needs to go outside and look at the garden. When we talk about the mental load of motherhood, this is exactly what we are talking about. And when I was thinking about what I wanted on Mother’s Day, it wasn’t really about the opportunity for praise and gifts, it was about the promise of a day of relief from that mental load. Being a mom is amazing, but it is exhausting, and I realized I had been looking forward to a day where someone said “I get how exhausting this is, and I see that you take on more, and I’m going to run the show today so you can get a little break”.

The second reason for my disappointment was that in that one day, I started to clearly see the next decade of my life. Maybe this was a little dramatic, but I started to imagine Christmas mornings with nothing in my stocking because no one thought to get anything for me while I was getting things for everyone else. I could picture Father’s Days that were meticulously planned that felt even more crushing in comparison to Mother’s Days that consisted of a Hallmark card and nothing more. I thought about the hard work of putting together a child’s Halloween costume, of designing Easter baskets, of planning birthday parties and coordinating family vacations and all of the fun and memories that make up a magical childhood. And I started to see a version of that childhood for my kid where the magic was all me. And if I was the one making all of the magic, how would I get any magic for myself?

When I got out of the shower, I told all of this to my husband. And I’ll be honest, it didn’t feel great to bring it up. I felt self-conscious and ungrateful. What was I really complaining about? I spent a lovely day with my amazing son, my husband (who, for the record, does a TON to support me in motherhood and make sure I have breaks even during the week when he is working), and my parents. I received so many sweet text messages wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day and telling me what an amazing mom I was. I definitely had been celebrated, so admitting that I didn’t feel celebrated enough felt gross. But you know what happened as we started having the conversation? My husband agreed. I told him that I loved the Fernet and the High Life but that it didn’t really feel like he had planned anything, and he admitted that his “plan” had been to grab some things while he was out, and that he could see how that didn’t really feel special. He validated my discomfort, told me not to apologize for feeling let down, and it turned into much more of a conversation than a confrontation. I told him I was surprised I felt this way, but that I guess it turns out I actually am one of those moms who wants her partner to plan something sweet. We talked about the fact that I hope that our son will grow up to be the type of person who still calls me and maybe even takes me out to dinner on Mother’s Day even when he’s older and out of the house, and how so much of that depends on what he sees when he’s growing up. If he grows up in a house where his dad takes him to CVS and helps him pick out a card and some grocery store flowers and that’s it, that is the way he is going to handle things. But if he grows up in a house where his dad tells him how amazing his mom is, and how hard she works, where together they craft a day of appreciation and showing their love, that becomes his view of things instead.

Creating childhood magic can be done by just one parent. I could give my son all of the magic in the world without my husband ever even lifting a finger. But I don’t just want the magic for him. I want it for all of us. I want my son to feel the biggest and brightest joy on Christmas morning, and on his birthday, and on every day that we do anything even remotely special for him, which I hope is as many days as possible. I also want him to see his parents experience that kind of joy. We aren’t just the creators of his world, we are also his first glimpse into what love and care and happiness look like, and I want him to always remember us as doing the most when it came to those things, and when it came to each other.

I also feel like I cannot overstate the importance of having conversations when things feel off. I absolutely could have just shrugged the day off and pushed it aside as me being overwhelmed, overstimulated, and burnt out. But these things build, and if I didn’t say something this year, who is to say that it wouldn’t just come back with a vengeance next year? I’ve seen far too many stories on the internet from moms who become bitter and passive aggressive over too many cumulative years of their partners asking them to plan their own Mother’s Day, or feeling like they never get what they really want. You know how you get what you really want? You ask for it. My husband is not a mind reader. He did a few nice things, equal in effort to what I was probably projecting that I wanted, and if I had never said anything he would have continued to do a few nice things for years and I would have let that little fizzle of resentment and confusion at my own feelings of being underwhelmed build and build until I felt unseen and undervalued. Instead, this year, on my first Mother’s Day, I learned that I actually do want to treat this day like a big deal. I want people to celebrate me and all of the hard work that I put in to raising my son. Specifically, I want this from my partner, and I want him to set this example for our child. And it’s not really about the gifts or the praise. It’s about feeling seen. It’s about feeling like the effort that is put in on a day like this is equal to the effort that I am putting in every single day as a mom. When I can feel seen and valued and cherished as a mom, that’s where the magic gets to happen for me as well. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.