The Mariana Trench of Missing Motherhood
OP Mother's Day 2022
This one comes with back story in the inbox, so if you’re in the app, saunter over there. And also - if you’re new here, or having a gleeful relationship with motherhood and mother’s day (or trying to), this one isn’t for you. No shade, just go enjoy.
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Light has never been here, in the deepest part of the Pacific.
The closest to the core of the earth any surface dweller can go is named the Mariana Trench, which feels rather Biblical.
Maternal.
And apt.
Maternity is often marine-like in my mind. Aquatic. It’s bathed in water, birthed in water, healed through water.
Drowned, by water.
My mother is a swimmer. Even in her seventies, she still swims a mile, back and forth in a lap pool, three times a week. She wears goggles now — giant, snorkel-like goggles that must make the physics of movement more challenging — it’s clear her objective is not to break speed records, although she makes the mile in under an hour through a variety of strokes. Ten laps crawl, ten breast, ten left side, ten right side, chicken-airplane-soldier, repeat. Meditation, by any other name. Her gaze is unobstructed, clear down below, watching.
Waiting.
She shares the story of bringing me into the water early and often, reminding infant me to hold my breath, to float, to swim. Infants in the first four months of life naturally hold their breath when dunked in water. It’s a skill you can lose and need to re-learn, but I never did, thanks to my mother. She taught me to roll and surface, float on my back before I could crawl. Rescue myself. Keep myself from drowning.
In later years I became a lifeguard, as was my mother in her youth. Trained not only to self-rescue, but how to retrieve someone else from the depths.
I have no memory before a time that I knew water, and as I grew into an independent (and often obstinate) child I went to the deep end. Diving, diving, diving. Finding the texture of the floor of the deep end with my toes — my fingers — sitting in my own version of mediation and watching the world move above me. My experience of the pool more vertical than the laps she would wander for the same hour. Occasionally we would meet in her touch-turn as I surfaced, gasping, she would smile and push off, retracing her tail back and forth.
This was the dance of our version of motherhood, hers and mine.
Down.
Across.
An aquatic crossword, linked by an occasional letter.
I’m 41 this year and am coming to grips, slowly, screaming, with fists full of my own regret, thirteen years after I first started trying to be my own version of mother.
I have experienced insanity in this abyss.
Touched the bottom of the ocean.
For years the psychosis came each minute, then each hour, and then each week. It isn’t constant for me in this moment, the ache of missing motherhood, but it is pervasive. Repetitive. Unyielding and unchanging, set off by the most innocuous of smells or memories, or flippant shares and eavesdrops.
Names.
For years, I lived in the Mariana Trench of missing motherhood. The deepest depth of any emotional ocean. The cavern carved by Mary’s scream at the execution of her child is a familiar pain to many of us. Those who have lost, who have never found, whose bodies do not contain the capacity to gestate for any number of reasons. Those whose own mothers went missing in body, mind, or spirit.
Motherhood is hard. Missing motherhood is different. It is the floor that beckons.
We are there, together.
I suppose my own mother trained me for this.
Hold your breath. Surface. Roll. Breathe.
I swim across now, on many days. The meditative watchful waiting for someone in the depths to come closer.
If you are there, now, this is for you.
The light exists.
So does the darkness.
Both are true.
