(wrote this for Fitri Ya’akob, To Mother, exhibited for How to Desire Differently).
"Unexamined assumptions: First that a "natural" mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children, living at a pace tuned to theirs; that the isolation of mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted, that maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless; that children and mothers are the "causes" of each others' suffering. I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is 'unconditional' and by the visual and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cover to those images, weren't this parts then abnormal, monstrous? As —as my eldest son, now aged twenty-one, remarked on reading the above passages: You seem to feel you ought to love us all the time. But there is no human relationship where you love the other person at every moment." Yes I tried to explain to him, but woman—above all, mothers—have been suppose to love that way."
—Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
since the day you were conceived, i have been writing letters to you to mark these shifts in my life that were dissolving the parts of me that existed before there was you. now that you are turning four in a few months, I realised that those earlier ruminations that I wrote: of my excitement in finally giving birth to you, the preparations of being the becoming the best version of the mother and the struggles of the fourth trimester in which the ideal and what I could manage in actuality wrestled unforgivingly in the heaviness of postpartum mood swings and hormonal imbalances, that those were are all written for me. those earlier letters made you solely responsible for the disintegration of everything I have known about myself, the expectations I placed in becoming mother and the weight of the failure I was carrying in my body each time you were in some kind of false danger, when you fall sick, when you could not sleep and when you suddenly refused my breast and preferred the bottle, I could feel the weight being too heavy to bear.
no one told me becoming mother is more painful than childbirth itself. we read about the birth story as this amazing, life-changing miraculous event that is celebrating the woman's strength and the resilience of the woman's body, the sacrificial offering for humanity to exist in the world. but what comes after the birth story: when suddenly society is offering you an abundance of advice on becoming mother and you do not hear much of becoming father or becoming parent. i remember rubber time in the fourth trimester, you waking up with your klaxon screams. your father and I would scour through different sites on the search engine, going through a list of solution for every problem. Most of these sites suggest solutions on how I can be better and none of them actually told me that hey it's ok to fuck up today and not find solutions, that it was ok to fail.
if all these were not overwhelming enough, you had your first seizure the moment I was getting the hang of things, when you were only three months old. I remembered holding you in a bath, your eyes suddenly glitched and for a few seconds you turned blue. in those coming weeks, it kept happening again and again. you'd turn blue and we'd frantically held you flailing about not knowing what to do. I told your father you were time-travelling somewhere on a different plane just so I could feel some kind of ease from the lack of control.
suddenly all those little things, of you not wanting to fall asleep without us rocking you for hours each day or you screaming your lungs out from five to seven because of colic were very minute. all I wanted was for a day where you did not turn blue. inaya, there was always some kind of strange hope that your brain condition would not put you in any risk but each time you grew rigid in my arms and your body becomes a shell, I could feel the guilt of continuing on with the pregnancy and bringing you into this world. suddenly I did not care about becoming mother. what became more important for me was for you to survive and that was when everything shifted my child.
my love for you then was filled with conditions because in honestly it was given to serve my purpose of being this mother that society would approve. but since those seizures, getting you medicated, bearing witness to you reaching all the milestones that the doctors say you couldn't, have been the many major miracles and my love for you shifted beyond my understanding, beyond the conditional. I still feel the weight when a family member casually remarked "Eh how old, how come haven't walk yet?" or a complete stranger asking out of concern if there is something wrong with you. inaya, in these few years you have taught me that failure of becoming (the perfect) mother is all part of the process of navigating this world with you. when you fail and i fail, it is the society that is failing us with these expectations of meeting some normative measure. i learn to read you as a person separate from me and take your cues to whether you were ready or not. you taught me that it's empowering to exist outside of it and suddenly becoming mother is just replaced with the comfort of becoming myself with you and being ok to be myself without being connected solely to you once again.
you make me aware that there is no such thing as the perfect mother, the woman mother, the nurturing mother and the sacrificial mother. there is no such thing as the natural mother. becoming mother is not exclusive for the biological mother. i have seen your father in many many instances become mother. there are domestic helpers who are mothers, trans men who are mothers, single mothers with other mother-systems that are outside of the norm. thank you inaya for dismantling the conventional mother for me. I cannot imagine it any other way.
love you whenever, wherever and always,
