I love moms. Moms are great. Moms raise the next generation of shorties, and generally the next generation turns out to be relatively tolerable people.
BUT
the time around Mother's Day (when people are in between patting each other on the back for their ability to procreate) has a higher than average inane comment ratio. "It's not too late for you to have children." "You'd make a great mom." "Oh, you're
thirty. Well, you still have a couple years."
A bit in the same blood as Sandra Cisneros poem...
*************************
Old Maids
My cousins and I,
we don't marry.
We're too old
by Mexican standards.
And the relatives
have long suspected
we can't anymore
in white.
My cousins and I,
we're all old
maids at thirty.
Who won't dress children,
and never saints--
though we undress them.
The aunts,
they've given up on us.
No longer nudge--You're next.
Instead--
What happened in your childhood?
What left you all mean teens?
Who hurt you, honey?
But we've studied
marriages too long--
Aunt Ariadne,
Tia Vashti,
Comadre Penelope,
querida Malintzin,
Senora Pumpkin Shell--
lessons that served us well.
***********************
I get comments like that from time to time, mostly from patients. They mean well, but I wonder if they've ever read
Cunt, or
Bust, or any of these
delicious books.
No, it's not too late for me to have children. It's also (never) too late to get my master's degree, or visit Korea. Yeah, I would make a great mom. But I'm a really fucking excellent nurse and a pretty decent friend.
Life is about
choices. Well, life is about a lot of things, but choices and respecting the choice of others is HUGELY important in the Hybrid Hopes Philosophy of Life. While that includes me making my own choices about motherhood, abortion, and what kind of lettuce I'm going to plant in my front yard, that also includes me respecting the rights of others to HAVE kids.
I got to hear
Rickie Solinger speak last year about this topic. She's written a whole book on it (that I have yet to read),
Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States.
From that interview with
Mother's Movement Online and Rickie Solinger:
The sharp separation of mothers along race and class lines— a divide that determines which women are valorized for their motherhood and which ones are vilified for it— leads Solinger to pose a troubling question: “Do Americans want motherhood to be a class privilege? A life experience only available to middle class women?”
So that got a bit tangental.
I love the crap out of my mom. She didn't have the easiest time raising four hooligans and worked hard to turn us out into functional and decent adults. I think we all fit that bill.
Some years, figuring out what to get my mom for mother's day/birthdays/etc was easy. Here's a little broach that I chose carefully, it's got a rose and says MOM and looks nice and shiny. Here's a little candle in a bunny rabbit holder.
This year, my mom lives on a boat. She has like two square feet of living space and no room for a refrigerator to put our drawings on, no room for broaches that she really will never well, no room for art supplies or a year's worth of magazine subscriptions. Yet again, I turn to etsy. Even a Mom on a boat can take showers! Eureka! My mom likes to smell good!
Smell this! I picked up a passionfruit/papaya scented bath set for the moms. Not a bad scent combo for a lady who gave me a bunch of passionfruit seeds! I can't wait 'til she gets it! Thank you,
SugarLicious!
This is turning into my longest post so far. I'll blame Sandra Cisneros and her too old cousins.
I'm almost done, I swear.
I work with several nurses that are older than me and also childfree. It's nice. When I do get those crazy, invasive, well-meaning, presumptuous comments and they get on my nerves, they understand. I'm also not the only one in my crew that has had an extended courtship period.
To summarize:
yay moms! yay women! yay etsy! yay passionfruit vines! yay coworkers!
