Here’s my most recent column published by the Arizona Daily Star: https://tucson.com/opinion/local/local-opinion-mothers-day/article_8dde37d6-bb59-11ec-a71a-af9ecd0a4e0d.html
It took me a while to realize how much I love my mother. Probably not unlike many, our relationship had complications. But once I became a mother myself, I better understood her motivations and limitations. I realized why she regularly coated my face with sunscreen, and why my hair always lacked the adornment sported by my peers.
We live in a society where mommy issues abound, and we blame mothers for just about everything. Even in the example above, why wasn’t my dad tasked with the burden of taming my hair? Why did I use my plain hair as an example of Mom’s limitation and not Dad’s? I know mommy issues are real, and my own kids will probably spend thousands in therapy dealing with the unintended consequences of my parenting, but let’s be honest: Mothers don’t have it easy.
I once had an idea for an algorithm that would calculate how much a person made in a year doing the labor we take for granted: cooking, cleaning, laundry, child care, shopping — perhaps in addition to the full- or part-time work that actually pays.
I lost my first column writing gig after I became a mother. It was a biweekly column that I wrote for three years for an online publication, but once I had a kid, and altered my bio accordingly, I felt my editor growing distant. He stopped corresponding with me when he would regularly reach out to praise my voice. He was ecstatic to help my publishing career, and he made a point of telling me so.
I guess it’s true what they say: Having a kid changes everything.
Publishing, as many other industries, is hostile to mothers. I know some industries see us as a liability since having kids is so expensive (and once you have one, they just keep on coming). But I think the hostility goes much deeper than that, in some unchecked corner of our psyches that is well worth examining.
One of my colleagues, Sallie Koenig, is investigating the ways that higher education is also hostile to mothers. You might think colleges and universities, as democratic bastions of society, set a different standard, but according to her research, that’s not the case.
“One of the participants in my study told me, ‘When I got pregnant, the department head sent out an email saying he hopes it isn’t catching.’”
Yeesh.
As part of my doctoral work, I am translating the Egyptian poet Gamilla El-Alaily’s work. You may know her from the Google Doodle back in 2019 in honor of her 112th birthday. The poems I translated are all about her mother. I had been playing with the idea of entering translation awards, but hadn’t thought the translations were good enough to warrant paying the reading fees, thinking, “Who sees merit in a bunch of poems praising her mother?”
Then I realized I was buying into the same anti-mother sentiment I had been victim of, and that I probably victimized my own mother with (I’m sorry, Mom). My Egyptian-born husband thinks the poems are beautiful, and he doesn’t get why I don’t share his enthusiasm.
One thing I love about Egyptian culture — and this is speculation, but born out of good reason — is that mothers are revered by default. Mothers don’t have to juggle a career and managing the household to get respect. They aren’t ever under pressure to diet to be thin or inject their face with toxins to be young. They are regarded as beautiful because they escorted life into this world, and their job would never be described as thankless.
So let’s celebrate Mother’s Day with one of El-Alaily’s couplets:
“Peace be upon you, mother, peace with every holiday,
Peace with every sunrise, peace with every sweet song.”
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers, past, present, and future. It’s worth it.