Complicated Mothers Day

If you're grieving, raging, or simply feeling unseen, come sit with us.

Hi, Aunties. You may have noticed I’ve backed off to a once a week cadence for the past few weeks. Between losing a dear friend, having overcommitted to a few projects, and some chronic illness flare-ups, my capacity has been low this spring. Wise friends advised me to let myself off the hook and scale back a little, and I’ve taken their advice. The Auntie Bulletin slowdown is temporary. Thank you so much for your understanding.

This week and next, I am talking with the wise and lovely Ryan Rose Weaver about what makes Mothers Day complicated for so many of us. Ryan has been thinking about “Complicated Mothers Day” for years, both for herself — she is a mom to one kid and a survivor of endometriosis, infertility, and heartbreaking perinatal loss — and in support of others — she also hosts a monthly support group for perinatal loss survivors.

This week, Ryan interviewed me for her newsletter, In Tending — I share the interview below, and it’s wide-ranging but comes around to Complicated Mothers Day toward the end. Then, next week, I’ll be hosting Ryan in turn on Substack Live. We will explore our own and others’ stories about what makes Mothers Day complicated, as well as how we can show up and support one another regardless of our relationship with motherhood and mothers. You can join us live on the Substack app at 11am Pacific (find your timezone) on Tuesday 5/6, or wait and receive the video and transcript in your inbox on Friday.¹

A Conversation with Ryan Rose Weaver

Ryan: Where did you grow up? What else grows there? What was it like for you to grow there?

Lisa: I grew up in a small beach town on the Salish Sea (otherwise known as Puget Sound), in the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States. At low tide, the vast tide flats are patched with colonies of sand dollars and flattened forests of eel grass. The landscape of the Salish Sea tideflats is the landscape of my soul. I am totally at home there.

Low tide on the Salish Sea

Despite the idyllic landscape, I struggled socially as a kid. I always felt at home with my parents and my five siblings and our extended family, but at school I was bullied and excluded. While I still have to work through that trauma with my therapist from time to time, I’m also weirdly grateful for my social struggles as a kid, because I learned early and the hard way to make wise choices about who you befriend. By high school, I started to figure things out, and I’m still close to many of my high school friends 30 years later.

What is your earliest memory of tending another being?

I was only two when I became a big sister, but I remember being so excited. I adored my little brother, and lovingly called him “Boo Boo.” I have a memory of pushing him in the stroller on the day our dad brought him home, but I think that’s probably a manufactured memory based on a photograph. I remember comforting him whenever we’d have a babysitter – singing and hugging him and assuring him that our parents would be back soon.

Boo Boo (left) and Lisa (right)

What or whom have you most loved tending since?

When I was a kid, I babysat my three younger siblings, their friends, and lots of kids around town. I wriggled out of attending Sunday School by volunteering in the church nursery as often as possible. In high school, I logged many hours nannying for the family across the street, and my older brother had his first of four children. I became a godmother in my mid-20s, and have always taken that role very seriously. In my late 20s, I was a live-in caretaker for my wonderful Grandma Jean, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve also cared for other elders in my family, as well as many beloved kids. Professionally, I’ve been a teacher in one form or another for over twenty years, and in the public sphere, I’ve been involved in community organizing for almost that long. I couldn’t say which of these care roles I have loved most – all have been essential in their season.

You and I now both write newsletters that focus on the importance of care and caregivers. As noted above, The Auntie Bulletin focuses on “Aunties” or alloparents – people who play an essential role in the care of people to whom they’re not biologically related.

Can you tell us more about how you came to be fascinated by this topic?

I’ve often had care roles in my life, but it wasn’t until I started living in co-housing and spending several hours a week with the kids in our community that I started wrestling with what my role meant. I had recently lost multiple pregnancies. When we finally let go of having kids, there was a lot of loss and grief, but it also eventually freed up space to recognize and lean into the abundant networks of care we already had. Once I knew I wasn’t going to be a mom, I was able to start thinking more deeply about what it means to be an Auntie.

The idea for The Auntie Bulletin started as a little whisper in the mind – “What if I write a newsletter about loving other people’s children?” – and almost immediately became something I had to do. When you’re out and about in the world with other people’s children – especially if they’re not technically family – you are illegible to others. People think you must be the kids’ parent, or their aunt, or their nanny; other options don’t occur to them. In the case of male Aunties – whom I suppose we can call uncles if we must – the illegibility they experience is compounded by others’ deep suspicions about what they’re even up to.

A beautiful side-effect of writing The Auntie Bulletin is that my role has become so much more legible to myself. I had not recognized how isolated I was, and then I started this newsletter, and then suddenly I was meeting all these other Aunties who had experiences like mine! And different from mine! Amazing!

This project has led to repeated perspective shifts. I realized that Aunties like me actually have a ton in common with other alloparents, including grandparents and other extended family, step-parents, foster parents, godparents, educators, and childcare providers. Then I realized that alloparents being able to talk amongst ourselves is really important, but also that we need spaces for parents and alloparents to connect and position ourselves as members of the same team. And then I realized that the conversation about care and kinship shouldn’t just be about children but also about building loving relationships with our elders and people of all generations.

The thing keeps unfolding and expanding, and there keep being more vistas to explore.

The cutie on my shoulder is now almost done with grad school.

How do you tend to your physical body, and your interior life, so that you can sustain your various care commitments?

I am a full-on introvert, easily overstimulated by light, sound, people, and anything unexpected. If I don’t come home to myself and reset often, I quickly lose my ability to show up and care for others. I’m an avid lifelong fiction reader, and function best when I can curl up and read for at least a few hours every day. As my symptoms of chronic illness have gotten worse over the past few years, I’ve also found a wonderful community of chronically ill, disabled, fat, and elderly acquaintances at the pool, and regular but time-limited interactions with my water aerobics buddies are great for my mental health.

Finally, practicing meditation for many years has made the act of coming home to my body and breath a genuine refuge. Many people struggle to make meditation into a daily practice, but for me – at long last – the key was to let go of trying to do it right. Once I had super low standards for my meditation practice, it became easy-peasy. As dharma teacher Jack Kornfield has said, “You put your ass on the cushion and you take what you get.” But I don’t even put my ass on the cushion, usually – I meditate in bed.

Yes! Normalize lying-down meditation. I wish more people would.

Speaking of hanging around with like-minded people — whose work do you read when you need community-tending inspiration?

There are so many amazing people writing about care today. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Atul Gawande, and adrienne maree brown are major inspirations. I loved, loved, loved Angela Garbes’s books Like a Mother and Essential Labor. And there’s a very deep bench of wise folks writing about care work here on Substack. My must-reads include Rosie Spinks, Elissa Strauss, Anya Kamenetz, Elise Granata, Courtney Martin, Rebecca Gale, Katherine Goldstein, Kerala Taylor, Amrita Vijay and Andrew Stephens , Elena Bridgers, Shane Meyer-Holt, Kevin Maguire, Victoria of Carer Mentor: Empathy & Inspiration (which is a truly amazing and comprehensive resource for caretakers of adults), and of course your friend and mine, the excellent Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers)!

Aww, shucks! That is a deep bench indeed. I’m honored to be on it.

This feels like a good time to transition to talking about Mother’s Day. I’m wondering if you had caregivers in your own childhood who influence the way you think about care now. How do you honor, or choose not to honor, that inheritance on Mother’s Day?

I was fortunate to be raised by multiple wise, compassionate, loving, wonderful women. My mom, both of my grandmothers, and some of my aunts were educators, and they modeled for me from the beginning how to really turn toward children, love them, and pay attention to their ideas and questions about the world.

The family I was raised in is not very oriented toward rituals and celebrations. Over the past several years, my mom and I have agreed not to give gifts to each other at all, for any holiday, and it’s an enormous relief to both of us. We prefer a call or meal together – the gift of quality time and attention.

You and I have both had experiences with loss and/or infertility, as have many members of our respective newsletter communities. It feels good to be in a healing space around that, and I think those experiences make you forever aware of how shitty Mother’s Day can feel when you’d like to be a biological parent and yet you are not. What has your mileage been like here?

Losing multiple pregnancies in rapid succession was one of the hardest seasons of my life. Right on the heels of that, my partner and I had to decide whether to pursue IVF, whether to try to adopt, or neither. So I had some hard Mothers Days there for a few years, although really it was the everyday celebrations of motherhood that were hardest for me. I remember being at a women’s gathering while I was pregnant for the second or third time in a row, not ready to tell anyone, and terrified of losing the baby (which I subsequently did). There was another pregnant woman there, several months further along than me, and everyone was talking and laughing excitedly about her coming baby. I longed to be able to say, “I’m having a baby too!” and join that sisterhood of mothers. Instead I had to sit there vibrating with anxiety and pretending to be glad.

Stuff like this happens all the time to people who are involuntarily childless – Mothers Day is just extra brutal. Something like a quarter of Auntie Bulletin readers report being unable to have children despite longing to do so, and I have heard from many who struggle with a deep ongoing sense of grief and loss.

I’m very, very fortunate that I was able to come to a place of true steadiness as a non-parent. My partner realized before I did that parenthood was not the path for us, and I was grateful one of us had finally found clarity. Over the past few years, as I’ve experienced significant worsening of symptoms of chronic illness, I’ve found that, for me, Auntiehood is a wonderful middle path between parenting and childlessness.

Mother’s Day can also bring up a lot for people who are child-free even if it is by choice. Are there any particular pain points for folks in your community around this day that their parent friends need to be more aware of and thoughtful about?

Oof, there are so many pain points around Mothers Day in the Auntie and alloparent community. In my recent survey, readers had such important answers, which were pretty wrenching to read. For example:

• Several people reported not being able to have kids of their own and how hard Mothers Day is for them.

• Some wrote about feelings of non-belonging, and there was a big range of reactions to what one called the “honorary mention” – that is, appreciations for non-mothers on Mothers Day that may or may not feel genuine and heartfelt.

• Many wrote about the ways Aunties are so often made invisible or marginalized, never getting our own day.

• My heart really goes out to the stepmoms who shared about never being “mom enough” to fully count on Mothers Day.

Mothers Day isn’t only complicated for people without children, though; it’s also complicated for many parents. A lot of this has to do with people’s grief over their relationships with their own mothers. Several people who responded to The Auntie Bulletin survey talked about:

• Having difficult relationships with their own mothers, and wanting to spend the day with chosen mothers who are more affirming to them instead, and feeling torn about that.

• Having to choose between different mothers and mother figures in other ways (i.e. one person with two moms who divorced when they were little, and who has spent their whole life since being pulled between competing mothers on Mothers Day).

• Being queer and wanting to be affirmed in their identities by their mothers

• Being transgender navigating Mothers Day during and after a gender transition.

• Grieving over having lost their mom. (One person, adopted as a baby, also talked about the grief of never having met their biological mother in the first place.)

I’m looking forward to talking with you about this more on Substack Live next week, Ryan. And to all the Aunties and all the people who love us, I’m grateful we are not alone.

Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin

The #1 Best Way to Decide If You Want to Have Kids

Who Will Care for You in Your Old Age, If Not Your Kids?

NEW Collective Wisdom Survey: Auntie Impostorship

Each month, I survey the Aunties about an issue of interest to our community. Thank you so much to those who responded to the Complicated Mothers Day survey. The stories you shared are so important, and I’m looking forward to exploring many of them with Ryan Rose Weaver next week (while being careful to protect survey respondents’ privacy). I know Ryan will bring a loving, understanding, and supportive perspective to this conversation.

Now, our survey for May is about Auntie impostorship: the ways we feel like we don’t quite belong or aren’t fully legitimate members of a family, kinship circle, or community that we love. Sometimes this happens because others make us feel this way: a parent or primary guardian may signal, subtly or otherwise, that there are experiences or emotions we can’t possibly understand or parts of their family’s life where we’re not welcome. Other times, the source of our impostorship is internal: we tell ourselves stories about not quite belonging in the lives of the families we love.

Am I speaking from personal experience? Of course I am.

I’m curious: How, if at all, has Auntie impostorship shown up for you? When and where have you felt like you don’t quite belong as an Auntie or other adult in the life of kids who aren’t your own? Have others signaled your outsiderness to you? Is it a story you tell yourself? How do you navigate these experiences? And if you’ve been relatively unaffected by feelings of Auntie impostorship, what’s your secret? What have you or others done to ensure you always know you are welcome and belong, even in families that aren’t technically your own?

The Auntie Impostorship survey consists of four open-ended questions. Feel free to answer as many or as few as you like, to think outside the box, and to answer the questions you wish I’d asked rather than the ones I actually did.

I’ll be collecting your ideas for the month of May. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.

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1. I’m the kind of person who prefers to read rather than watch or listen, so you can always expect a transcript along with any Substack Live video that I create for The Auntie Bulletin.