From All the Women Caught in a Flaring Light

From All the Women Caught in a Flaring Light

Imagine a big room of women doing anything,playing cards, having a meeting, the rattle

of paper or coffee cups or chairs pushed back,the loud and quiet murmur of their voices,

women leaning their heads together. If we leaned in at the door and I said, Those women

are mothers, you wouldn’t be surprised, except at me for pointing out the obvious fact.

Women are mothers, aren’t they? So obvious.

For My Daughter Who Is Not Mine

When all the women in my life are mothers, what else can I aspire to be? Aren’t motherhood and womanhood so intricately interwoven so as to run into one another, to become one another? What kind of woman are you if you can’t add to the discussions in the doctor office waiting rooms about nursing this child or that through this malady or that? What kind of woman are you if you can’t re-tell the story of labor and delivery, recounting the hours, the pain, the excess or lack of your child’s hairiness over a church picnic while eating cold fried chicken and coleslaw? What kind of woman are you if you can’t feel the contradiction between the satisfaction of a job well done and the sorrow at a loss for being necessary when your child moves away from home? What else could I be but a mother? So, I am a mother, and yet am also not one, because I can tell these stories about my child with only partial knowledge. I am a non-biological mother of a child with two mothers, making my position ambiguous when I share my parenting stories publicly; though, at home, when Aedin calls out “Momma,” I’m all too happy to be the one she’s calling.

The most common question we hear in public is “who’s the mother?” as people look back and forth between Rachel and me, obviously confused. It’s been asked matter-of-factly by doctors for their charts, shyly by new acquaintances out of curiosity, brazenly by total strangers out of nosiness, and sometimes not even spoken, but implied by a wide range of people knitting their brows in our direction in public places. When I’m out alone with Aedin, no one asks this question; I’m sure Rachel has the same experience. Now that Aedin is verbal, she answers based upon how the person asks it; since I’m her Momma and Rachel is her Mommy, she answers accordingly, but she only looks at them with confusion if they use an ambiguous word such as Mom or Mother.