Hi there,
Let me start with my mother.
After I was born, she suffered from what we now call postpartum depression. Back then, they called it the blues, and women just suffered through it quietly, as women have been expected to do through most of recorded history.
What I inherited from that was not trauma exactly, it was a story. Over the years, I heard how difficult I had been as a baby, how I didn’t sleep for two years straight. Those stories lodged themselves in my body, and they became a quiet, low-grade warning: motherhood is awful, and it will break you.
So I didn’t want it.
This was easy enough, because I was busy. I came to the US, I built a career, I traveled, and I had a great time. When my friends in Brazil married young and had children immediately, I thought they were nuts. I couldn’t imagine giving up what I was building for that. I married my long-time boyfriend and, naturally, everyone started asking when we’d have children, which I dreaded for two reasons.
One: What if the same thing that happened to my mother happens to me? What if it breaks me?
Two: I couldn’t imagine having his children.
About 5 years of marriage, we divorced. Problem solved on both counts.
Divorced and Childless
I was 35 and single, and quietly resolving myself to a childless life. It wasn’t grief so much as math: by the time I met someone else, even if I wanted children, the window would probably be closed. So I moved on, and didn’t give it a second thought. All my friends who were parents were in Brazil, so I had no real proximity to children and all the care and realities that go with raising them. They were not top of mind.
I moved to Tribeca after my divorce, and my building was near the PS 234 elementary school. I remember lying in bed in the mornings, listening to children scream in the playground, and grunting about the noise. I remember watching parents line up outside the school and thinking: don’t they have somewhere to be? I thought my boss was overly dramatic about the logistics of co-parenting her teenage daughter with her ex , how hard can it really be? I thought certain colleagues talked about their children too much. I once attended a funeral where my ex showed up with his new baby, and his family looked at me with that expression of pity and worry that I must be devastated about my empty life. Little did they know how much pity I felt for the mother of his baby.
I just couldn’t see it from where they were standing, and they couldn’t see it from where I was. We all nudged and judged.
Motherhood at 40
Then, at 39, I met my husband Ron. At 40, after I had already closed that door in my mind, I had my daughter. My son came two years later.
To my surprise, motherhood didn’t exactly break me — it cracked me open. It expanded my capacity to see things differently, to love differently, and to feel the scale of the world differently. It changed me in ways I didn’t expect and couldn’t have manufactured on my own, and I’m eternally grateful for it.
But here is where I part with every saccharine Mother’s Day narrative out there: I don’t know if it would have changed you the same way.
I was rigid, linear, a little locked in my own ways, and I was 40. Motherhood pried something open in me that probably needed prying, and I was ready for it. I’m genuinely grateful for that.
But my personal transformation is not a universal prescription. Many women are already open, already empathetic, already living with full hearts with or without children, by choice or circumstance. They don’t need motherhood to get there.
Motherhood is not a portal to a higher self. It is a specific experience that will transform some women and crush others.
I know women for whom it has been the great love of their lives. I know women for whom it has been unbearable. And I know women without children who are living with a wholeness I genuinely admire. Their lives are not missing anything. They are not waiting to be completed.
The Mommy Wars
Stay-at-home mothers weaponizing guilt against working mothers. Working mothers dismissing the labor of women who chose home. Mothers of every kind leveling the word selfish at women who deliberately chose not to have children, as if a woman’s body is a public property for all to weight in. That look of pity reserved for women who wanted children and couldn’t have them, doubled for the ones who are also single, because apparently the tragedy of not having children can only be surpassed by not having children and not having a partner.
What a waste of the most valuable resource women have: each other.
Every hour spent litigating who is doing womanhood correctly or fueling the oppression Olympics of who is suffering the most is an hour not spent on the systems that make womanhood brutal in the first place.
The mommy wars are a horrible distraction. From the absence of paid leave, the cost of childcare, the motherhood penalty, the medical establishment’s ongoing indifference to women’s pain, the fact that postpartum depression in my mother’s generation didn’t even have a name, for the right to choose to be a mother to begin with, and I could go on and on.
So the one thing I want for Mother’s Day is for people to let women be.
No need for forced solidarity or performative support. Just genuine disinterest in whether another woman’s choices match yours.
Leave the SAHM be without justifying herself to everyone else. Spare the career mother the weight of people’s concerns for her children. Stop making the women without children a cautionary tale. Resist the urge to give a pity face to the woman who tried and couldn’t.
Let. Them. Be.
That’s the gift.
Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate. Sending lots of love,
Patricia