What is a Mother? Or Who? Or How? Guest Blog Post by Shannon Quist

I have to remind myself that I’m the expert on my lived experience, but as far as having a mother, being mothered, being a mother, I have to be honest: I’ve been in the weeds on this for a long time, and though I’ve grown taller, this is a place I’ve not yet conquered. 

Having a mother, a physical anchor to my creation, is not something I remember. There is photographic evidence of me just after birth, sure, and of a woman I don’t know holding me as my parents stand next to her posing for the picture. 

But my body is a foreign thing to everybody I know including myself. I was not given a breast to draw from, nor the magical milk of a mother; I was taken “home” and given formula. But if there is any formula I know, it’s that if you take a baby from their mother, there will be trauma, pre-verbal pain and confusion.

You say enlightenment, though, too?

Perhaps. I do remember the first time I woke up, gained clarity, had an epiphany, underwent an awakening, whatever you want to call it. I’d had my first dream, the one where a porcupine chased me. I thought I was safe when I climbed up the tree, but when I looked down, it was climbing up after me. I woke up in terror, thinking, oh no. But upon awakening, I didn’t cry out for my mother. No, I sat up in the crib, stared out the window listlessly as I came to grips with some realization I can’t verbalize even now, then soothed myself back to sleep with my blanket and thumb.

I had to have been younger than three. I know because I was still in my first bedroom in the crib. But why didn’t I call out to be mothered? To be held? Calmed? 

Certainly, there were times when I have been mothered, sometimes well, sometimes not, but it isn’t necessarily an experience I associate with one woman. To be mothered is to be comforted, loved, calmed, maybe spoiled a little. Is that a decent definition? If so, I have had it. 

I think my trouble with being mothered is—and please know this took me years to realize—the fact that mothering should also encompass listening. Or seeing a human for what they are. And that wasn’t my experience. I was a live doll. 

Or maybe this is the definition of being mothered: Maybe it’s the act of smothering a tiny being to the point that in your efforts to see yourself reflected there, you impose your wants and desires, you speak down, you don’t listen. If you make this tiny human believe what you believe, and if you start when they’re really small, the clay will harden exactly how you like. 

But this didn’t happen to me either. The turning out how my mother would like, I mean. 

So, it turned out that for so many long and difficult and foggy years, I turned inward to look for what was missing. I would build my own morals, my own dress code (or lack thereof), my own standards, my own opinions. When we talk about raising a child and “raising them right,” we’re always so concerned about morals and ethics, aren’t we? 

But what about in the case of a child who has never known their mother and is being mothered or smothered by someone who doesn’t see them for what they are? And how is that child supposed to know who they are if their only guidance is a mother that isn’t their own?

If you want to talk about one hand clapping, it’s the hand of a child who doesn’t know who they are or why things feel wrong. I always knew I would be alone. I always knew there was something missing. I just didn’t know why. Or what. 

And then my daughter was born. It was the happiest day of my life. The only mother there (besides me, of course) was my mother-in-law, one of many temporary stand-ins over the years that I had of the mother I needed but could never quite have as my own. 

Becoming a mother was so much. It took me the entire pregnancy and two months just to wrap my head around it and stop sobbing every time my daughter sighed like me. She was the first blood relation I’d ever had, and epiphany after epiphany came.

Almost instinctively, I guarded her, let her wander, crooned over her, held her close, told her the truth, watched in wonder as a human genetically like me grew into a human completely separate from me. She was and is her own beautiful self. I gave her everything I didn’t get. I hope.

And I thought, this little girl has her mother, a mothering mother who mothers. I don’t claim to do it well, but I do my best. Maybe if I loved myself the way I love her, I could heal myself of these mother wounds once and for all. 

And I try, damnit. I wrote a poem to my Real Mom (spoiler: it was to me), but fucking hell, what a lonely life. I can do it, I’m perfectly capable of continuing on this way, loving myself, mothering myself, but it isn’t fair that I should have to. Somebody else was supposed to in the beginning, in the middle, but now we’re at current day, and that somebody is still missing. 

Maybe the world isn’t ready to understand what we adoptees do. We can survive abandonment, lies, and the loss of our mothers, the most important physical extension of ourselves, and live to tell the tale. But the way I see it is the same way I look at my life right now. It’s almost certainly related. 

People ask me all the time, “How do you do it?” Because I work full time, I’m still in grad school, and I’m a divorced mom of a young girl. Plus, last year I got the insane notion to write a novel. 

But my answer is always the same: “I don’t know how I do it. All I know is that I have to.” 

There is no other option. There is no magical mother out there waiting for us. All our relationships are jaded from what they could have been. But we figure out how to be kind to ourselves, to find validation, to keep moving on. We figure out how to play the role of our own mothers in lieu of what we can never have. We have to or we won’t survive in a world that can’t comprehend our reality.

It’s not that there isn’t a small child inside me screaming to be held, to be told she’s wonderful, to be reminded of her strengths, it’s just that there’s nobody here but me. So, even if it’s impossible, I fill this mother hole of mine the best way I know how. Is there any other option? 

*** 

My Real Mom

You know which one I mean. 

She is soft, but doesn’t come off that way at first, hiding instead behind strong words and a puzzled frown. 

She has loved me always, though there have been times when she hasn’t known me at all. 

She is everything I am, everything I want to be, yet it feels as though I never please her. 

Spontaneous, sometimes she buys me spur of the moment gifts, trinkets she thinks might help me climb out of my moods. 

Other times, though, she reminds me to grit my teeth and make due with the bare minimum. 

She is the only one I can rely on, I’m sure you know what I mean. 

She was there when I was born, though she didn’t know what would happen to me. 

And she was there as I learned to speak, learned to fail, learned to hide. 

She didn’t always call herself mom, though, nor mother or mama. Not any of the titles you’d think she’d call herself, not for a while at least. 

It wasn’t until she named the failings of all those women that came before her who said they loved her but fell short somehow of that promise. 

And we women, why is it that we are set up for these failures, taught that our worth revolves around our families even as our families are hindered from being what we want them to be? 

You know what I mean. 

But she didn’t let this stop her from loving me. 

I love my real mom because she is me.

Shannon Quist is the author of Rose’s Locket and a Texan adoptee. You can find her and more of her writing on Instagram (@shannon_quist) and Twitter (@shannonrquist).