On Being an Invisible Mother

by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings

So much of what I do, as a mother, goes unseen. I plan our healthy meals and read the labels of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure our home stays toxin-free, and I mix our own cleaners and make note of when we’ll need to reorder those essential oils we use for healing. I carve out a schedule that protects our family playing time, and I craft a budget that means we have food and shelter for another month, and I make sure all the art supplies stay stocked.

I manage Amazon subscriptions for ingredient-approved vitamins and count them out every single day and line them up next to my boys’ breakfast plates, and instead of “thank you” I hear about how they didn’t want these scrambled eggs this morning because all their friends get to eat cereal for breakfast, and why can’t they? I clear out their closets when their old clothes are too small, and I buy them new underwear when the old ones cut off circulation and I stock new socks when the old ones have too many holes, and the only thing I hear for it is how they wanted red socks instead of the black ones I bought.

I turn off lights and flush toilets and mend their blankets and remind them to brush their teeth and find their lost library books and read stories until my throat hurts and send them back to bed a thousand times every single night, and I don’t even think they notice.

There are so many days I can feel downright invisible.

Welcome to being a mother.

///

When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped a magnet dry-erase calendar on the front of our white refrigerator.

“Dish schedule,” she said.

Our names were written on it in black—Jarrod, Rachel, Ashley, and Mom switching places on all the squares. Every month she sat down with a school calendar and the dry-erase one and wrote our names on the schedule in a way that wouldn’t interfere with our lives.

The schedule got more complicated when we got to high school, because there were volleyball games and every-night-of-the-week practices and football games with the marching band and National Honor Society and Wednesday night church and homework after all that.

I didn’t appreciate all the hard work that went into a schedule as complicated as that. All I did was resent that I had to wash dishes two nights a week. I resented that I worked so hard at school all day and then slaved away at volleyball practice and rode a bus to the pick-up point and finally got home after dark to finish what homework I couldn’t do on the bus, because I cared about handwriting and the bus was too bouncy, and then I still had to do the dishes.

So unfair.

My tunnel vision didn’t let me see that she worked all day, much harder than I ever did at school, and then she cooked dinner and tried to keep it warm for me and drove to meet the bus and stayed near while I finished my homework so I’d have help if I needed it and, on top of all that, she planned meals for the month and did all the shopping and budgeted our very limited resources and wrote out a schedule for doing dishes so one person was not overburdened with the responsibility.

She was a mother.

She was invisible, too.

///

Now that I have children of my own, I know just how selfish children can be. I know just how thankless motherhood is. I know how no matter what we do behind the scenes, there is still more they want us to do.

It’s simply the nature of children. I know this. They don’t see their own selfishness or the way those ill-timed complaints can make a mama not ever want to cook a hot breakfast for them ever again or how the mere thought of tackling eight loads of laundry that come back every week is enough to keep her in bed when the alarm chimes. They only wonder why they’re having oatmeal again when today was supposed to be pancake-day. They don’t see that Mama ran out of time to flip pancakes because she had to turn every male shirt right-side out before sorting it into laundry piles she’ll spend all day washing.

It’s completely, developmentally normal for them to not make those connections yet. Someday they will.

But someday means nothing for this day, this day I stripped all his sheets and blankets and spent half the day he was at school vacuuming and washing and putting a bed back together because he woke up with ant bites all over his legs and I’m afraid there might be ants in his bed because they were eating popcorn up here yesterday even though it’s against the rules. This day he comes out of his room complaining that his blanket is still a little wet.

This day when I loaded the washer with that first pile holding his Spider-Man shirt, because I was sure he’d want to wear it on his birthday, and there’s just enough time to wash and dry it before he has to leave for school. This day he comes down the stairs crying about how he can’t find his workout clothes to wear on his birthday, and I know they’re lying at the bottom of another pile I planned to wash later today.

This day I woke up to find three lights left on all night and I can’t help but mentally calculate how much that’s going to cost me.

The promise of someday does not make this day any easier.

///

After I married and had an apartment of my own, my mom came visiting with a box.

“What’s that?” I said, because I had recently finished unpacking, and I hadn’t missed anything important.

“All your old stories,” she said.

“What stories?” I said.

“The ones you wrote when you were little,” she said, and she pulled out one that imagined what I would do if I had a million dollars. I’d written it when I was seven.

“I’d buy a car, and I wouldn’t share with my brother,” I’d written. We laughed about it.

There were Little House on the Prairie imitations and the story about a girl miraculously walking again to save her friends from danger and another scrawled out on notebook paper the summer I went to visit my dad.

“I didn’t know you kept all these,” I said.

My mom smiled. “Of course I did.”

Of course she did. They were pieces of me she loved. They were pieces that proved her love.

And she is a mother.

///

There is a drawer in my closet where I keep my kids’ drawings and old writing notebooks they’ve filled with words and loose papers with quirky doodles filling corners. My boys don’t know the drawer is there.

My eight-year-old doesn’t know that when he slipped his note under our bedroom door, the one that bears a picture of a boy with a red face and smoke coming out of his ears and the words, “I feel angry when you tell me it’s bedtime,” the note went into that drawer. My six-year-old doesn’t know that when he wrote a kindergarten essay in school about how he knows his mom loves him when she reads to him, his essay went into that drawer. My four-year-old doesn’t know that when the amazing fox picture he drew disappeared from his drawing binder it went into that drawer.

They don’t know all the ways I love them, because they are still young children who believe love looks mostly like hugs and kisses and sweet snuggles. They don’t know yet that it actually looks like time and service and invisibility.

What I am still learning in my mother journey is that sometimes the greatest acts of love are the ones that whisper instead of shout.

A storage container with writing treasures shoved under our mom’s bed.

A dish schedule that honored our time over her own.

A ride to early-morning volleyball practices, even though she worked late.

I want to be that kind of great.

Indignation comes welling up in me, every now and then, when I’m tired and frustrated and annoyed that I can’t seem to find a single minute to myself. I want to be noticed. Acknowledged. Appreciated. I forget that invisibility is better than alone.

I get to be a mama. I get to love my children through olive oil brushed over broccoli and a sprinkling of sea salt sitting on top. I get to love them by joining them at the table and coloring a picture of Lightning McQueen, even though a thousand other responsibilities are calling my name. I get to love them with a secret drawer that holds treasures more valuable than what sits in our bank account.

I get to be loved by his bursting into the room while I’m working so he can give me a missed-you kiss. I get to be loved by the flower he brings me, because its beauty reminded him of me, and I get to watch it curl up while I’m writing. I get to be loved in his request to be carried downstairs, just like old times, even though he’s so much heavier now and, also, fully capable of walking himself.

I get to be loved in a million silent ways, and I get to love in a million silent ways.

Welcome to being a mother.

This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.

(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)