Mothermonk

some thoughts on failure and freedom

“Mothermonk” is my new name for this thing I’m writing here. I like it because it is weird and gently gender-bending (not “Mothernun”) but also the two halves of it are quite clear: we more or less all have some idea of a mother, and some idea of a monk.

I like it further because my ideas of those things are not compatible with each other. And the particular kind of incompatible they are feels like a pretty good portrait of what motherhood has felt like to me: a feeling of frequent mismatch. The work of motherhood seems to keep asking most of me in the areas where I have least to give, and asking least in the areas where I have most to give. I ended most of my days as a toddler-mom feeling both depleted beyond what seemed possible, and simultaneously bottled up, untapped.

Just like the venn diagram of “mother” and “monk” has only a small sliver of overlap, it felt like the venn diagram of “me” and “motherhood” had only a small sliver of overlap. And at the same time, as the primary caregiver for two young kids living in a housing development built in the 1970s with lots that maximize privacy, motherhood felt like all I did. (I’m writing about this in the past tense because everything feels in so much flux right now that I am not sure what is true of me at the moment.)

On top of this feeling of an equation not solving, there was also a constant feeling that there is some way of making this better, and I just haven’t found it yet. And its unhelpful corollary: therefore everything that feels hard must be my fault.

When the name first occurred to me, that feeling of mismatch was the main draw. It came to me as a title for a book, and it came with a subtitle: Mothermonk: A Memoir in Thirteen Failures.

And that word, failure, has taken the name to a new place for me. At first, I thought of myself as a failed mother because part of me wanted to be a monk rather than a mom. But then a little inner voice spoke up and said, You know how, before you had kids, you liked doing some contemplative things, like maybe calligraphy, but you hated meditating and mindfulness drove you up the wall and really you mainly wanted to do what you felt like when you felt like it? You could have been a monk back then, if you’d wanted. But you didn’t.

At this point I realized that there is a big part of me that feels “mother” and “monk” are both archetypes I have wanted to, or felt like I should, live up to. And this part of me is convinced I’ve failed at both, and am still failing.

Then it occurred to me that a mothermonk could be a character: the embodiment of a strand of cultural meaning that runs through my idea of both mothers and monks, in which they have gone so deeply into the ordinariness of life that they become both invisible and wise. They sit still meditating for so long you forget they’re there, and then they ask a question that floors you. Or they’re wiping the counters and tidying away food and they feel safe, like the heart of a home, and you can ask them anything.

There’s a trickster flavor to the wisdom of a mothermonk. It comes out of eating a lot of humble pie, sweeping a lot of floors, being bored during a lot of hours of meditation, cleaning up a lot of thrown food, changing a lot of diapers, being given yet another menial assignment by your abbot before qualifying to become a novice and go live in a hut in the mountains in February, and douse yourself with buckets of ice water three times a day.

After a certain amount of all this, it becomes impossible for a mothermonk to take themselves—or you—too seriously. It’s the kind of wisdom that knows that failure is not a catastrophe to be avoided but a joke to be enjoyed, or a springboard to be used for bouncing high. It leads to great freedom. I do not feel like I have much of this wisdom at the moment, but I want more, and I like the idea of naming my newsletter after someone I’d love to become.

If this feels like a journey you’d like to join me on, please do. I will keep exploring these questions in my writing and drawing, which I plan to keep free. I am also enabling a paid subscriber’s chat (the Momo Chat) where I will post a prompt on Fridays (first one coming later today). These will be open-ended, and about things like failure and freedom. And as often as possible, they will be invitations to make something.

If you want to be in the chat, but you can’t afford it, let me know. If you want other people who can’t afford it to be in the chat and can contribute extra, let me know.