I’ll Love Till It’s My Turn to Hold Her Back
Izel Nava (She/Her)
Editorial Team Member
I had to interview my mom for an assignment about working life as an adult. The questions ranged from ‘Are you satisfied with your salary?’ to ‘What do your coworkers think about you?’. The questions were pre-typed into a Google Doc I had made between passing periods, with new bullet points full of run-off sentences that transcribed her answers.
“What was your dream job as a kid?” I expected something basic, similar to what I regurgitated during the first week of icebreakers at school—doctor, astronaut, explorer, nurse, firefighter, or singer. Instead, all I hear is a long pause. I open my mouth to rephrase the question before she answers.
“I probably would’ve said a mommy.”
My fingers stop moving across the screen and I look up at her, the woman I know better than anyone. I’m not easily shocked, especially by someone I pride myself in knowing so well. Growing up, my mom always encouraged me to be independent, and when I got to my teenage years that meant lectures full of ‘never let a man treat you that way’ when we saw a couple on TV arguing, or ‘don’t limit yourself for him’. I never once thought that my mom’s dreams were limited to bearing someone else’s children. The shock folded into a batter of guilt.
I remember reading a blog post about this woman who had three children, and how she fantasized about living. When she was little, she wanted to be a marine biologist. She still wants to be one, but she’s a mommy. Since she’s a mommy, her kids don’t see her as anything else. I remember how disorganized the paragraphs were as if they were typed in a rush. I imagined her locking herself in her bathroom for one second of peace, as she vented about how she used to have dreams But to her kids, husband, and everyone else, she started living when she became a mommy, and everything that happened before was insignificant. I remember crying about it. Even though it was a grown woman, it read like a little girl hiding under the covers, whispering a secret to me, making me pinky-promise not to tell. It wasn’t well written, but it didn’t have to be. I felt bad for her. And I promised myself I’d never limit my perception of my mom as just a “mommy”. But now as I looked up at her, I could only see the parts of her I didn’t recognize.
In front of my mom, I always found myself talking about having a family and having children as cheap and offensive. I denounced it like it was a weight that would drag me to the bottom of the ocean and leave me for dead, filling my lungs with its responsibility till I popped. “Settling down” was a curse word that never left my lips. White-picket fences were the stuff of nightmares. I grew up with horror stories and my observations about traditional life, something I never once equated my mom to. To me, she was born assertive, born brave, born with a sharp tooth.
The woman in front of me was a mirror of a smaller girl, in my likeness, looking up at the sky while dreaming of diapers and bottle feeding. I don’t know this woman. Her words are foreign, her vulnerability is domestic. But I love this woman. Her feet are wet, pruned from clawing out of salt water. I know enough about her to know that she was birthed from the hips of the women she grew up with just like me. Unlike me, she can only do what she can replicate. I mourned for this woman, I mourned for her intelligence and potential. But I stop myself from rejecting her dreams. She will be a mom one day. She’ll give birth to two healthy little girls, and she will be someone’s wife. She’s going to get a degree, she’s going to be the first to graduate from university, she’s going to be the first to buy a house, she’s going to build herself a career, she’s going to cry, she’s going to heal, she’s going to love, and she’s going to be passionate. None of those things make her a mom or a woman. But they do make her extraordinary.