I write to you all this week from my mother’s bedside. She’s in hospice care. These are our last few days together.
Midcoast resident Heather D. Martin wants to know what’s on your mind; email her at [email protected].
I know. That’s a lot. I’m sorry I sprung that on you.
As you might imagine, though, this is what I am thinking about right now, so this is the conversation. Well, sort of. I am actually not quite ready to unpack the full reality of this moment.
What I do want to talk about is my mom’s life and how it intersects with a certain national narrative about gender roles I’m watching play out. My mom has had 90 full and rich years on this beautiful, blue planet of ours. She has been a lot of places, done a lot of things and met a lot of people.
She attained an education she was told was not for her and spent most of her working life as an ordained clergy – a career that was not exactly welcoming to women when she chose it. She is a feminist. And yet, I know for certain that if you asked her, she would tell you that her children are her greatest joy and her greatest accomplishment.
Which is nice. However, to be clear, it isn’t that she “managed to raise her four daughters while also working full time.” It is that the active, daily practice of deliberately forging the life and work she wanted for herself was how she raised and mothered us.
Career and home were not parallel or competing realities. They were two parts of a whole. We kids were.
