What's your superpower?
Among the many things I’ve learned at the job I started about a month ago is that new hire orientation is now called onboarding and it is extensive. Or maybe it just seems that way because every other job I’ve ever had – including motherhood – has been more of a trial-by-fire situation. I flew in on the seat of my pants and made it up as I went along.
One of the fun onboarding tasks was to create an FAQ about myself to share with my new team, but I had a hard time coming up with professional answers for some of the questions, like: What would be your superpower?
My first thought: getting pregnant. It is actually my true superpower and something I’d always been weirdly good at (which was another of the FAQ questions but I answered “spelling” instead).
A few times since I started the job I’ve found myself in situations where I’m asked to tell a group something interesting about myself, and it’s been really hard coming up with a fun fact about me that has nothing to do with my kids. I’ve shared that my daughter donated her kidney, that her knucklehead teenage brother recently got a giant tattoo and that the four kids and I went to Italy together a few years ago.
My 23-year-old daughter overheard me sharing the tattoo tidbit with my new team and later told me it made me sound old. “Everyone has them nowadays,” she said. “They’re not a big deal.”
***
Last week I went to see a healing medium who told me how I had learned as a child to make myself small and blend in with my family. “It wasn’t until you had children that you really started to become who you were supposed to be,” she said, and I nodded my head in agreement.
I know this is not a popular sentiment but in many ways, becoming a mom saved me. It gave my life meaning and purpose and let me begin the process of being the real me. And most importantly, it taught me to start thinking about people other than myself.
And while I am proud of the progress I have made in almost 30 years in that role, I really wish I’d been better at it. While becoming a mom saved me, it created issues for four kids born to a mother who lacked some basic understanding about the way that love works.
This week, my girl and I were lying on my bed and laughing about the dumb Godzilla vs. King Kong movie we watched a while ago that makes us absolutely manic. We shout up the stairs to each other, “Can you hear me? I’m in Hong Kong!” which is a direct quote from the movie, and make jokes about how Godzilla blasted his way straight into Earth’s core and that recently, scientists discovered rocks from the Earth's actual core in Baltimore. It’s amazing how many times a day we can weave these bits into our conversations.
Then we started talking about her teenaged brother and suddenly she’s crying and telling me she wished I’d been as engaged in her life back in high school the way she perceives me to be with her brother. We’d just gotten his senior portrait and apparently I not only didn’t order hers, but I also neglected to choose a pose for her yearbook so the one that was automatically selected is hideous and it makes her cry just thinking about it. And then she started to cry.
***
Earlier that day, a woman I work with shared with our team the new Mother’s Day ad for Dick’s Sporting Goods featuring a few of the company’s female execs and their kids. I watched as one of the moms gently talks with her son about his apprehension around playing soccer and it brought me right back to the YMCA pool and my own 5-year-old son who refused to get in it.
I’d signed him up for a Sports n’ Splash kind of class that was half in the gym and half in the pool and while he could just stand along the sidelines during kickball, it was glaringly obvious that he was miserable when he was the only child who refused to get in the pool. Each week he’d sit on a bench on the pool deck while the rest of the children splashed in the water and played. I’d sit on the other side of the big glass wall near the vending machines and watched my child while shushing the toddler and baby beside me and wonder why he couldn’t be like the rest of the kids.
***
My oldest child spent the first week of his life hooked up to tubes and wires in an incubator in the NICU after he aspirated meconium and developed pneumonia. What had been an ordinary birth went south towards the end when he suddenly went into distress and as soon as he was born, was whisked away and even given last rights during his first day of life. And while he underwent a lot of duress, I had my own medical crisis and did not see him for 24 hours. I took myself downstairs to the nursery early the next morning and poked my finger through the hole on the side of his plastic box to press my fingertip into the palm of his small hand. I don’t think I even got to hold him in my arms for another five days.
When my son finally came home a week later, he started to cry and didn’t stop for about six months. And yet, it never occurred to me that his introduction to life had anything to do with it. I’d left the hospital with paperwork on jaundice and breastfeeding but nothing to tell me how to comfort an infant who’d just spent his first week of life alone in a plastic box.
***
If I could truly have any superpower, I think it would be to have the ability to go back in time. I’d strap on my Super Mom cape and travel back and try to be a little less caught up in myself and spend some time paying more attention to my children. I’d definitely drink a lot less wine. I’d be more focused on who they were and not what I wanted them to be.
I’d tell that 5 year old he didn’t have to get in the pool and stop signing him up for stuff. And I’d pick that crying infant out of his bassinet and hold him and tell him that everything was okay. I’d make sure he knew that he was loved.
I couldn’t wait to become a mother although now I see just how completely unprepared I was for the job. A little onboarding would have been really helpful. I really would have benefitted from a 30-6-90 plan and think it might have helped me get better reviews from my children over the years, too.
It’s hard to hear from them about the times I failed them. When I could have been better at my most important job. What I do know now is that at the time, I did the very best that I could. It might not have been amazing, or what she wanted or needed, but I gave it all that I could.
After she finished crying about how I let her down in high school, my daughter walked over to where I was lying in bed and hugged me. “I really love you,” she told me, and maybe that’s my true superpower. That despite my defects, I am loved by the people who I love most. That somehow we are able to take the good with the bad and just love each other. Even though we have no idea what we are doing, somehow to love each other unconditionally just seems right.
HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY
xoAmy
SUNDAY SHARES: read-watch-cook-buy
Weirdly, I picked up a copy I bought of Song of Achilles a few years ago and started reading and discovered that the 10-year-old novel is back on the bestseller charts thanks to TikTok. I do not love it the way I loved her newer book, Circe, but I'm into all the Greek mythology and think that Thetis was the original helicopter mom (but like, one that would rip your throat out with her teeth if you threatened her kid). Plus, Maggie Smith played her in Clash of the Titans, my seminal 1980s movie, so you know she's a badass.
Maggie from Minnesota emailed me after last week's newsletter about kind of feeling God in my life and shared this podcast and I am finding it so fascinating that whether it's through religion, Gabby Bernstein, or AA, the message is the same: Listen to what the Universe is telling you to do and stop trying to force what you think you're supposed to be doing.
As someone who spent a good 10 years floundering her way through life, I loved this recent article in the Times with a quiz on whether you are flourishing in your own life. I'm still at like a 5 so, there's work to be done!
Maybe one of the reasons I'm not 100% with life is that I still spend way too much time on TikTok. This week, I identified with this girl whose roommates don't fill the giant Brita, wanted to live on a farm and feed goats and gave me an inspirational quote to keep in a notebook.