Mother Is a Verb

This article originally appeared in Brooding, a newsletter delivering deep thoughts on modern family life. Sign up here.

Mother’s Day on the internet has been a little contentious these past few years. Back in mid-March, I got an email from Etsy “checking in” to see if I wanted to opt out of Mother’s Day email campaigns this year. Could we wait until it’s at least May before we begin loading up this perfectly nice day with all of our baggage? Just like an actual mother, Mother’s Day is expected to be everything to everyone, and when the day inevitably fails to satisfy, big feelings ensue.

If Mother’s Day fills you with grief, you are of course excused from celebrating. No holiday other than Christmas is as shadowed by more looming sadness than Mother’s Day. It’s just part of the deal when you’re talking about something as powerful and devastating as procreation. I like to embrace the operatic range of emotions that Mother’s Day brings up. Even if you’re not on good terms with your mom, or (like me) don’t have one anymore because she died, at the very least here is a day for a big cathartic cry.

The fact that it’s a “Hallmark holiday” is of no concern to me. Mother worship is older than monotheism. The Venus of Willendorf is nearly 30,000 years old! By designating a “mother’s day,” Hallmark stepped in where modernity had fallen short.

But rather than let the day be always bound up in the power relations that define motherhood today — with our partners, with our parents, with our children, and with political regimes that cynically degrade and exploit mothering itself — why not take a more lateral approach to Mother’s Day and celebrate the mothering that we give and receive from other moms? I love a handmade card and a morning coffee delivered to my bedside, but what I really love, and what I really want to spend the day thinking about, are the moms I know and the ways we mother one another. So in the spirit of the Kids in the Hall’s “These Are the Daves I Know,” here are some moms I know.

Shout-out to the very first mom friends we meet, at a local meetup group or maybe at the park. These early friendships are excruciating to make. I had no idea how I wanted to behave as a new mom trying to make friends, and I’m sure I tried too hard to seem cool. This period feels so unforgiving, but in retrospect, I believe it’s the opposite, and the first parent friends you make may end up being the best friends you’ll ever have.

When our babies were about 5 months old, my friend Avery and I zipped our Ergobaby carriers into our parkas and went out Christmas shopping. While out and about, we got stuck in a snow squall and had to take shelter in the waiting area of a pharmacy. I recall it being fun, actually. When I got home, I felt like the baby and I had gone on an adventure together.

A few years later, when I was pregnant with my second son, I met Sheri, who is 16 years older than I and whose three kids went on to babysit for us for years. Everyone needs a close friend who is a generation ahead to tell you to relax with the authority that people two generations ahead don’t always possess. I used to go over to Sheri’s after my kids were asleep and her kids were out with their friends. Sometimes she would give me the precious gift of letting me smoke a cigarette at her kitchen table.

When my kids were in day care, I met a group of moms who coalesced in a group text that is going strong almost ten years later. In the spring when it would stay light until late, we would meet up in the park near the day care for dinner picnics that most reliably consisted of Doritos, baby carrots, giant tubs of hummus, and king cans of beer. These were the relationships forged while everyone was trying to keep half an eye on the kids as they toddled and fought with sticks. You wouldn’t think being so distracted and exhausted would make close friends, but it does.

And then there are the mundane instances when a mom friend looks after your kid and expands their tiny world. My younger son was having dinner at my friend Martha’s, and I called to check in about when he would come home. “We’re watching the Oscars,” she said casually — astonishing since my son’s version of the Bechdel test requires characters to either carry a sword or have the ability to fly. Getting him to watch the Oscars with me was unimaginable, but that’s what friends are for.

My friend Sophie drives a nicer car than ours and lets my older son, who is a car guy, customize all the displays and lights in it, which gives him no end of pleasure. And once, she came over while my husband and I were very overextended and stressed, and she played games of Ticket to Ride on the floor with my kids until we could all finally sit down and relax.

What luck to have a friend like my friend Noelle, who says “Just send your kids over” and means it. It takes a certain kind of person, with a certain tolerance for chaos, to truly have an open-door policy, and she’s one of those.

After my mother died in 2021, my family returned home from the memorial service to find a lovely array of treats laid out on our kitchen counter: cake, flowers, rotisserie chicken, a nice bottle of wine, and a copy of the newspaper, which somehow felt like the most tender thing of all. The fridge had been stocked too. It turned out my friends Amy and Ariel had asked my neighbor for the spare key, let themselves in, and taken care of us.

This is elite-tier friendship, and at this level, we can see how much friendship at its best overlaps with mothering. There has been an emphasis over the past few years on friendship as a site of self-improvement: radical honesty, callouts, the naming of slights and hurt feelings in the service of some kind of purified, scrubbed-clean higher self. All of this is fine, but I’m less interested in this rigorous version of friendship than I am in a softer, more accepting friendship that has more in common with caregiving. I am all too aware of my flaws; I don’t really need my friends to remind me of them. Rather than demand I be better, I would rather my friends accept me as I am. Isn’t that the kind of mother we all wish we had, too? And no, you don’t need to be a mother to treat your friends to the mothering they all need. Mothering transcends the biological — every chosen family knows this.

Last week, my husband gave me an update on his mom, Louise. She had driven for two days to visit her best friend, Carol, which she does periodically. Carol and Louise met when they were new moms. Louise made it to Carol’s and promptly came down with COVID. She sequestered herself in Carol’s guest room for several days while recovering, but the two of them didn’t let that stop them. They just talked and joked through the closed door.

Motherhood enmeshes us in tight networks of responsibility, and often we’re giving care not out of pleasure but because we have to. When we care for our friends free from these bonds of obligation, it feels like liberation. (Miranda July writes about a relationship between a mom and her best friend in her new book, All Fours, which beautifully evokes this feeling of friend freedom.)

I don’t believe in a fixed definition for a “good mother.” Doesn’t it depend a lot on who a kid is and what they need? But I do believe there is something universal about being a good friend. I think it has to do with freely given care and acceptance. So go ahead and “spoil Mom” or whatever, take her to brunch, buy her a candle. But what the day is really about, to me, is the mothering we give one another and how it holds all of us together.