Making the Wild Choice
BY EUNICE BROWNLEE
Photography by Meggin Tengberg | Tengberg Studio
Motherhood is nothing short of a series of choices. From the moment we know we are pregnant, the choices begin.
Picking out clothes and nursery items. Creating a birth plan. Selecting a name for the baby. Choosing a place to give birth. Deciding on parenting styles. Reading every parenting book ever written and questioning every single choice.
The list goes on.
Every day, we make 1,000 different choices. Some without thinking twice, and others, we will replay in our heads for months (Should I have caved in Target? Is it okay if they have just one Happy Meal?). Some are easy. Some are gray. Some are hard, but necessary. Some are wild, and we make them anyway.
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It was 4 a.m. and I could hear my daughter scrambling to the bathroom to vomit. She missed. By a longshot. She knows I don’t handle vomit well and she tried to encourage me to go back to bed and insisted she would clean it up. As she knelt with her face in the bowl, I rubbed her back and handed her a glass of cold water. Then, with a fistful of paper towels, I got on my hands and knees and began sopping up the mess while stifling my gags. She looked up from the toilet and urged me to let her clean it up. I told her I would handle it and she just needed to rest.
After she crawled back into bed, I turned on my computer to get started on the long list of work tasks I needed to finish that day. In just under twenty-four hours, I was due on a plane to Costa Rica. My kid was sick and I felt horrible that I was going to leave her.
To add to my misery, over the weekend, I had discovered water damage in my closet and the smell was getting unbearable. Between the vomit smell wafting from the bathroom and the obvious mildew smell coming out of my closet, I started to feel sick myself.
I felt helpless and overwhelmed. I had thankfully finished packing the night before — an act that is highly atypical of me — or I might have gone into a full-blown meltdown. I realized that my stomach turning wasn’t a result of the awful smells in my home or whatever illness had overtaken my kid, but a classic case of mom guilt settling in.
My mind was spinning. I had so much to do, not enough time, and all I wanted to do was snuggle up in bed with my kiddo. As I tried to figure out which task to tackle first, I kept thinking both, “should I cancel my trip?” and “I sure hope I don’t get sick. That would be a shitty way to start vacation.”
My daughter woke up after a few hours and crawled into my bed so she could be in the same room as me. As she settled in, I expressed my feelings aloud to her. I was fighting back tears and told her I didn’t know what the right choice was. She looked at me and said, “Mom. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. You deserve this.”
It had been exactly two weeks that I’d been home since my previous trip — ten days in Los Angeles so I could perform in the SuperBowl Halftime Show. When that opportunity came, I immediately talked to her about it. Before I could get into the details about being gone for nearly two weeks, her response was, “That’s so cool! You’re going to have so much fun!” I hadn’t even gotten to asking how she felt about it when she went into full cheerleader mode.
To have her be so supportive of me leaving for another ten days was truly amazing. I could have cried right then. She’s always been pushing me to make the wild choices.
We all make hard choices as parents. As a solo parent, I must balance what she needs with what I need. I don’t get to tag out and lean on the support of a partner when I need time for myself. I used to not allow myself to have any “me time” because it felt selfish and indulgent. I have learned how important it is to do things I enjoy, even if being a solo parent means it takes a little extra work to make it happen.
What amazes me about the relationship I have with my daughter that she is so incredibly supportive, even when it’s uncomfortable for me to ask for what I need. I am fortunate that she sees how hard I work to give us better choices than we once had.
As women, and specifically as mothers, we’ve been conditioned not to choose ourselves. In fact, we’ve been told that it’s selfish and irresponsible. The “good” moms will wear their self-sacrifice like a badge of honor.
Truthfully, it’s wearing us down and burning us out.
Choosing ourselves is the keystone of self-care. We cannot sustain if we are always putting ourselves last. Ironically, it’s my daughter who is the one to constantly remind me of this. She is always pushing me to choose myself (although I do have to remind her that when I choose to do nice things for her, she should accept the gesture).
As for Costa Rica? I ended up going. She felt better the next morning when she woke up. I had already landed in Houston at that point, but it made me feel better to know that I wasn’t abandoning my kid when she needed her mom. (Thankfully, I didn’t catch whatever she had.)
I had a great week away and when I returned home, she begged me to tell her all about it, and was extremely grateful for the pile of gifts I brought back for her and her friends.
I am hoping that through demonstrating choosing myself (even if I am pushed into it), she will learn that it’s important for her to make the wild choices, too.
EUNICE BROWNLEE has spent her career finding the balance between her left and right brains. She is a passionate writer and writes regularly about mental health, trauma, and abuse. She’s also a solo mother, striving to raise a daughter who is strong and outspoken. Eunice has been published in The Kindred Voice, Motherscope and Spoken Black Girl. Eunice’s current project is a book about the trauma of navigating the justice system as a victim of a crime. When she’s not doing any of the above, she can be found seeking her next passport stamp and drinking wine. Follow her on Instagram @eunicebrownlee.