Motherwhelm is an Earworm
BY KAITLIN SOLIMINE
Photo Courtesy | Kailtin Solimine
Motherwhelm is a term. I read it somewhere but now I can’t remember where1. I don’t want to Google it. Won’t. Won’t. Can’t. Time limits set for social media; a box in the front hall to hide away phones. For now, the children live in a world without devices to their names — but soon? The overwhelm. Ignore. Delete. Delete. We made this for ourselves.
[A writer-mother friend, Sara Petersen, reminds me via newsletter, that there’s an App to solve your motherwhelm. It costs $249/month.]
I want to shut out the world but what is the world exactly? I’m not sure where to go. In the middle of the third (endless?) pandemic lockdown, I screamed to the family that I was running away but when I got to the bottom of the stairs and reached for the car keys, I realized there was nowhere for me to go because we were locked inside our homes. “Laughing and crying you know it’s the same release,” Joni Mitchell sings from a distant child-free decade, but car keys in hand, face mask donned, stuck between in-home and out-of-home, I didn’t cry nor laugh. Dumbstruck is the word for that. Or just plain numb.
I don’t want to write about motherhood anymore. I’m still a mother. Am I? I want a break from it. The idea of motherhood. Of having to define what is both ideal motherhood and lived experience. There’s an image I saw on Twitter of a naked woman alone, draped over a marble canopy in a Venetian room, walls plastered with antique tiles. Another mother-writer I know marveled at the luxury of aloneness in this image. I would Google it so I can share it with you, but what would the image search “naked woman alone” reveal? A naked woman alone exists only for the male gaze. Reclaim. Rewrite. Disappear.
The whelm of it. Whelm sounds like worm. Earthworms. Earworms. Did you know earworms are a proven, scientific thing? The sound of a song curling its way past your ear’s helix and concha (anatomy’s poetry?) to your brain (then heart?). Researchers in the UK found three reasons earworms stick in your head and have done so since antiquity, but they didn’t investigate the particularly vexing problem of the earworm named “Baby Shark,” so I lost interest in that study.
I had something else to say here but I forgot. Am always forgetting: a wallet on the top of the car, a car key on top of the car’s armrest, an airpod on the airplane. Goodbye material goods. They say, “At least you remembered the kid,” but one day I did forget the third-born. She was in the activity seat in the dining room. I was in the front hall on my way to the car. (If no one sees you forget your kid in the dining room, does the kid make a sound? Tree. Kid. Philosophy.) I remembered. I forgot. Maybe I’m missing some key details here. This I know: I am desperate to clear the house of toys, tire of clichéd Lego underfoot. I read about a book called Simplicity Parenting and then stress I shouldn’t read a book about simplicity because it may make me want to take a leap. Not metaphorical. Actual. I left my novel’s protagonist on a cliff in my iPhone notes, the only working manuscript to date. She’s standing there, looking out into the ocean, abyss of gray waves, and no, she’s not contemplating jumping. She’s not contemplating anything: she’s a blank page!
If she jumps: erasure?
(Here I am again, thumbs typing manuscript in digital ink on a screen illuminating my face like the moon, the baby seeking a constellation on blue-lit cheeks. We mothers exist in pixelated nightmares.)
The baby who was nursing when I wrote all this lifts her head off my breast and drops, sideways, onto my abdomen. Is she asleep?
She’s eight months tomorrow. Perfect baby age. Perfectly fleeting (edit: already eight months by the time I copy and paste this into Microsoft Word). Pajama softness against me, cuddling: the love. The overwhelming love unkempt and impossible to stop like the Encanto earworm on repeat now since school drop offs – Let it in, let it out, let it rain, let it snow, let it go!
I see only a whirl of hair, shadow in the early morning light creeping in from fog-draped city, that perfect shape of her round head that tore my labia in a crooked line.
I told the midwives not to stitch. To be made whole again in pieces, jagged lines exposed—afray is the word I’ll conjure into being for all of this. You know what I mean. It sounds like a real word spoken by a real mother in the middle of a real doorway, keys in hand, forgotten child swatting the plastic bumble bee. The bee bobs frantically to and fro. Baby hand swats again. Mother framed by door, mind amiss.
Afray. Afray. Afray. Let it rain, let it snow, let it go!
1 Eventually I succumb to the search engine and upon investigation, I find “Motherwhelm” most prevalently displayed via Beth Berry’s illustrious motherhood newsletter and recently published book, Motherwhelmed.
KAITLIN SOLIMINE is mother to Calliope, Rafael, and Lyra, author of award-winning novel Empire of Glass, cofounder of Hippo Reads and Hippo Thinks, and a childbirth and lactation activist. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Guernica Magazine, LitHub, and more. She lives in San Francisco where she is at work on a second novel, The Blue Lobster, which explores themes of midwifery, climate change, and New England Native American history, as well as a book of essays on home and motherhood.