Strong Mothers

On Mother’s Day I always miss my mom, and too, reflect on how I came from a long line of strong women — who did not want to have children! That baffled me as a kid, when I saw my mother and grandmother as so completely wonderful and amazingly strong. And strength became part of my own story, a mother of two daughters of my own, pictured here with me in Central Park this spring. I so wanted children, from a very young age.

Here’ s a book excerpt from my own memoir of motherhood, independently published in February 2025.

Book excerpt from When the Baby Is Not OK: Hopes & Genes, a memoir.

“It’s natural to seek counsel and comfort from family, friends and colleagues for support during the first pregnancy. But in my case I’d already heard that having a child was life-changing from too many unpleasant warnings. I purposefully avoided subjecting myself to any additional negativity.

    Important people in my life had talked about weight gain during pregnancy that felt unattractive and never came back off. Had described back pain. Disfigurement of their bodies. Swollen feet. According to them, the whole experience in general was not worth the effort and inconvenience. For me in particular, they predicted parenthood would cause dependency on a man. Mire me in poverty. And maybe worst of all would block my career growth, they said. Even for a man, starting a family limited his ability to move forward or follow his dreams. And after all, I was female. In so many words I heard that pregnancy was a fate best avoided.

  “Take her, please. She’s my little nightmare,” a friend said without affection while staring at her cute three-year-old who I knew gave in to frequent temper tantrums. 

    My friend was attractive and married, staying at home taking care of her first daughter. She watched her little girl nestled inside of her very own toy electric vehicle as she joyfully buzzed up and down the long driveway beside their big house. I didn’t know what to say back to the mother in the way of comfort. Her Italian husband, a really cheerful guy and a great chef, was in the kitchen making something that smelled amazing. I couldn’t wait to go inside.

    I also heard, “After you have a kid, your f**king life is over,” from another young parent who confessed to me one day in tears. She was one of my ex-husband’s cousins. Her young partner nodded stoically in agreement gazing glassy-eyed at their vivacious and healthy toddler. The father didn’t add any details but he did look utterly miserable.

    The unhappy couple were sitting beside me on an immaculate and colorful floral-design couch in the well-kept living room of their toddler’s grandmother. Everyone was eating the grandmother’s famously delicious, freshly-baked cookies. Drinking her perfect espresso in tiny gold-rimmed glass cups. Watching the adorable little one play happily on the rug. He was beginning to learn to walk. I was hoping he wouldn’t run into something and break it, like one of the grandmother’s many, pretty little ceramic statues. Or try to climb up on the glass coffee table and get the rest of the anise biscotti. The cookies were that good.

    Where is their pain coming from? I didn’t know and after the toddler’s grandmother came back into the room I did not have the courage to ask.

My own mother once confided, “The worst mistake I ever made in my life was having children.”

   I was a teenager at the time. She’d turned around from the front seat of the 20-year old, classic blue 1955 Chevrolet that morning to look at me while she drove home from church. She wasn’t even mad about anything at the moment. It came out as a warning for no apparent reason. The way parents tend to give advice their kid never really asked for.

    Quite the shock.

    I didn’t ask her to elaborate on her comment. I’d been thinking about how she looked like some famous movie star driving the car. Her rich brown hair curled under and bouncing at her broad, tan shoulders. My most beautiful woman in the world. She never wore makeup except an arch of red that covered her lips Sunday mornings framing her perfect white teeth. She’d studied music in college and went to church religiously – for the music. She looked like an angel when she played the organ for services. But her words that particular morning hurt like the devil.

    I knew my friend, the cousin and my own mother based these statements on their own lived experience. So, of course, all valid for them. But still, it didn’t make any kind of sense to me. All life is sacred.

   My friend’s young daughter was precocious, intelligent and creative. More a good dream of a little angel than a nightmare. I always enjoyed playing with her whenever I visited.

   For my cousin’s part, she must have noticed life going on after motherhood. I knew her mother quite well as my ex-husband’s aunt. After she’d raised my cousin and then the new baby came, she embraced being a grandmother. Still incredibly strong, still worked full time and still entertained on weekends. An awesome cook who kept a spotless house, her husband, daughter and grandbaby all clearly adored her. A life far from over.

   My own grandmother was thriving happily long after she’d raised my mother and my two uncles. A wildly irrepressible, sexy mermaid of a woman, my grandmother had dark tan skin and glossy black curls. I remember her decked out in vibrant colors and shiny things whenever she showed up during my childhood. A fantastic swimmer, she always lived close to the water. Super-independent and active, she divorced my grandfather after she turned 60. I often overheard her tell stories about socializing with the seniors and dancing with her new gentleman friends. Having had kids didn’t seem to have slowed her down much. And if my grandmother hadn’t had my mother? Well, then where would I be?

    Not here.

    I heard regret in the voices of these women I’d loved. And I did wish their experiences had been different for them. At the same time, how could the new young lives they created by having children be mistakes? And for that matter, how could I be a mistake? Unthinkable.

    I felt indebted to my mother for carrying through with her pregnancies.

My mother sparked the fire that became my life and lucky for me, she kept it going before I could.

     I didn’t ask about how I came along in her life story because pregnancy and childbirth were two of her least favorite subjects. At times she briefly mentioned prolonged and severe morning sickness. Losing weight instead of gaining during her first trimesters. Thankfully my mother didn’t take the popular medication thalidomide for relief. Originally sold as a sedative, doctors recommended thalidomide to many during their pregnancies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The drug was soon found to be toxic for the growing fetus. Thalidomide during pregnancy injured thousands of newborns worldwide, and before long, parents sued the drug maker, German company Chemie Grunenthal. She spared me all that.

    Even with her troubles she became a devoted, if at first reluctant, mother. Up until I was about four years old, she taught reading, math and music from home. Later, she resumed teaching sixth grade at local public schools. I’d seen her successfully teach children whose parents had nearly given up on them ever learning how to read. She also tutored exceptionally bright ones whose parents wanted them to skip grades. I watched her remain nonjudgmental about each child’s abilities, while being persistently supportive of their natural intellectual growth.

    Boys other teachers had unkindly labeled as the worst of the “bad kids” blossomed under the grow-light of my mother’s individualized attention. They seemed to love her. One particularly notorious little boy no one else wanted in their classroom easily learned to read with her. He’d been sent Upstate from the City; rumor was he’d illegally released big snakes from the Bronx Zoo somehow. I didn’t know if the tale was true or only meant to scare the girls away. But I did notice how he seemed to adore my mother. Honestly, no one could figure it out. She was simply magical at teaching children.

    My mother patiently taught me a surprisingly large number of skills, too. Like with her other students, she didn’t criticize or praise me in the process. She got me to read before kindergarten. Showed me how to grow vegetables, herbs and flowers. Taught me to write, draw, cook, sew and clean the house. To sing in the church choir and play the piano at home. Gave me picture books to learn basic French, Spanish and German words. She taught me the rules of countless games and how to play all kinds of sports. So many other things over the 17 years I lived at home that I can’t name them all.

    I understood her motivation clearly. She talked to me about not knowing how the world might turn out during any lifetime. Whether diseases, famines or wars would come and go. Who might win and be in charge, or if the victors would use the same language I did. Maybe they wouldn’t. Learning skills was a simple matter of survival. And she wanted that for me.

 “When you have skills,” she said, “you can get by. No matter what comes your way. Change is inevitable. So be useful.”

   If it was indeed a mistake for my mother to have me, it was one she followed through on with a lot of effort. I wrote about my love and gratitude for her in my 10th book, a poetry collection titled Comorbidity, Expressions of Love (2019).

   In my mind giving birth is unquestionably divine. Creating the future. People I loved described parenthood as the end of dreams. I thought of it as the beginning of mine. 

    Things will be different for me, I promised myself.

    Having Superbaby would become the joy of my life.”

 

— Book excerpt from When the Baby Is Not OK: Hopes & Genes by Jennifer J. Brown, copyright 2025. Available in print and ebook editions in most places books are sold.