Notes on Grieving and Mothering in the USA

With my mom's recent death, I honor her "hero's journey" this Mother's Day.

An indescribable combination of courage and panic emerges when your worst-case scenario materializes in an instant.

Upon hearing confirmation over the phone of my mother’s sudden cardiac death just three days before Thanksgiving, I immediately thought to myself: “You have to accept this.” 

As Joan Didion poignantly and incisively documents in her 2005 exegesis on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, the passageway to acceptance is winding and full of mirages. Nearly six months on from my mother’s ultimate Irish goodbye, I can’t properly assess my degree of acceptance on this day—my first Mother’s Day without her.

On the night of November 22, 2021, I realized quickly that shock and disbelief enable you to function in the aftermath of reality’s most unthinkable contours. Reality is unrelenting and unforgiving, at least as I’ve always known it. But I think it’s best to get acquainted with it, since it mitigates collateral damage.

My mother, Julia, was unflinching in her realism. I could always trust her not to lie to me or to minimize the severity of the jolts of life. She was highly familiar with unimaginable jolts, and she knew they could only be properly managed and carried with honesty and candor.

Despite shouldering a lifetime overload of grief and stress, my mom also maintained a biting sense of humor. Case in point, I detected a twinkle in her eye when she flatly told me at 8 years old that I would never be tall enough—or anywhere near skilled enough (she kindly omitted that part)—to play in the WNBA. (She was encouraging about my more suitable endeavors, including writing). This candor strengthened our bond, since I knew, at the very least, she respected me enough not to lie to me. I could trust her.

My mom was never of a fan of hagiographies, and she was as inexpressive as she was pensive. Her inner world, in many regards, will always remain mysterious to me. I suppose this makes her more interesting. I think she realized that hagiographies and exultations of the dead ultimately dehumanize those they intend to honor.

That being the case, I honor her today by offering a glimpse into the kind of multidimensional human being she was to me, wherein I acknowledge that motherhood was only one of her defining facets. It was a role she relished, but as an American mother to two children, one of whom (my brother) was chronically ill from infancy, the trials of her motherhood proved far more brutal than necessary.

The commercial messaging around Mother’s Day in the Unites States feels subtly dystopian. Like the cloying signage below, which I snapped at a local Marshall’s last month, the nation’s criminally porous and threadlike social safety net has led to a perverse and damaging celebration of mothers as paragons of self-sacrifice. Mothers are framed as super-humans who should remain demure amid constant caregiving. However, the occasional “wine mom” reference playfully acknowledges the cracks in the veneer—wine as a salve for an astounding lack of social supports.

The pressure on mothers to perform under such exploitive capitalist conditions is palpable—their unpaid and unsupported labor barely holding up the empire as it withers under the de facto rule of rapacious billionaires and millionaires. If that sounds like a dramatic and over-the-top assertion, then you likely have no frame of reference for why the Gilded Age theme at this year’s Met Gala was as fitting as it was appalling.

Of course, race, social class, ability, and their intersections profoundly shape experiences of mothering—not all mothers endure the same level of marginalization and vulnerability. However, the pressure to mirror ideals of motherhood envelops all mothers to varying degrees. This is something I have only witnessed secondhand; my own relationship to motherhood, like many US millennials, includes delaying the possibility for myself for socioeconomic reasons. (Alas, this is a tale for another time.)

In short, the dominant discourse around Mother’s Day in the United States signals an awareness of the underlying distress tinged with a plea to continue the status quo of self-sacrifice. Here’s some flowers and breakfast in bed in lieu of universal healthcare; paid parental leave; federally (and generously) subsidized childcare; and robustly funded public education. With the Supreme Court predictably yet still stunningly planning to gut reproductive rights (sidebar: SCOTUS has been a nightmare since 1789), to make such hardship and requisite bodily trauma mandatory constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

My mother was a proud union member (CSEA) and advocate for workers’ rights. I have a fond memory of her meeting with Working Families Party organizers in our North Buffalo living room in the early 2000s. As she graciously executed hosting duties, I could tell the discussion energized her. She was unapologetically political. She always spoke up for what was fair and just, not just for her own children, but for others as well. I believe she felt a deep sense of solidarity with all those who parent, and she knew such solidarity required empathy. She was acutely aware that the obstacles she faced were part of a wider struggle.

I think having a son with a brain tumor and epilepsy radicalized my mother. She knew no caregiver of a sick child should also be forced to contend with a bureaucratic maze of a healthcare system designed to maximize profits for shareholders and boost executive compensation. She believed healthcare was a human right. Full stop.

On several occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at the height of my brother’s illness and hospitalizations, I remember my mom yelling over the phone at health insurance company representatives. She wasn’t yelling at the representatives as much as she was yelling at a country that would allow this to happen. Moreover, despite economic precarity remaining a specter, we were fortunate enough that one of my parents always managed to have a job with good insurance. Even if you number among the “lucky ones”, it is still untenably stressful to navigate such a sadistic and criminal system tying coverage to employment status.

I appreciate that my mom did not suppress or conceal her righteous anger in the face of injustice. She modeled for me how anger makes sense, and that anger can be a necessary driver of social change. Her intensity on those calls also yielded the answers she needed; she knew you had to be forceful to be taken seriously.

At her core, my mom knew it simply did not have to be this hard. If she were a Canadian mother, she never would have been called to such a fight. She desperately wanted in her lifetime for the US to adopt a public, universal healthcare system. (My dad has always remained emphatic on this point as well.) She realized it would be one foolproof way to alleviate suffering for millions of Americans. It pains me that she did not live to witness it, and the ambulance and hospital bills my dad received following her death carry a particular sting.

I was struck recently by comedian Jessi Klein’s characterization of motherhood as an unrecognized hero’s journey. She describes that for mothers “…it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there.” This framing helps me see my mother as having embarked upon an especially harrowing hero’s journey, which contains depths and contours I can never fully know, much less capture in words this Mother’s Day.

Today, I honor the hero’s journey of Julia O’Sullivan, who taught me with courage and candor, how to fight like hell.