World’s Okayest Moms

There’s nothing like feeling a wave of nausea to focus the mind on meeting the moment. Specifically, where can I vomit most discreetly at this moment, I wondered, because there’s no time to spare. And, secondly, she’s a mom, this person in front of me— she’ll understand. She has had at least five children, so vomiting is part of the picture.

I excused myself from the interview, walked behind a line of laundry, right next to a trash heap and a bug-eyed chicken, and threw up. My colleagues kindly checked on me, I drank a minuscule sip of water and returned to the dirt courtyard to ask my semi-structured survey questions. Why hadn’t I asked her when she last drank water? She was breastfeeding through most of the interview—I know she needed some clean water.

It wasn’t the baby I was focused on, however, but the four-year-old older sister sitting beside Mama like bark hugs a tree. Left behind from preschool, barefoot and sporting a decidedly dirty dress, she seemed an unlikely candidate to ever attend school. It breaks my heart to say that, but there’s only so much a mom can do. Her older brothers, 7 and 11, were the priority if Mama, a widow finding little more work than occasional laundry, could save the $4 required to pay their school fees next year.

Her 18-year-old daughter was also breastfeeding throughout the interview. Her “marriage” didn’t work out.

Meanwhile, back home, my own 18-year-old daughter is feeling the awful pressure of AP exams, finals and late assignments, prom and its unspoken standards, service hour expectations, graduation and a party, packing up childhood, moving to an entirely new state and lifestyle, and anxiety about succeeding in life as a grown-up.

Threaded through the aching for my daughter’s heavy feelings are distracting thoughts about whether my other daughter was able to catch up on delayed obligations for school, and whether I had registered and paid for my son to attend upcoming events in North Carolina, South Dakota and Japan, and the ropes course in Sandy Springs. Probably not. “World’s okayest mom,” as my favorite t-shirt says.

And…Josie, where are you? We have a pressing date tomorrow. It’s Mother’s Day. Our children are making us brunch, the way they have for the last six years. We will get dressed up in our finest. We will have origami napkin designs, bacon and fluffy pancakes, or perhaps very flat ones. But you’re not there. I’m not there either, but Madagascar is a lot closer.

It can’t be real. What are sweet Georgie and Sophia feeling? Are they numb, horrified, utterly alone, angry, hiding cauldrons of grief, just fine, all of the above? Josie, what can I say to them for you? What anguish you must have carried knowing the end was sooner than it should be.

Mothers must work in teams…otherwise, how can we bear it? The weight of caring so much, carrying so much—it must be shared. Whether we have a lot of riches or very little, we can’t care for our little ones (no matter how tall) alone. The burdens we face and feel criss-cross every boundary: national, racial, educational, financial. Whether wealthy or poor, healthy or sick, American or African, we all hold the pain and joy of every one of our children, and all at once.

The mothers who went before us are a lifeline. How I would get through a week without my mom’s advice and kindness, I do not know. I can’t list all that she has taught me, including how to be generous and gracious and how to make a good bœuf bourguignonne.

And I have other mothers too: my stepmother Mary Ellen who taught me not to explain, not to let them intimidate me, and how to live the lake life. My godmother Auntie Carol, who taught me to get rid of all the extra so I could focus on one problem at a time, and also how to go to bed early. My second mom Gloriann, who taught me how to use food to bring people together and how to laugh at life, and also how to find the best silver at a thrift shop. And my aunties, who taught me that sometimes the thing to regret is not being rash but waiting too long, and also how to wear a designer dress.

And all of these women have cleaned up more vomit, literal and otherwise, than they deserved to. We do whatever we have to, to love and provide for our piglets and clean up after them as needed. As Tatum asked me recently, distraught, “Who will hold back my hair when I throw up at college?” We wipe away vomit and tears, and we smile from afar when they dance—in stilettos or barefoot.

That barefooted 4-year-old in the courtyard won’t have the opportunities that my children have or even what her neighbors have, but she has a good mom who will take care of her till the day she can’t. And in that, she’s rich.