Our columnist is saying goodbye to her column after three years. It's time to take stock of motherhood again.
As a mother, you have your hands full. Photo by: imago
After three years, this column is coming to an end; not that fatherhood ever stops giving me material for columns. If it were up to me, I could keep writing here forever. But sometimes it's good to end things after a certain time. For a columnist, the last column is a challenge. It shouldn't be completely banal or too pathetic. Something important, but casual.
And to take the pressure off right away: I couldn't think of anything worthy of an ending. Maybe it's because I'm about to give birth to my third child, but he doesn't want to be born like this. Maybe it's because I can barely think because I wake up in the night drenched in sweat and then toss and turn for hours, like at the end of a pregnancy in the summer.
The two children, who have been living outside my body for a long time, naturally still expect me to float towards them like an elf in the morning and patiently chase away their often noticeable bad mood, for which we parents always seem to be responsible.
So we tell jokes, we kiss and tickle the kids awake, we sing. We make fools of ourselves when we'd rather be making coffee while the three-year-old's tantrums and the six-year-old's loose-toothed puberty slap us in the face to the point of slapping us. But that's the job.
“The mother is an action”
And yes, it is not child's play. “Mother is an action,” I recently heard the lead actress of the series “Queenie” say. Because even if many people are allowed to call themselves mothers – if only through a biological or legal process – motherhood and its quality are ultimately defined by actions. Even if the title of “mother” is a kind of act of faith, a laurel wreath of good qualities that is simply placed on one's head. But everyone who did not have a “good” mother knows that this word alone is not enough.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I thought a lot about what kind of mother I could be. I personally didn't have a mother who wanted to be in my life from birth until the birth of my children. As an adult, that wasn't a big deal for me because I had other people who wanted to play her roles. So I was a little surprised that, as a pregnant woman, I suddenly felt envious of those women who had their own mothers by their side to support them during and after childbirth.
Being a good mother isn't that easy. Which is a good thing, too. I fail constantly because of the demands I put on myself as a mother. It's not nice, but I'd rather fail and try again than have no demands at all. And when I think about it today, I know exactly what kind of mother I want to be. Someone who, even after all the tantrums, after all the parents' evenings, after all the tears, the bandaged knees, and the pasta with tomato sauce, is present and, above all, welcome in her children's lives.