As a speaker, I am able to express who I am through my work. The lessons and insights I talk about may be universal, but they are from my own life experiences and have provided me the privilege of creating a rewarding career through sharing them with corporate audiences. As well, a year ago I started SilkensActiveKidsMovement.com. We are working with local champions across the country to create opportunities for kids to be active. I have watched in amazement as the idea of supervising kids in unstructured play has gained momentum and begun to unfold, with children playing actively once a week in parks and gymnasiums across this country. This professional focus can be demanding of my time and, always, of my mental energy, but it constantly challenges me to keep growing, to share what I know, and to find more effective ways of helping people be at their best.
The doubts and restlessness I feel with parenting have never been there for me in pursuing my athletic and professional goals. There, I am in familiar waters, guided by passion, ambition—and my mother’s example, for she lives in this restless part of me. The intensity of my passion comes from her—of this I am certain. She was a creative, expressive woman, bursting with expectation. She was contagious; her music and energy filled every crevice of our home. Her sculptures and paintings articulated her deepest longings. There was a part of her that the demands of motherhood could not touch: she would not be consumed, would not disappear in the role of mother.
The other night I went through my hope chest and came across one of the rare pictures of my mother—most of our family’s albums seemed to have fallen through the crack of a split family. The photograph was taken on her fortieth birthday. Her blond hair cascades over her shoulder, her long and lithe body leans into the camera. What struck me most were her eyes: they look so clear, full of light and expectation. At forty she was looking at a world of possibilities. She was in art college, had a new lover and had left her marriage. There is a lightness, a clarity in her eyes I never really observed back then. Now, I notice it because I recognize that light in my own pictures.
But there was another side to my mother. She was a woman of extremes, all light and all darkness. Dark, she was self-absorbed, oblivious of her children’s needs, sharp-tongued and sometimes thoughtless. In her moments of light, I still remember the feel of her soft bosom against my own thin and bony chest. She would fold me in her arms after school, ask me about my day, know immediately if I was anxious about something at school. Her ability to read my moods was truly remarkable. And perhaps that is why it was painfully confusing when she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—respond to me.
One moment we were learning to macramé together, the next she couldn’t even look at us. We were her greatest joy but we were also the noose around her neck. We stole her time, her opportunity for greatness, her creativity. My memories of my mother have no grey.
When I turn that intensity I inherited from her inward, setting impossible standards for myself, I recognize my mother’s self-talk. When I am restless or impatient with parenting because of what it drains from me, I see the potential of recreating something that I would rather avoid. I understand now that it is in mothering we grasp truths about our own mothers that otherwise might never have been unearthed.
When my sister and I were pregnant, a few months apart, we both expressed the same fear, “What if we become our mother?” Absurd, frightening and impossible, it is a thought that has brought many an expectant mom to her knees. Neither my sister nor I want to tip the other way and have self-desires override the maternal and the nurturing. Here I am in unfamiliar waters, charting a new course, unable to use my mother as a positive role model.
Perhaps I will never fully see all that is good in my mother, because I don’t yet know how to. I don’t yet know how to let go of the bad so completely that I can see the good in all its clarity. But having children has made me better able to understand her, to acknowledge her struggles, her inability to resolve the conflicts, her need to leave her family to pursue her own dreams, her own life. Looking at her pictures, I have flashes of insight, moments and feelings I recognize, and it is at these times I truly rejoice in her. I understand her doubt, and how that doubt can destroy many of the deepest joys in parenting.
• • •
My doubt is waning. I feel more confidence in my mothering as my children grow. I know I am a natural mother. Perhaps not in my ability to bake, not in my ability to stay home with my kids. But in my ability to tune in to their needs, to understand them as human beings, to love them unconditionally—of this I have no doubt. (When my mother read this piece she said, “You sound like a mother who is driving herself nuts.”)
And yet I am also learning to strike a balance. This Christmas, my children’s father took them for several days. It was the first time since they were born that I had been alone in my own home for five consecutive days. I glimpsed another way of being. These days unfolded with a melodic ease. The days were my own, my thoughts developed to completeness without the interruption of a small voice asking for milk. I stayed up late writing, thinking, organizing, knowing that the next morning I would not be woken up at 6 a.m. by the sweet voice of my five-year-old, asking to crawl into my bed for an early-morning cuddle.
It’s true, I can’t seem to “pause” my dreams. I feel a deep responsibility to live up to my potential in my work and in my community, as well as with my children. I ask for complete thoughts; this is perhaps my greatest need. A need for uninterrupted thought. I wake up at five in the morning to have a few quiet hours to exercise or simply sit on the couch and experience some alone time. I would rather experience sleep deprivation than not have time alone. In my fortieth year, I created the mantra “It’s all about me.” I said it with glee as I traded in my fully practical but very worn Subaru for a slightly used, much swankier Range Rover. I say it every Tuesday night as I leave my children with a babysitter so I can practise yoga. The time in a handstand, my yoga instructor Elizabeth spotting me lest I crash unceremoniously to the floor, is time that I empty of all the worries, the doubt, the conflict. Some things I do are just about me, making me more capable, more aware, and able to bring more Silken to everything I do.
• • •
I hold an image before me, an image of a woman lying on the beach in her bikini, the sun falling gently across her body. Her posture is totally relaxed, her face absolutely serene. In the background her kids are playing joyfully; I can hear their shouts of glee, their ripples of laughter. This is my happy place. Somewhere I go when I am struggling to find time to write those last few e-mails or standing in the kitchen with both of my children needing my attention and the telephone ringing. Perhaps I will never have that look of serenity on my face. Full of conflict, frustration and unbelievable joy, my experience of motherhood is an intense and miraculous journey. And then, I don’t really like beaches anyway.
It was just a casual moment, but it pricked at me, a sharp reminder of an uncomfortable sensation I’d managed to keep at bay for a long time. A friend had come by to pick up my teenager, who was heading off to the skateboard park with her son. I leaned into the car window and offered to pick the boys up after they were through.
“Oh, no, it’s okay,” said my friend. Her teenage daughter was in the front seat. Mother and daughter were going to have lunch together near the skateboard park and would meet the boys afterwards. No problem.
Going out for lunch together. As they all pulled out of the driveway, I waved and thought, Oh yes, that’s what it’s like to have a girl. With a daughter, there’s an opportunity for a mother to be more than a ride. With a girl, there’s a chance to be a friend.
It had been a while since I had reflected on that, though there was a time when I thought a lot about having a daughter. Growing up, I always believed that I would give birth to a girl. I couldn’t have explained why I assumed this—I just did. I had been lucky enough to enjoy a tight relationship with my own mother, which continues to this day. It never occurred to me that I might not experience that same closenes
s with a daughter as my own life unfolded.
The birth of my first son, Dylan, didn’t interfere much with my fantasy, but by the time I was pregnant with my second and last child, I was thinking hard about what I would do if I didn’t have a daughter. Partly it was because I was married to a man with four brothers. I used to feel just plain sorry for their mother, who was certainly treated with respect and occasional affection, but for the most part, entirely ignored. Sometimes I wondered what I would do with my few pieces of sentimental jewellery—a teenage promise ring, a pair of diamond studs no bigger than the head of a pin—if I didn’t have a daughter. Of course, jewellery was hardly the issue. I can’t even tell you where those shiny bits are now.
What I fear will be missed as time goes by is the comfort of an intimate relationship with my sons. I know what I have with my mom. I feel it every time we share a cup of tea. We sit together on the couch, discussing the small, insignificant details of our day with an ease born of blood, but also of reciprocity. It’s a two-way relationship; we both want to be there.
Though I knew I would love my children ferociously every day of my life, regardless of their gender, I wondered how they might feel about me if they were both boys. No doubt they would love me back on some level—even the most acrimonious relationships between mothers and sons are rooted in that.
But would they want to spend time with me? Would they tell me when a relationship broke up? Would they phone just to talk about some little thing that happened at work? And most important, as the years went by, would they go for lunch with me, keep me in the loop of their emotional lives?
Then Daniel was born and there was no time to ruminate. Besides, when kids are little, regardless of whether they are boys or girls, much of mothering is the same. There is bathing them, and rubbing Nivea into their rough, red cheeks in the winter, and reading about Piglet, Pooh and the Heffalump. Every so often, I’d be particularly reminded they were boys and I was not. I noted in my diary when Dylan, who was maybe four, said, “Mom, wouldn’t it be great if you were a boy and then we’d all be boys”—a startling statement. I thought I was the only one who noticed our differences.
There was another time in my life when I was outside, looking in. I had grown up with two brothers, both quite a bit younger, and I always felt that distance. The brother closest in age to me died when he was a young man of twenty, just as the space between us had started to close. Could it be that staying connected to a boy as he became a man would always be beyond my reach?
• • •
For a long and busy time, however, such issues were set aside in the rush of music lessons and soccer practice and making sure the boys’ lunches were packed and their teeth brushed. Once, when Dylan was ten, I tucked him in at night, pulling the bedclothes up around his shoulders. He asked, sleepily, how it was that moms always know the right way to do things.
“Like just then, when you fluffed my blanket out and then it settled down on me. It felt so good.”
That was all I needed to hear to know my place was secure. In the daily nurturing of those boys, in the spontaneous back-and-forth jumble of living together, my fears receded. There was much joy in our lives. I was a single parent when the boys were small, and so the three of us did everything together. When I went running they pedalled alongside on their two-wheelers, and the sight of their wobbly heads encased in mushroom-like helmets kept me going when I got tired. Dylan always helped me fix the vacuum cleaner, which seemed programmed to suck up valuables, and Danny always saved a place for me on the couch when we watched videos. I came to treasure the nape of a little boy’s neck after a fresh haircut. I don’t know exactly what the highlights would have been if the boys had been girls, but I do know this: there is nothing more gratifying than two boys competing to make their mother laugh.
Still, as they got a little older, I began to notice things. My women friends with daughters started shopping together (and not just to get school supplies). Though I get about as much pleasure from shopping as I do from eczema, I felt the pinch of absence, like being excluded from a club I yearned to join. I tried to talk the boys into doing something together to make that feeling go away. But it was hard to think of what we could all enjoy. I don’t skateboard; they don’t do aerobics. I wasn’t up to making a bigger effort at golf. Then, one day, it didn’t matter how we might spend our time together—that time had evaporated. Dylan got a girlfriend and, in a sigh, the pattern of our lives changed dramatically. She wanted to watch movies at her house, and so they did. He was hardly home.
That old saw, “A son is a son till he takes a wife, a daughter’s a daughter all of her life,” started roiling around my brain, a bit of a taunt, and I didn’t like it. So in the last year or so, to distract myself from that hollow feeling that gets bigger as they get older, I have been trying something new. I have begun to consciously think about what it is I have gained from my relationship with the boys, what we have, and not what we don’t, or won’t. I look for meaning in places I didn’t used to.
It’s a survival technique, to be sure, but as I watch them move further into their own lives and away from mine, it is increasingly useful. Recently, I had an experience with Daniel, who just turned sixteen, and it seemed to represent the sum of my experience as the mother of boys.
It was a Saturday morning and he was sleeping in. My mother never let me sleep in when I was a teenager—there were household chores to do, after all, and the best part of the day was racing by. But I’ve aways thought sleeping in was a good thing for teenagers, and so I let it happen.
Around about 11:30 a.m., though, I often wander into his room with a stack of freshly folded laundry to put in his dresser drawers. I’ll poke about, clearing things up, maybe humming a little just to hint that afternoon is about to spring. He ignores me, and I leave. But this time, as I was preparing to exit, he stopped me.
“Mom, Mom, Mom,” he said. “Come back. Sit on my bed.”
So I did. He kept his eyes closed, and said nothing. I told him a thing or two, like what I’d make him for breakfast if he would deign to rise. Maybe we should get you a haircut, I said, and, oh, Ben phoned and wants you to call him. Danny huffed some morning breath at me and murmured his assent. I stroked his head, and stopped talking. In that moment, we were together and happy with each other. I knew that, and I chose to value it.
It doesn’t sound like much, does it? Compared to a cozy chat over a glass of Chardonnay and a Caesar salad on a Saturday afternoon in the restaurant at Holt Renfrew, a ritual treasured by my mom and me. And it feels like even less when I wonder how those moments will emerge in the years to come, after he leaves home. If a mother’s comfort with boys is in the easy silences, the unexpected hugs, what happens when you’re no longer living together?
Already, my older son has moved out. Just after he turned eighteen a few months back, he went to live with his dad, having understandably grown tired of going back and forth between two houses. I see him once a week at Sunday supper; occasionally I persuade him to let me drive him someplace, and we grab a bite. He’s good about it, really, he is.
In return, I am trying hard to give him the distance he needs, to listen to him talk about his own choices, his own life, without insisting I be integral to it. I learned about letting go by watching my mother with her only surviving son, my younger brother. She has always wanted more from him than he was able, or eventually willing, to give. Through her, I have learned that what defines “enough” in a relationship is largely determined by the person on the receiving end. I may even have come to accept that if there is a hole, something missing, I will be the one to get out the shovel and look for a way to fill it.
So now, when it has been a while since I’ve seen or talked to my older son, and the younger one has entered a period of inscrutability, I take a deep breath. I think about what the boys have given me, and I count those blessings, one by one. They have always let me be myself, rarely criticizing me, though often poking not-so-gentle fun at my fo
ibles. They have humoured me, and they’ve let me hug and kiss them on the neck, even in front of other people. The boys have given me much laughter, still do, and probably always will.
These days, when something nice happens, I virtually bronze the moment. Recently, Danny and I were driving in the car and one of his favourite tunes was blasting from the CD player.
He was singing along madly and at the end, I said to him “This song will always remind you of being a teenager, Danny. You’ll hear it when you’re thirty and forty and you’ll think back to when you were in high school, playing football, hanging out with your friends.” I looked over at him and smiled.
He looked back at me, right in the eye, and replied, “And being in the car with my mom.”
You’d have to be the mother of boys to know this, but that was enough.
part three
A LONG ECHO
For me, the pleasure of work and a cruel sense of imperative are mixed together, shaping a force that I wrestle with every day. Having been raised within a tolerantly Calvinist family, I am motivated by guilt, by desire, and by the ineffable satisfaction of completing a difficult task. This may be the main reason that I write. The challenge of building ideas and of communicating those ideas with the sharpest and clearest of words requires an ascent to a summit that most don’t want to undertake. There is immense satisfaction inherent in the journey, and of course, considerable pain. It is not at all easy to live as a writer, especially here in Canada.
And then there is the other work I cherish and toil at: teaching, talking, doing research, and chipping away at the quotidian tasks of a woman in academia. The plateau of writing breathes an air more exhilarating than academia’s grubbier potion. The hallways and offices and classrooms of a university demand an unrelenting attention, compounded by theoretical wars, identity politics, a thick glass ceiling and a burgeoning concern for technology and funding.
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