Motherhood

When my ex-husband asked for a divorce, we had been together—between dating and marriage—for 17 years. 

We started seeing each other at 18, and I grew up with his family as my own. His father officiated our wedding and told me after the ceremony that he thought of me as one of his biological daughters. His wife treated me the same. My own mother died when I was 24, and my mother-in-law gently filled in some gaps without ever attempting to take my own mom’s place. She was there for the birth of both my children and took care of me afterward when I was recovering from C-sections and too doped up to hold my children. We went on more than one trip just the two of us. We frequently had lunch. 

When the messy divorce process started, my soon-to-be ex was acting erratically. He told me and everyone else how happy he was to be able to go out and hook up again. He said he no longer had any interest in being sober and, in my presence, threw his 12-step book in the trash. His mood was unpredictable and often scary. He admitted to being suicidal, and I began to fear he was having some kind of psychotic break. 

I called my mother-in-law. I told her about how he was acting. I begged for her intervention. I didn’t want him living alone with my kids. She told me my concerns were unfounded. She was his mother and a psychologist who specializes in couples, so I told myself I was the one overreacting. I was the bad guy here, as he repeatedly insinuated. I thought I was paranoid. I agreed to shared custody.

After making it through the divorce process, his mood stabilized a bit once we each moved to our own places. At least I didn’t see any volatility, and my young children didn’t report any. He began dating his assistant, who helped him run his business and his life. I went to therapy and was diagnosed with complex PTSD and a panic disorder. I started taking medication and the past started making more sense. 

Through it all, I tried to keep a relationship with my now ex-mother-in-law. After all, she was still my kids’ grandmother. She told me she still cared about me, but when I talked to her, I felt her holding back. I couldn’t talk to her candidly—about everything from my husband’s addictions and infidelity, to our marriage communication issues to issues of parenting, friendship and the grief over my own mother’s passing—like I did when I was married. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything she knew about my life and how little concern she had about what I reported to her. 

By the time my marriage had been over for almost a year, I made a decision: I no longer had a mother, biological or otherwise. The anniversary of my mother’s death was in the beginning of May, a week before Mother’s Day. My ex-mother-in-law had been texting and calling me, asking when we could get together. She offered to take me out for a pedicure, lunch and to come play with the kids at my house. I’d been avoiding her and she was onto me. I scheduled a call. 

“You’ll always be my kids’ grandmother,” I told her, “but I need our relationship to end.”

I’d never broken up with anyone before. 

“When I told you what was going on,” I said, “you didn’t believe me.”

She talked about how when I’d come to her, she didn’t understand, which was why she didn’t do anything. I nodded as if it was a satisfactory answer, but it was another in a series of enabling excuses she made for her son. 

“You don’t want us to contact you anymore?” she asked, speaking for her husband, something she often did. 

“Not unless it’s about the kids,” I said. 

She began to cry. “I feel like I’m losing a daughter,” she said.

“You are,” I said, letting myself cry in front of her for the first time since the divorce. And I said goodbye. 

On Mother’s Day, my first as a single mom, I took my kids to the beach. We had an awful time. My daughter ran into the ocean with her clothes on and had a meltdown. My son wouldn’t go near the water, so I abandoned him on the sand to keep my daughter from drowning. He cried because he wasn’t having fun all alone in the sand. I bought cinnamon rolls, which were disgusting. I stripped the kids down to nothing in the back of my car, wrangled their sandy bodies into clean clothes and then we drove the hour and a half back home. We were in the car longer than on the beach. I got home exhausted and washed my filthy children, fed them and felt thoroughly sorry for myself. 

I found out later my ex, his girlfriend and his parents had spent Mother’s Day together at a garden. They’d been playing doubles pickleball. The girlfriend often had lunch with my mother-in-law. They probably got pedicures. They were planning a vacation together. How easy it was for her to find a new daughter, I thought, while I now was truly, for the first time, motherless. But I don’t want her. She told me for years to stay in a marriage in which I was being abused and mistreated. And she continues to make excuses for his behavior, his actions, his words, even when they are flung in her other children’s faces, her husband’s face or her own. 

I still miss her. I miss her so much—more than I miss her son. I still cry over the loss of her and my father-in-law, long after my tears for her son have stopped. I don’t know if there was ever a universe in which I got to keep them, but they did once promise me.

In college, my ex was accused of sexual assault. Why didn’t I run? I believed him. Why? Because, while we sat outside his university hearing, my father-in-law called me a saint, joking I was good to stay. My mother-in-law said that if it came down to it, they’d choose and keep me instead of him.  

He was found “not responsible,” and I believed the ruling. I believed my in-laws—that I was good to stay, that it was the right thing to do, to stand by him, the wrongly accused. They called me a saint for years, and, as a non-religious person, it didn’t occur to me until after the marriage to question that saints become canonized when they die, losing themselves in the service of God. Their son was their god. They wanted me lost. 

I wrote her a letter I do not intend to send, which said, among other things: “I’m so mad at you. I miss you so much. I love you. I know you’re gone, though. You’re not my mom. You were never my mom. You’re his mom. I had a very good mom. She never would have left me if she had any control over it whatsoever. I was loved unconditionally. At least I have that.”

I can’t have a mom, but I am a mom. I can be a mom who believes her children when they tell her they’re scared or hurt. When my children cause pain—because everyone makes mistakes at some point—I can help them repair the damage they’ve caused. I can tell them that helping is what makes them good, not believing they are right. So, while I still mourn my moms, I can learn from them, their mistakes and virtues. 

I’m not, nor do I want to be, a saint. 

Love

Mental Health

Breaking Up With My Mother-in-Law Was the Hardest Part of My Divorce

Just after my 50th birthday, with three kids finally out of the house, I found myself single and without a career, broke and struggling. Then a friend offered me a job to be a driver. Twice a month, I would join another driver to transport a few duffle bags of homegrown Colorado weed across Middle America to Missouri. I’d get paid $2,000 in cash in St. Louis upon delivery, and my friend (we’ll call him Bob) backed the deal with an assurance that if I hit any legal trouble, he would cover all the fees.

The job was never something I thought I would do, but I desperately needed the money. Somehow, I just knew I would be alright and things would work out if I said yes. A gut instinct. It was a family business anyway. Bob and his wife, Amy, and her son Eddy ran the trade together. So I accepted his offer and took my first drive in October of 2014.

I parked my car in the grocery store lot on time at 7 a.m. and waited to see Bob drive up. I would drive whichever car followed Bob’s, alongside a man I’d never met. Bob had said I would make more than the other driver because Bob needed me to play the part of a seasoned Midwest mother with a black lab to round out our cover. We were to be a retired couple hitting the casinos for a weekend vacation. 

A car with Florida license plates stopped.

“Hey, partner,” I said, opening the back door to let “our” dog, Lenny, take the back seat before I took the front.

The man smiled and said his name was George. He was clean-shaven, dressed in a collared shirt and long pants. I had on a loose-knit sweater and my best mom jeans with a shawl slung over my shoulders to fit the image of a mature woman who might play bridge or lap the mall. 

We headed east on the interstate with our car in the lead. Bob and Eddy were in the decoy car with Colorado plates following behind. George and I corroborated our story, but we didn’t talk about what was in the car, how much or what it cost. It was easier if I didn’t touch anything and knew as little as possible. If I had given any thought to the amount or the risk, I would have panicked, so I kept myself busy smoking cigarettes and going over the safety measures. Everything was triple vacuum-sealed and then placed in charcoal bags to throw off any scent in case of a canine unit.

George had been driving for Bob for two years and took the first shift heading east across the Colorado plains. He began to chat and told me he was raised in New Hampshire, lived as a boat bum in Florida and was now semi-retired in Denver, skiing weekdays and painting cars out of his garage. I liked his East Coast drawl, which leant to the collection of stories about everything lobster. He was nice, and I listened politely to an hour of old-timey stories until we found his playlists of ’90s grunge rock. Rage Against the Machine played and gave the two of us something to focus on until my time to drive.

As George drove, my role was to be on the lookout for speed traps. Bob had advised looking out for state troopers parked above underpasses or hiding behind billboards to clock speed. I also played up appearances. If we spotted a state trooper in the distance, which George often inconspicuously pointed out, I would do “womanly” or “touristy” things to look normal, like file my nails or point at the horizon and feign amusement for God knows what since Nebraska was as flat as a pancake. We drove past state troopers not a mile over or under the speed limit, heading on to our night stay after a 12-hour drive.

I took the morning shift and headed to our first drop-off point in Iowa City. George eyed our scheduled rest stop to ensure that we were clear of the police, and we were instructed to keep moving down the highway if there was any doubt. After the all-clear, Bob backed into the empty spot next to us and George got out to help Bob unload the small bag from our trunk to his—ten pounds of bud worth $12,000, I found out later. Bob drove off to take an upcoming exit, and we headed past him to the following rest stop. The wait was unnerving, but after 20 minutes, we received the mile marker in a text message and began the last four-hour stretch down the gauntlet toward St. Louis.

We made it to the city in the early morning. The highways were surprisingly crowded as I gripped the door handle of the passenger seat and tried to focus on Bob in the decoy car who had taken the lead. There were so many cars and after hours of Middle America dead land, the traffic moved around us at a careless pace. Cars crossed lanes without warning, semis flew past in the far lane and we were flowing in traffic, adjacent or ahead of at least one cop car. I knew it was irrational to be pulled over in traffic, but my heart still fluttered. The people were restless after the tragedies of Ferguson, and the city screamed with police presence. 

Bob took an exit toward downtown and led us to a popular casino’s parking garage. He was a high-roller with some professional experience in cards and no one looked twice at his bi-weekly visits. We circled up to the top floor of the parking garage and pulled into vacant spots among the fully packed garage. The men got out and headed to unload the bags as I let Lenny out to play as a distraction. The trunks clicked close, and Bob came around to give me a hug. He left me with a box of Hot Tamales and a box of Junior Mints instructed for George. I put the boxes in my purse. Bob and Eddy would head to the final drop-off, but our part was done. I could finally exhale. Had I done it? Was it that easy? I wondered. I opened the box of candy to see a wad of $100 bills and a bag of seven pre-rolled joints. I lit one and the two of us chain-smoked as George made the tight corners down nine floors of the parking garage.

On the road, George called his son to tell him that everything had gone smoothly—that he was safe. We hadn’t talked about family in the 16-hour journey, but now I knew we both had adult kids. I found myself wishing I had someone to call and tell I was safe, but there was no way I was going to call my kids. I didn’t want to involve them. Though the money was needed, it didn’t make me proud.

The amount in the 120 pounds of duffle bags was worth over $200,000. If caught, I would have been booked with a felony with a minimum of 10 years and up to life in prison. I didn’t acknowledge it. I kept my mind on the music and the story, and I didn’t allow myself to think anything differently. It worked, and I drove again. Then again. Then again, tri-weekly, for four more years. Each drive became a little less tense and more routine. George and I were never pulled over, never had an accident and never raised suspicion from onlookers in crowded places. We never talked about the if. 

The more I drove, the less I dwelled on a moral compass—what I saw was medicine. It was really after I met the dealer in Iowa City that I realized I could finally tell my kids, who worried but supported my ways of making money. I had expected some over-tatted ruffian or a guy in a suit like in the movies to be at the other end of the Iowa drop. Instead, there was a farmer with his wife and baby, whom he had brought to a fast-food parking lot we’d begun meeting at instead of the rest stop. I cooed at the baby while the weed exchanged trunks and thought about my kids. This was his way of making a buck, as it was mine. 

He told me later how he was trying the best he could to make a life for his family. Trying, like all of us, to do what he could with what was offered in order to survive.

Adventure

Drugs & Alcohol

Mom at the Wheel: My Time as a Drug Runner in America

Growing up, my mother and I were really close. My father walked out on us when he and my mother divorced, so, naturally, she and I had a pretty decent relationship. We moved back to her hometown when I was nine and, when she wasn't working, we usually watched movies or went for scenic drives. 

Sometimes we'd have long talks about our family or what was going on in the world. I had a parent, a mother and a friend. I'd come home from school and I'd know that after all the constant bullying, low test scores, struggling to pay attention, I could confer with my mother. There would be no backlash, no ridicule. I depended on her for that.

After I'd turned ten, she met an abusive and narcissistic asshole. He made our lives a living hell. He'd come home from work, sit down, have a beer and watch TV. Three beers turned into ten pretty quickly. He had a nervous disorder and was prescribed an entire list of medications, none of which mixed well with alcohol. One time, I went downstairs to find that he was using a floor lamp as a baseball bat. He aimed a Mason jar at my head like he was hitting a fastball. 

My mother and I were both the victims of his hate.

They were married after four years but finally separated around my junior year of high school. It felt like a completely different world with him gone. He ruined our lives for seven years. However, there was a part of him still with us after he left: his political beliefs.

My mother was a moderate Republican before she met him. And when I say moderate, I emphasize moderate. She was mostly indifferent about the government, never really going out of her way to worry about politics or bring it up around others. She lived in her own bubble. She had hobbies and dreams, she was pretty happy. And when she wasn't happy, she didn't focus on her unhappiness. She'd go through the emotions she needed to and she'd move on. However, she was impressionable. 

He, on the other hand, was insanely right-wing. He worked at a correctional facility and often came home spouting racist obscenities about the inmates. He'd say the hard "r" at the end of the N-word without remorse. I remember asking my mother why she was dating a racist, and she'd go, "No, he's not racist, he just deals with a lot at work." He was very clearly a racist, and I don't know how she could excuse it so nonchalantly. 

His interests started to meld into hers. She started hating illegal immigrants (even though she had been an illegal immigrant for a while until she finally got her citizenship). She said she wasn't racist toward people of color, but that she was just "prejudiced," as if being racist and prejudiced wasn't a possibility—or even the same thing. She would call Latino communities "chimichangas" without a second thought. Seeing both of them carry on like this made me extremely uncomfortable.

I was taught from a young age about that ancient way of thinking, and here it was, in my own environment, the fire being fueled by the people with whom I shared a house. I not only avoided having my white friends over, but I also avoided having any friends over. I didn't want my white friends thinking that I was the spawn of racists, and I didn't want to take the chance that any of my friends in other ethnic groups would be mistreated by my mother and her boyfriend. I'd come home and hear them agree with each other while they watched far-right propaganda on TV, and soon after, I'd hear them get into a screaming match. He was a domestic abuser. They hated each other. I don't know how they were together for seven years. But it seemed like their whole relationship was built on the hatred of each other and the hatred of other people.

After he'd left, I was just finishing up my junior year of high school, which was also my last. I had enough credits to graduate and I wanted to escape the area I grew up in—I wanted to meet new people and, most importantly, I wanted to get a break from my mother. She was still the person he'd transformed her into, even after they separated. I was pretty much a stereotype, at least, for the military recruiters in my area. I was a lower-class white kid wanting an escape.

Sure enough, I joined, shipped out to training, came back home for two weeks (most of that time being spent with my girlfriend), and prepared for a new life. I had a pretty decent run in the military after that, and my mother was doing fine. Until my time in the military came to an end.

By the time COVID-19 hit in January, phone calls with my mother were getting shorter. It was like she was a completely different person. I'd see her post on Facebook saying the virus was a PSYOP or that the 5G towers were spreading it. It was like my mother had been replaced with another person. She started talking to me on the phone about someone named "Q" and how she thought JFK Jr. was still alive and was fighting an "underground war.” She even told me that there were secret underground tunnels run by Satanist, adrenochrome-injecting, Democratic pedophiles.

At this point, I was fully convinced that my mother had lost it. 

My time in the military, however, was shortened by the unluckiest of circumstances. I took the honorable discharge and got out. I needed a place to stay until I got back on my feet. So I went home. I was living with her. I couldn't walk in the kitchen to get food without her shoving some Q-adjacent propaganda down my throat. We'd get into countless arguments, back and forth, to the point where I started avoiding her. I hated talking to her. I hated the sound of her voice. The conspiracies got worse and my tolerance weakened. I was starting to lose my mind.

Then, the election came. Joe Biden won. My mother and her boyfriend were both in disbelief. Everything their Q had prophesied about Donald Trump staying in power and about the "war against the Deep State" finally coming to a turning point—it was proven false in one night.

Today, in the spring of 2021, we rarely speak while living in the same home. She tells me the vaccine will kill my girlfriend and me. She pleads for me to stay home to "protect against Chinese military invasions" through Canada. She and her boyfriend "gear up" with survival supplies and ammunition. She even asked me if I was ready to fire at police or military if Biden "ordered them" to come take away their guns. 

One of us will blindly fire at another American to uphold a conspiracy theory on the internet. One of us will not. And that is, sadly, the difference between us.

Politics

Insiders

Tearjerkers

I Lost My Mom to QAnon

I grew up in the ‘80s, when bangs were big and shoulder pads were plentiful. My parents fought to make a living after a huge economic recession in the early years of my life. I remember the feeling of fear and uncertainty as my dad searched for work. 

He worked as a roofer in a rather remote area of the Texas Hill Country. Roofing in the August heat in Texas has got to be one of the worst jobs on the planet, and my dad sacrificed sleep and sanity in an attempt to keep us fed. Eventually, he transitioned to building whole houses, and the stress level just went up as he tried to hold it all together while learning the business the hard way.  

At the time, the custom home business wasn’t booming. People were struggling financially, as the country climbed out of the hold of the recession. My father interviewed for different jobs in other states that might provide more security, but nothing panned out. Instead, he and my mom carried on fighting for work, trying to make ends meet and raising three kids. It was feast or famine. Some months we had money, and others we had next to none. 

My mom grew up in Scotland, and was by nature very frugal. I know most people who grew up in this time remember plastic tubs being reused for all manner of leftovers. My mom took it up a notch, also washing out Ziploc bags, bread bags and anything else she thought could be put to use. She didn’t buy herself anything—I’m fairly sure she wore the same clothes for the first 15 years of my life, and I never knew her to go shopping for fun. 

Looking back now, I realize how hard my parents worked, not only to keep my brothers and I fed and clothed, but also to keep us free from their grown-up worries. We played hard, making use of every inch of the property we lived on, finding adventures as we explored the forest next to us. 

As kids, we weren’t conscious of how much money we had, but we did understand how we were doing based on my parents’ stress level and where we shopped. Most weeks, we strolled down the generic aisle that grocery stores had in those days, with the depressing black-and-white packages that blandly stated what type of food they contained. We would also go to the day-old bread store, where we’d sometimes find very little and other times score big loaves of bread (cinnamon raisin being the most exciting variety), and even pastries. 

On one of these occasions, my brothers and I were following my mother around the tiny shop. We’d finally made it to the checkout line and were desperately hoping that we were almost done with the shopping. 

A little old woman with a different skin color than us was checking out in front of us, trying to buy a loaf of bread and a chocolate cake. She pulled out her cash to pay, and realized she didn’t have enough for both. Her face fell, as she put her head down and paid for the loaf of bread, leaving the cake behind as she hobbled towards the door with her cane. 

I watched my mother, who had barely enough money for our bread that week, pause for only a moment, looking from the chocolate cake on the cashier’s shelf to the back of the woman slowly making her way out of the store. She slapped her money down on the counter, picked up the cake and ran—with the sweetest gift of love and sacrifice in chocolate form—to the little lady getting in her car outside. I remember the look on the woman’s face: sheer surprise and wonder that someone had noticed her pain and had stepped up in compassion and kindness.

It was a simple gesture, and we didn’t go hungry because of it. But my mother’s sacrifice that day stuck with me, and I can still see that little woman’s blissful face in my mind. To me, it’s a symbol of the way compassion and sacrificial love can break down all sorts of barriers, even if it’s just in the form of chocolate cake. I am convinced that for that woman, it wasn’t just cake that my mom gave her. It was the gift of being seen, loved and given hope for another day.

Acts of Kindness

My Mother Taught Me Generosity Even Though We Were Poor

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

LGBTQ Voices

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

Lord help us: They say it's not polite to talk about religion or politics, but—hey—we've already talked politics, haven't we? Prayer's up.

Religion

In “To Zion,” the fourth track from Lauryn Hill's 1998 debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the acclaimed artist sings to her infant son, Zion David. A love song about her devotion to her baby, it shares her overwhelming gratitude for being chosen by God to be his mother and her determination at the height of her career to foster the life that was growing inside of her, even while everyone around her advised her not to.

My earliest memory is of my mom singing "To Zion" to me as a toddler. It’s what she had chosen as her song to me, her youngest child and only son. When my mom got pregnant with me and then gave birth, she had very little in common with Lauryn Hill. I wasn’t her first child, and she also wasn’t at the height of her career or in her early 20s. No one had even told her to terminate her pregnancy. But my mom had suffered a heavy trauma a year before giving birth to me, when she miscarried a son late into her pregnancy. I imagine that the lyrics, “See life for you, my prince, has just begun / And I thank you for choosing me / To come through unto life to be,” were something of a mantra and that the song served as a kind of testimony for her. 

By the time I was 4 years old, she raised my two sisters and me as a single mom. My parents had separated, and while my dad largely remained the financial provider of our family, my mom was our emotional and physical caretaker and primary parent. She wanted more for us; she wanted us to be different from the rest of our family and from most of the people she had grown up with in her tight-knit working-class Italian American community, where family was first and everything else came second. My mom also believed in treating my sisters and me like autonomous human beings, which to this day is still a radical concept for many people raising children. 

But from a young age, it was clear to my family that I was queer. We didn’t have the right language, so the word that was often used about me was “gay.” The two eldest grandchildren in my family—both boys—had come out as gay within a year of each other before I was 5 years old. While my family wasn’t as accepting of my cousins as they are today, when I began showing signs of being different, they saw, accepted and loved me. The thing is, I never saw myself as gay as a child. I knew that I liked boys but, importantly, I also knew that I was a girl. 

How do you verbalize that to your family as a young child with no concept of what being trans is?

Like all queer and trans kids, I grew up in a world of mixed signals and confusion and, from an early age, I learned to live in my own secretive and guarded world as a defense mechanism. Most of the experiences at my Catholic elementary school were brutal—I struggled to express myself and came home crying every day, always about the same thing. I had been called a slur or been made fun of for being flamboyant and feminine. Often, I would cry into my mom's lap about not being treated like one of the girls, confused by the fact that no one saw me as the girl I saw in myself.  

I was unable to communicate that to anyone, even my mom. But during one of these crying spells, she told me something that has stayed with me throughout my life. I had two options: I could either change and try to act like the rest of the boys, or I could continue to be who I was and deal with the fact that some people would make fun of me. She showed me that I had a choice to make, and she didn’t shy away from the fact that both choices would be equally difficult, full of sacrifices on both ends. Through my tears, I told her that I would choose the second option, that I would continue to be myself and learn to deal with the torment that I was encountering outside of my home. 

Most Italian American homes have strict gender roles that are imposed upon children from a young age, but I was raised with a different set of values and customs. Italian American daughters are raised to carry the emotional burden of their families, whereas Italian American sons are raised to be little princes who rule their mothers’ hearts and, in return, act as their mothers’ protector for the rest of their life. My mom grew up the youngest of five children with three older brothers, and throughout her childhood, she had grown to hate what she perceived as their misogynistic masculinity and laziness. 

She vowed as a mother that regardless of her children's genders, she would raise them equally rather than imparting a different set of rules to her daughters and her sons. But as the common phrase goes, “We make plans, and God laughs,” and my mom faltered in her fortitude, trying her hardest to be true to that promise she had made to herself many years ago. For the most part, my sisters and I were raised with the same values and rules. 

My mom imparted the same wisdom to all three of us, encouraging us to be true to ourselves, to have integrity and to protect one another and those we loved. But I still was my mom's little prince, babied as both the youngest and her only son. In return for being treated like royalty, I held up my end of the centuries-old contract and protected my mom throughout my childhood and teen years. Whenever there was a fight or any bit of criticism wielded toward my mom, I found myself going to battle for her. Where my sisters fought with my mom tooth and nail, I only saw the good in her and canonized her a saint in my heart. And when I fought with my dad tooth and nail, my sisters canonized him a saint in their hearts.

When I was 20 years old and living in Brazil, I decided that I could no longer run away from my womanhood and started coming to grips with the fact that I had to transition. I felt ready to do it, but I hesitated over a very specific question: After my mother tried twice to have the son she wanted so badly, was I robbing her of her divine right to have this experience? 

A week later, one of my sisters called and told me that if I ever decided to transition, our mom had told her that she would be ready because of the way the culture had shifted. I remember yelling at my sister, telling her to tell my mom that I wasn’t trans and that I was offended by that line of thinking. When I finally calmed down, I found myself overwhelmed by my mom's love, acceptance and ability to see me once again so clearly. 

Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve of 2015, I FaceTimed my mom from my apartment in Brazil and came out to her as her daughter. She accepted me, with a sense of calm and grace that she has always carried with her in the most intense moments, and simply told me that she loved me. Soon after, she was posting on Facebook about her three daughters.

It’s now been six years since I came out as trans, and my relationship with my mom has evolved into something that isn’t exactly quantifiable or definable. I know that I am her daughter and that she sees me as such, but I also know that in many ways, I am still her son, something we both acknowledge and laugh about often. To this day, I don’t look to my mom as someone who I have built my womanhood from; instead, I look to other trans women with whom I have a similar shared experience of womanhood.

Of course, I am still in many ways my mom's protector, the way that all Italian American sons are. But as her daughter, I see her vulnerability and humanity in ways I didn’t understand until I became a woman. We will never be able to fully relate to one another's experience as women because we have come to our womanhood differently, but we share an unbreakable bond of sisterhood as mother and daughter, and we share an unbreakable bond of love and understanding as mother and son. 

The older I get and the more my relationship with my mom evolves and grows deeper, I relate heavily to the lyrics in “To Zion”: “And I thank you for choosing me.” I thank God and the universe for choosing me to be my mom's child and to have the only unconditional love I’ve ever known in my entire life.

I Am My Mother's Daughter—and Her Son

One of my earliest memories as a young child was sitting in front of an open fire in my pajamas after a bath, my hair wrapped in a warm towel to ensure the henna conditioning treatment would take. I was maybe 6 years old, and I remember feeling so completely cosseted as my mother went through this Friday night routine that gave her (and my older sister and me) such pleasure. It’s just one of the many warm memories I have of my mother but, as an adult, I began to reflect and ask myself: Did my mother love us too much? Is that even possible?

I know everyone says it, but my mother was special. She honestly enjoyed helping people and went out of her way to do just that whenever she could. As a physician, her patients and colleagues alike adored her, but nothing came close to how much she loved her children.

From a very early age, we knew that we were her world. Her love was palpable. We were her everything and we basked in her affection while somehow avoiding being completely spoiled. Becoming a mother later in life (for that time) had finally fulfilled her, and her love for us was evident to all. Especially my father.

My parents had married later in life than was the norm in the ’70s. Mum was 38 when she walked down the aisle, and Dad was 35. Both physicians at a renowned hospital, their future looked bright as they said their vows and celebrated with family and friends over a five-star banquet. Within three years, they had bought a home and were parents to two daughters, and life looked sweet.

While my mother was outgoing and personable, my father was quite the opposite. He was something of a lone wolf and never really had friends, only colleagues. He was set in his ways, having been a bachelor until his mid-30s, and I often thought that he considered his wife and children to be minor inconveniences. Perhaps as a couple, they had rushed too quickly from being newlyweds to being parents. Or perhaps he felt pushed out, unable to compete with us for my mother’s attention and love. 

When the hospital that they both worked at closed down, my dad made the decision to accept a position in Australia, the plan being that we would follow once he was settled. It never happened and, after a year, he returned home, but something had shifted. 

A year as a single parent had made my mother focus even more on us, and it was as if my dad barely existed. During his absence, my mother had acquired a rotund Labrador named Tara that we adored, but my father was severely allergic; and having only one lung due to a childhood illness, breathing difficulties were not something he could afford. But we loved the dog, so the dog stayed. Shortly after his return from Australia, he accepted another position in a hospital a few hours away from home, buying a second house closer to the hospital to reside in midweek. He came home every second weekend, and we spent weekends visiting him, too, but his absence made him even more estranged from us, and when he did come home, the atmosphere felt alien. The groove that my mother had established with her two girls was well and truly formed, and my dad, it would seem, existed on the periphery.

Of course, the inevitable eventually happened: We grew up. It seems that my mother hadn’t thought far enough ahead to factor that in and, by the time we were young adults, her desperation to keep us close was apparent. When my sister moved out, my mother got her a new dog to try and entice her back. It didn’t work. She was ready to strike out on her own, something most parents would be proud of. But my mother was lonely. 

By this time, my parents were pretty much living separate lives, and when they finally made the decision to end their marriage officially, the situation hit my mother with full force. She had always instilled strong moral values in us, but she had spent so much time loving us unconditionally that she had neglected to encourage us to establish life goals and prepare us for the day that we would become adults. This resulted in us being unprepared for making decisions about college courses or careers. We both ended up marrying young and having families at a young age without ever fully realizing our potential. 

She also failed to see the damage it did to her marriage, and while my father certainly had some blame in the decline of their relationship, I always felt sorry for how much of an outsider he must have felt within his own family. After their separation was finalized, we rarely saw or heard from Dad. He had put us firmly in the “Team Mom” category without ever once even trying to speak to us about the situation.

It was some years later, after both my parents had passed, that I began to question my mom’s unwavering commitment to her daughters at the expense of her marriage. After her death, I found some paperwork that led me to discover that before she had met my father, she had been engaged to another man who had broken her heart and called off their wedding just a few weeks before it was due to take place. Not long after this heartbreak, she had discovered she was pregnant and felt unable to keep the baby, given her circumstances. It was the 1960s, after all. The baby was put up for adoption, and she never told a single person at the time. She was devastated by the entire ordeal and, when we found out, her unwavering love for us suddenly made sense: She had obviously been grieving the loss of her firstborn for so many years. It was heartbreaking to me that she never felt she could confide in our dad, her husband. I’m sure he would have understood and supported her, but obviously, that was a gamble she was not willing to take. 

My Mother Loved Us Too Much

My hands tightened around the steering wheel as rain pelted the windshield, my arms trembling from the fear clawing at my gut. I shifted the car into reverse and slowly backed out of a narrow parking space sandwiched between a concrete pole and a large SUV. My kids were arguing over a toy in the backseat, one of them screaming in anger. When I turned around to see what all the commotion was about, I heard a loud scraping sound and the crunch of my rearview mirror folding outward as the car dragged against the concrete pole.

"Mommy, what happened?" my daughter shouted from the backseat. I slammed on the brakes, and my mind went blank. A loud buzzing sound rang like a bell in my head, preventing me from answering her. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words caught in my throat as I fought to keep from vomiting. 

Once home, I inspected the damage (the entire right side of the car was scraped and dented) and worried about what others would think when they saw it. I couldn't tell them (or my kids) what had really happened—that I had been in the throes of a panic attack. 

Instead, I concocted a completely different version of the story—one that blamed the accident on thick sheets of rain and limited vision—because this was something that normal drivers would understand. But my husband knew the truth, and he wasn't mad. Instead, he hugged me and asked if I was OK.

Even as a teenager, I never liked driving and dreaded the day I was old enough to get my license. While all my high school friends were drooling over fast cars and counting down the days until they could take their exams at the DMV, I was busy making excuses to avoid the entire process. My parents didn't understand my hesitancy because I hid my driving anxiety well, so they sent me to driver's school. Surprisingly, it wasn't as scary as I'd anticipated, and I did well with my lessons as long as I stuck to quiet roads and avoided major highways.

It wasn't until I had an accident years later while driving home one afternoon with a massive migraine that my childhood anxieties were triggered. All the old fears came back—my fear of dying, rejection, getting lost and being alone. My vehicle was totaled, and while I escaped unscathed, I never wanted to get behind the wheel of a car again. Of course, at the age of 22, this was not an option since I had to go to work, but I awoke with a new sense of dread each morning, knowing I had to drive.

Driving was only one of several phobias that plagued me. When my husband and I started a family, the challenges of motherhood amped up my anxiety. I felt far more vulnerable since I was responsible for keeping my children safe, which led to excessive worry, constant fatigue, frustration, irritability and guilt. I also feared that my disorder could be passed down to my children, either as a genetic predisposition or from the unhealthy environment of fear that I was raising them in. 

My anxiety had reached a point where I could barely drive and could no longer enter unfamiliar buildings unless I was accompanied by someone else. Simple things such as grocery shopping, running to the drugstore, filling up the car with gas or flying on a plane were no longer options. I also feared the dark, tall heights and large crowds, all of which made me feel trapped. 

My world was shrinking by the day and impacting how I raised my children. 

Fortunately, my kids were too young to realize how heavily I relied on my husband to run errands or shuttle everyone to extracurricular activities. He often called out of work to drive me to appointments, deal with repairmen at our house or take the kids to school functions. Although he worked two jobs, he handled my disability without complaint. I hated being dependent on him but also felt incapable of changing. The phobias outweighed my guilt, burdening me with the shame of being less than an ideal mother and wife.

Anxiety had not yet been diagnosed as a disorder during that time—people like me were considered weak, lazy, cowardly or immature. So I kept a mental list of excuses to hide my disability whenever I was called on to do something beyond my comfort zone. If the PTA board needed me to run off-campus errands for school programs, I told them I couldn't because I had a doctor's appointment. When the other moms invited me over with my children for playdates, I lied and said my car was in the repair shop. If the kids needed chaperones for field trips or a ride to a friend's house, I feigned a stomachache or told them I had already made other plans that day. I broke into a sweat and my heart raced at the thought of getting behind the wheel of a car and approaching a major highway. I tried to drive to the mall several times but was overcome with nausea and headaches. Eventually, I gave up.

Once my kids were old enough to see through my excuses (but still too young to have a driver's license), their frustration mounted, especially when they missed functions that I couldn’t drive them to. They asked why I never volunteered to carpool like the other mothers did or why I wouldn't attend extracurricular activities unless their father also participated. My oldest teen lashed out one day in anger when he was stranded in the rain at an outdoor event and I refused to pick him up. He accused me of being an inept mother who was selfish for expecting their father to run all the family errands. I let him think the worst rather than admit I struggled with crippling anxiety, because I didn't want him to see me as a weak or abnormal mom.

Over the years, my kids realized their mother was not like the other mothers they knew, and they stopped asking for my help. The upside was that my disorder forced them to become more independent; however, it also convinced them that they couldn’t rely on me for anything that involved driving or going to unfamiliar places. So I did other things to compensate for my disorder—I volunteered three days a week at my kids' school (it was one of a handful of places I felt safe going to), catered classroom parties, baked special homemade treats, spent countless hours helping with homework and school projects, allowed them to have their friends over as often as they wanted and rewarded their success in school with little gifts. Of course, I always dropped whatever I was doing to be their sounding board and their friend, but underneath it all, I still felt inadequate because I couldn't do the simple tasks that other mothers did so effortlessly for their children. 

Everything changed when I met another mother my age who suffered from similar anxiety symptoms. I was amazed that she could laugh about her fear of driving or how she admitted going half a mile out of her way to avoid making a left turn at a busy intersection. She, too, had a ready list of excuses to avoid doing things outside of her comfort zone. Still, the difference between us was that she acknowledged her disability, referring to herself as a "perfectly imperfect" mother, and approached her disorder with a sense of humor. It also helped that more research was being done on anxiety disorders and celebrities took to social media to discuss mental illness openly. Stigmas were being shattered, making it safer for mothers like me to shed our shame and admit that it was OK to say that we were not OK.

In the beginning, I was too embarrassed to admit I needed help, but once I did, my doctor convinced me there was no shame in taking medication for my symptoms. She taught me different ways to decompress: deep breathing exercises, long walks, yoga, warm baths, playing in the yard with my dogs, listening to calming music—whatever else brought me peace. I also learned that it was OK to say no to the things I didn't want to do and communicated my feelings to my husband whenever I felt a panic attack coming on. He often talked me down from that frightening ledge before I fell.

The next step was to talk about my disorder with my adult kids. They were very supportive, and it explained so much to them. I couldn't do certain things expected of me as a mother, but they understood that I did my best to be there for them in every other way possible.

I see things differently now and have since learned how to give myself grace. An anxiety disorder is an illness and, like any illness, I have to take care of myself until I feel better. However, it doesn't define me or diminish my role as a parent.

Yes, motherhood is chaotic and messy at times, but I have both hands on the steering wheel now, ready to move forward, one mile at a time. 

How My Anxiety Disorder Changed the Way I Raised My Children

Parenting in the social media age is torture. 

No matter what decisions you make around how much or how little you’ll share about your family life online, there are people out there with opinions. Try as we might to steel ourselves against what others think and say about us, if even the tiniest bit slips through, it can set up shop in your head.

Now, if it’s that bad for parents, think of what it might be like for stepparents. As a stepmom of about a decade, I can tell you that people have plenty of opinions about stepparenting—what it should and shouldn’t look like and what is and isn’t appropriate. They are not afraid to share those opinions, either. In fact, they aren’t even afraid of stepping in and getting involved.

In my case, it was kindergarten graduation that started the trouble. In truth, it could have been any event because there are so many of them sprinkled through those first few years of school. At that point, I’d only been in my stepson’s life for about two years, but I couldn’t have imagined being anywhere that day but in that uncomfortable, too-small elementary school auditorium seat.

His mom wouldn’t be there, however. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, but my understanding was that it was a scheduling issue at work and there was nothing she could do. I felt very bummed for her at the time.

It was a great day, with adorable kiddos singing sweet songs and receiving little paper caps and diplomas. I took pictures of our little guy with his friends, his teacher and his dad. Getting to document it all quickly became my favorite part of stepparenting in those early years.

It was only with my boyfriend’s blessing that I’d ever share anything on social media, as was the case with any of the other kids in my life who weren’t my own. I’d never had a bad experience sharing photos of my stepson before. So I wasn’t expecting to get a phone call about them.

The chain of events went something like this: A mutual friend of my boyfriend and his ex’s saw a picture I posted and mentioned it to her. We were still social media friends at the time, but for whatever reason, she hadn’t seen the photos herself. She and her friend determined that the photos were somehow a sign of me being too comfortable.

Then, in a move I still, years after the event, cannot quite figure out, she took the photos and posted them to her own account. There was a beautiful, heartfelt caption about the day, which ended with a passive-aggressive comment about no one feeling it necessary to take photos of her with her child there. 

I must’ve read that caption 300 times before I passed my phone to my boyfriend, quietly befuddled. He scrolled the comments and saw friends reinforcing the idea that she was there, even though she wasn’t, and saying how immature a co-parent must be to keep their child’s mother out of such a significant memory, et cetera, et cetera.

I didn’t publicly engage with her, the same way I have chosen not to in similar issues that have come up in years since. I’ve accepted that for her, social media is a tool to win the popular vote. As a stepmom, that’s a race you can never win, especially on social media. If you love and care for your stepkids too much or are perceived as being too involved with their lives, you’re slammed for playing house with other people’s kids. If you don’t post about them at all but post about your partner? You’re trying to erase the kid from their lives, pretending they don’t exist.

The thing is, stepparenting doesn’t look the same way in any two situations, let alone any two households. I love my stepson with my whole heart. I nod politely and square my jaw when people tell me I can’t possibly love him like my own because I don’t have any children of my own. I pretend not to hear comments about how if mom’s around, I shouldn’t be. I swallow back swear words when I want to lash out because that’s not doing anyone any favors and, simply put, I’ll stress myself to an early grave trying to change society’s ideas about stepparents. 

I also know that he has two parents who would move mountains for him. He doesn’t need me to be his mom, and I’ve never once tried to be. In my world, stepparenting looks like being a safe adult for this kid, in the way an aunt or uncle or grandparent could be. I’m here to love and to offer guidance and, sure, once in a while, I step in and do some hands-on parenting. But I’m not here to step on toes, not here to replace or outdo.

These days, the kid isn’t making as many appearances on my social media. And I’m sure people have opinions about it. They will as long as we’re all living and breathing. It’s not about them, however. It’s about him. The kiddo is approaching those awkward teen years at a rapid rate, and he’s got a right to figure out how he wants to be represented online. Old stuff is slowly getting archived. I don’t expect my parenting to be reflected on the internet, but maybe if I’ve learned anything in these short-long years that have passed, it’s that if you’re doing it right, the parenting is reflected in the kid. And so far, I feel like all of his parents, however they feel about each other, have done a damn good job.

Ancestry

Being a Stepmom in the Age of Internet Parenting Is a Special Kind of Hell

On this year’s Mother’s Day in the U.K., I told my boyfriend to leave and go visit home. I told him to see his mom, give her a hug and spend some time with her. 

He was set on staying with me and making sure I wasn’t alone, but I insisted. I said that it was important to me; it was important for him to show appreciation for her and hold her close. 

That opportunity was taken away from me almost two years ago, in July of 2020. I was 20 years old. This is my second Mother’s Day without her, my second Mother’s Day when all I see in town are signs, advertisements, window displays. Every day is Mother’s Day. Show your appreciation for the most important woman in your life. 

It is a reminder of the absence. Well, a bigger reminder. The small ones come in the form of a new job or a funny story or their favorite color on a mug in the supermarket. Things that make you think of them, things that you want to share with them. It reminds me of the reality of my situation. That I have to become someone new, someone who she will never know.

The day itself is strange. I feel like I have awakened with something pulling me back down. My best advice to anyone experiencing this and grieving on these days is to stay distracted. But it’s a shame when we don’t have the option to go out for a coffee or a meal, in case the visual reminder is too much. We can’t check social media. For me, this has been a big problem—Facebook posts pasted across my timeline. Other people are celebrating their mothers. They’re out for brunch and drinks and Mother’s Day dinners. I’m jealous. I’m a bit angry. It doesn’t help me. 

There isn’t a right or wrong way to combat this difficult day, but it is important to remember that you are not alone. Losing someone so close to you can be a truly isolating experience. You end up feeling like the only person on the planet who is suffering. But we are not alone. Mother’s Day marketing misses out on a huge group of people: people who have lost mothers, people with absent mothers, people who have no contact with their mothers. It is a broadly experienced pain, and you will never be alone. 

After this year, which I found to be a struggle, I am going to try and redefine Mother’s Day for myself. This is easier said than done, and trying to be positive about something such as this will be near impossible. But I want to. For her. I should think of her and remember the moments that make me smile and laugh. I should think about her leaving chocolate bars on the kitchen counter for me and my brothers. I should think about us dyeing each other’s hair and listening to Madonna. The good things. I want to be able to celebrate her as others do. Beyond all of the pain is the woman who raised me. She impacted me more than anyone else ever has or ever will.

I need to remember her. Everyone who is grieving at this time of year should try this. Redefine. Light a candle, pour libations and talk out loud to them. Talk to friends, to family. I’m lucky enough to have siblings who are experiencing the same struggles as me. But if, like me, you still struggle and cry, that’s OK. The grief we feel is the unspoken love that we didn’t have time to share.

Grieving is not a straight line. I find myself facing new challenges every single day. I hear her funeral song being played in shops and, sometimes, it destroys me. Recently—and I mean very recently—this began to change. I caught myself singing it absentmindedly. I stopped myself, but then I just carried on. It was in my head for a good few hours. It was a breakthrough I did not expect to have but a welcome one. It has less of a negative connotation in my mind now. Sometimes, it even makes me smile. And I want to think about her and smile as much as I can. 

Losing a mother is one long goodbye. A goodbye that I was experiencing even before she passed away. It is one goodbye that I will never stop experiencing. But I’m going to try and see the hellos, not just the goodbyes. For her. 

Mother’s Day Without My Mom

I’m standing at the check-out line at Costco with my teenage son. Our cart is overflowing with household supplies for an entire family. I am watching the total go up until it reaches the final number: $437. I quickly scan the contents of my wallet, and then, without thinking, I pull out five $100 bills. My son looks momentarily surprised. “Mom,” he says, “Where did you get all that cash?”

I tell him the first thing that comes to mind, the first thing I think of that seems plausible: “I sold something on Craigslist.” Sometimes, we lie to protect our children. Sometimes, our children also pretend to believe our lies to protect us. He doesn’t ask any more questions. 

In reality, the cash is whore money, a sum equal to one hour with one client. This fact silently fills the space between us. We both pretend not to feel it.

My older kids—including the one with me at Costco—know that I’m a sex worker. I told them years ago when my public persona as a writer on a sex work beat grew too big to hide. My husband and I took them out to dinner, where we explained that I write about the online sex work that I do (camming, independent porn production, phone sex). They asked a few questions but didn’t react strongly; they were expecting me to tell them I was pregnant again, and news about what I did to pay for the dinner they were enjoying was less exciting. 

That night, when I “came out” to my kids, I told them the truth about my work. A few years later, I transitioned to seeing clients in person, but I didn’t mention my switch to criminalized labor. To an extent, the nature of my contact and relationship with clients is not their business. But more importantly, I didn’t want to burden them with information that would scare them or would make them feel like they had to carry my secrets. 

While I have raised my kids in an accepting environment where they have had exposure to all kinds of people, including those in the sex trades, I cannot create an entire world for them. Despite my best efforts, they still exist in a culture where “your mother is a whore” is one of the most biting insults. The idealist in me works hard to normalize sex work to such an extent that my children’s children won’t be able to understand why this is an insult. Perhaps this is a bit optimistic, but maybe their children’s children or their children’s children’s children? The realist in me recognizes that right now, my occupation puts the very thing that I care most about—my kids—at risk for shaming, harassment or worse.

Anyone who has spent much time around sex workers recognizes that we are a diverse group of people who come from all walks of life. Despite the cultural insistence that no one would enter the industry for reasons other than force or desperation—a narrative shaped by second-wave feminists’ anti-sex work rhetoric—the reasons for entering sex work are as varied as the people who occupy the profession. 

What is also clear to anyone familiar with the industry is that it is overrepresented by people who suffer from other forms of marginalization: those who are disabled, neurodivergent, trans, queer, working class, poor, non-white, mothers or other forms of caretakers, etc. While this fact is often interpreted to mean that only those with few options would do sex work, this interpretation fails to recognize that the sex industry serves as a safety net for those who are excluded from conventional forms of employment. It offers flexible work with a low barrier to entry to folks who have been failed by the state, suffered systemic discrimination and/or have responsibilities or disabilities that preclude them from working full-time.  

I came into sex work in my mid-30s, after leaving my first marriage and the career I spent my entire adulthood up until that point trying to build. My world had turned upside down, and I was in a financial crisis that was only amplified by the fact that one of my children started to have serious mental health issues—so serious, in fact, that taking care of her became a full-time job. At the time, I had a boss who tried to be supportive but who couldn’t count on me to follow through with the tasks he assigned. I would spend hours at work on the phone with doctors, social workers and the school district, trying to stitch together enough resources to keep her safe. I also missed days of work after sleepless nights in the emergency department of the psychiatric hospital, and I often left early to pick her up when she was having psychotic episodes at school. Keeping her alive was my priority, and when my boss let me go, I understood why. 

Online sex work, the form of sex work I turned to first, became a way for me to make money on my own terms. I didn’t have a boss; no one complained if I took a day off; and I could work between crises. I would sit in the waiting room or on the phone with doctors while posting advertisements for my services on Twitter, sexting for pay with my clients or updating my OnlyFans account. In other words, I could keep my family afloat when my time was limited and most of my emotional resources went to parenting. What’s more, hourly rates were higher than in any other job I’d had (despite having two graduate degrees), allowing me to work fewer hours and be home when I needed to be.

My career in sex work has been complicated, but it’s absolutely intertwined with motherhood. I did what I needed to do so that I could be the mom I needed to be. I don’t regret it. I was able to hold my daughter’s hand when she needed it, and years later, I was able to be home for her younger brother who has special needs when school after school told us that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they didn’t have the resources to help him.  

I’m not the only mother with this story, but I can only speak for myself. While I know I made the right choice for myself and my family, I also know that the world, by and large, doesn’t agree. The United States, where I live, is in the midst of an intense moral panic that conflates all sex work with sex trafficking and is actively working to criminalize all aspects of the sex trades under the guise of an anti-trafficking agenda. We also still live under the cultural weight of Christianity’s Madonna/whore complex, which sees motherhood and sexuality as diametrically opposed. I know that should someone want to use sex work against me, they could attack my fitness to be a mother: What respectable mother engages in prostitution? And they would probably be supported in doing so. 

State intervention and violence vis-a-vis my kids loom large over my head, despite the fact that motherhood is my most important role. I live under the threat of losing my kids should the wrong person find out what I do to pay for their needs. Perhaps only other sex working mothers would understand the sheer panic that came over me when I found a sign that one of my teenagers had made as a joke that read, “Nudes for sale.” That night, I woke my kid up in a panic to stress that if anyone saw the sign, my husband and I could be under suspicion for trafficking, and given my profession, we’d likely be jailed. 

Perhaps only sex working parents would also understand why having our son’s preschool complain about his shoes, clothes and lunch—nitpicky things that all schools send home notes about—feels extra weighty when you know that any investigation into how you live your life could, given a particular judge’s biases, be used as evidence that you are unfit to parent. While it is generally believed that adults can both work and have sex without it negatively impacting their children, sex working mothers are not offered the same benefit of the doubt, which is ironic because sex workers are experts in maintaining healthy sexual boundaries (if job descriptions for sex workers existed, it would be near the top). 

The criminalization and stigmatization of sex work makes it less safe for everyone who trades sex for money or resources. It makes us loath to call the police when we have been mistreated or assaulted by a client, driving our advertising further and further underground and making it harder to screen clients and offer each other resources that keep us safe. It also isolates us from society when we could use resources and support. 

All of this is amplified for mothers, who fear that their work may jeopardize their ability to care for their kids, which is ironic given that many of us, myself included, became sex workers in large part because it afforded us the resources to take care of our kids in a world that offers little support to working mothers, particularly working mothers with kids who have disabilities, special needs or health issues. 

I don’t hide the full truth of my work because I am not ashamed of the work that I have done. In fact, I have found a lot of meaning in it. When my kids are old enough to understand the choices I made, I will share the full extent of my work history with them, should they want to know. But until we move into a world in which all mothers, especially sex working mothers, are trusted to make the best decisions that they can for themselves and their children, most of us will continue to keep it hidden for fear of unthinkable consequences. 

I’m a Sex Worker—and a Mom

Mother’s Day used to be a complicated day for me. You see, I have no relationship with my birth mother, even though I spent the first 14 years of my life in her care. After she and my dad got divorced, she seemed to take out all her anger, insecurities and frustrations about being a “failed woman” and a divorcée on me. Eventually, I spoke up about what was really going on, and after a long custody battle, I cut contact with her entirely and moved in with my dad and his wife. 

Before I managed to escape, there was a long period of time when I thought I was like my mother. I felt that because she and I shared DNA, I was a reflection of her and that all those dark and awful things about her that had caused me so much pain—that they were also somewhere in me, waiting to come out the moment I had children of my own. I was terrified of being anything like her, so I did my best to distance myself from the person she was and the person she wanted me to be. 

I stopped celebrating Mother’s Day altogether, as well. Whenever May came around, I’d dread the holiday-themed everything and the many school activities and events centered around moms and motherhood. I simply couldn’t reconcile the fact that my only option was to celebrate and demonstrate my love to someone who I didn’t want to be around—someone who would put on a happy face and act like the most loving and caring parent in the world, but turn around minutes later, in the privacy of her car, and verbally and physically abuse me for “making her look bad” in front of my classmates’ parents. 

Then, in the summer of 2006, I cut contact with her. I left and never looked back. From time to time I’d still get calls, texts and emails from her, but they were rarely conciliatory messages. She wanted to fight, argue and make sure I knew I was wrong for leaving her. “I am your mother, you owe me everything.”

Now, I’m not going to say I didn’t miss her. I did. Although, to be perfectly honest, I can never be sure if I missed the person she actually was, or the person that I had always expected her to be. You know, the loving mom we all see in movies. The one who is her daughter’s best friend and confidant, and will sneak her out of class to get ice cream and talk about boys. I never got that, and I was angry at her for denying me what I felt was my right: a good mother. 

Therapy helped a lot, although it wasn’t my choice at the time. Both my dad and my stepmom knew that I needed help, even though I wasn’t quite ready to ask for it. I eventually learned to let go of the pain I was holding on to; I learned the importance of forgiving but not forgetting. Once I did, not only did I feel lighter, but I was also able to see what had been right in front of me: my stepmom. 

She married my dad not too long before I moved in, and from day one, she took the role of the responsible, loving, sometimes strict mother that I’d been missing the first 14 years of my life. At the time, I had been too hurt and too angry to see it, but little by little, my stepmom became my rock. She showed up to my school events and cheered me on, even though she knew most parents at my fancy private school would gossip about her. She took me shopping when my clothes suddenly didn’t fit after one of my last growth spurts. She was even the one who I called for the day I got my first period. She went from being my dad’s wife, to being my stepmom, to being one of the most important people in my life. 

One day, I can’t really remember when, or where we were, I simply started calling her mom. It came out naturally, like I’d been doing it all my life. Like I was always meant to call her that.

Suddenly, Mother’s Day wasn’t quite so bleak anymore. I didn’t dread the month of May as much as I previously had (now I only dislike it because it means that awful summer weather is near, but that’s a story for another time). Mother’s Day became a holiday of hope for me—it went from a made-up holiday, where I was forced to “celebrate” someone I despised, to a day when I got to give back to my mom a little bit of everything she gave me. I mean, I try to do that every day, but the woman won’t sit still and pause her endless to-do list unless we come up with a good excuse; Mother’s Day is that excuse. 

Every year, though, we’re bombarded with messages in the media urging people to celebrate the person who “gave us life” and carried us for nine months. Somehow, the ads always make it sound like the only valid version of motherhood is the one that includes a biological connection between parent and child, and that couldn’t be farther from what I know to be true. In my experience, motherhood is best when it’s chosen and fully wanted. I’m pretty sure (although this is just a theory of mine, I have no way of really knowing for sure) that my birth mother did not want to be a mother. She, like many women, did what she felt was “the next step” in a married woman’s life. 

On the other hand, my mom chose to be my mom. She chose to take on the burden of raising kids to which she had no blood relation. She has defended me, loved me and been the role model I needed when the person whose DNA I actually have wouldn't. To this day, nearly 16 years later, she chooses to love me the way I always wanted to be loved by a mother. There were no sleepless nights with me as a newborn, but she says she’s making up for those now that I’m older and go out at night with my friends—especially if I’m not home by 2 a.m. “I can’t sleep until I know you’re home safe. What can I say? I’m your mom…” she texted the last time I went out that late.

As time went by and I let go of the anger and hurt I had, and I learned to let myself be loved and cared for, my views and feelings on my own future motherhood have shifted. My answer to the (still very annoying) question “When are you having kids?” is no longer a clear “Never.” It’s evolved. I now realize that I do want children of my own one day, but only when I’m ready to choose motherhood, and not because as a woman, that’s what’s expected of me at a certain age. (And, to be perfectly honest, I can’t wait to see my mom go full-on Grandma Mode). 

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