“All the Good Roles”

A Narrative of Motherhood through Artifacts

Abstract

To mother is to navigate competing impulses, to hold on and to let go, knowing all the while the impossibility of each urge. In this lyric essay, I explore the ambivalence of motherhood, the tension of a mother’s desire to both preserve and destroy, through artifacts, both mine and my mother’s. I take up my sons’ baby teeth, their empty baby books, and the objects lost to my mother’s dirt floor crawl space, the black mould, the bowing walls, all as a way of excavating both my and my mother’s dreams of our creative lives before and during our lives as mothers. There is the caustic smell of Bic Wite-Out beside my mother’s typewriter and, decades later, the three unworn wedding rings in my jewelry cabinet, all dormant objects that still buzz with longing. Ultimately, I do not seek in this essay to reconcile these competing impulses but to illuminate the complexity of a mother’s desires for herself and her children, oftentimes at odds, and what we choose to keep and abandon in our stories as mothers.