Searching for Complexity: Motherhood in Fiction
Summers are hard. Every June I swear I’m going to get a full-time office job so I can justify sending my kids to a day camp for the entire summer break. Every July I Google “cities that have year-round school.” Every August I try to climb out of the hole the sweltering days of the previous two months hammered me into—days of Alabama heat and my children fighting with each other and asking me what they can eat and needing me to take them places.
Several summers ago I began to slip into a bad headspace where I thought I was too much for my husband, where I thought I was not enough for my kids, and where I wondered how in the hell am I going to make it another day. I met with my therapist and told her I’m just too messy and too complicated to be a good mom. She said, “No. You’re a complex mom. And you recognize your complexity.” In that moment I embraced the “complex mom” label. It helped when I found myself playing the comparison game with
