The Thing That Links Us

Michelle Obama is the kind of mum that appears in my mind when the term ‘Boss Mum’ is used. People like Michelle Obama or Jill Abramson, or a grown-up Hermione Granger.

Maybe that stretchy lady from The Incredibles.

There’s a little montage that plays through my head, like an ad for a Home Beautiful magazine. Some strange amalgamation of all of these women and a handful more, women who have eyes in the back of their heads and can see through walls, often found with a green smoothie in hand as she stands on one side of a breakfast bar in a post workout glow chatting with her children as they eat there muesli with fruit and yoghurt on the other side.

A smooth haired, power suited, lunch making, bag packing machine that dolls out kisses at the front door as readily as she does missing car keys, extra cash and possibly, for those really forward thinking types, spare condoms, (because you can never be too safe).

The CEO who smiles privately to herself when she finds the drawing her six year old slipped into her board papers that morning asking for a unicorn for her birthday. The way she is able to pull off a dinner party for 16 people while also fielding homework questions for a grade three book report that has a detailed section on Frobscottle and Wizzpoppers and a year nine algebra report. Not to mention bedtime routines, sibling squabbles and croquembouche that makes all her guests wish they had worn their comfy pants to dinner.

I don't know where any of these images come from to be perfectly honest with you. It's some version of a strong and capable woman who is never flustered, never loses her head, always has the answers. I have women like this in my own life of course. We all do, don't we?

But when I first thought about this term, I couldn’t reconcile the image of my mum...tall, beautiful, hilarious when you're trying to take a photo of her, passionate about her football team...with the Michelle Obama, stretchy lady from The Incredibles movie woman who I can imagine stopping one child from choking on a marble while turning off a boiling pot of spaghetti with her foot in another room (I concede the fact that she is stretchy but I refuse to recognise your logical side of the argument nonetheless). The two ideas just didn’t go together.

So I started questioning the term ‘Boss Mum’ and wondering not about my mum's ability to meet the requirements, but more about what the requirements actually were.

And then my own ability to meet the requirements!

But then, that's the thing isn’t it...the reality is that at some point we all get flustered or lose our heads, and that isn’t a sign that we aren’t being strong enough or capable enough. It's a sign that we’re human.

So that made me start thinking, what does this idea, Boss Mum, (or, Mom, depending on where you are in the world), mean to each of us?

And the answer is every conceivable variation of a person you could think of as a mother in any way, shape or form.

It's the mothers by birth and by blood; it's the mothers by marriage.

The ones we find by a breaking-up and a reforming of a family.

It's the ones we find in the grandparents, older sisters, aunts, second cousins, and great aunts twice removed.

It's the mother of the best friend you had in high school who took you shopping for your first bra.

It's the one that lived across the hall from you for all those years that pretended she needed your help to finish a pot of spaghetti so it didn't go to waste.

Or the teacher you had in that really hard year, that year you nearly didn’t survive that saw the pain and the fear and the desperation behind your eyes and stretched out a hand every day until you took it.

It's the girlfriend your father had, the one you and your sister can barely remember, except to know that for those couple of years before he screwed it up, she was the only safe and stable thing, the only island for you to moor your lifeboat to.

Maybe it's the boss you had that saw something in you and mentored you and helped you become the person you turned out to be in the world of accolades and titles and power.

It's the ones that didn’t have enough.

The ones that went without.

The ones that said they weren't hungry, or didn’t like chocolate anyway.

It's the ones that weren't there to make you breakfast and weren't there to tuck you into bed at night because they were out working to make sure there was breakfast to be had and a bed to be tucked into.

It's the ones that kissed knees and wiped tears and held tissues over noses and said “blow”.

It's the ones that got up three hours before everyone else to walk to a freezing stream to collect water into a bucket that they carried on their back.

It's the ones who pushed back against the nurses who wouldn’t listen, or the doctors who thought they knew better, or the specialists who said there was nothing wrong.

The ones who sat at the table and went over the homework again and again and again, learning it with you until you got it right.

It's the ones who fiercely protected the mind and the body and the soul of their daughters, sometimes with their words, sometimes with their actions, sometimes with their own flesh.

It's the ones who turned the faces of their baby boys into the wind so that they would see where the fires of the past were burning, and where embers of hate and oppression and injustice still smolder so that they might grow into young men who will not add fuel to those fires but will work to stamp them out.

It's those that might not have started out in this world as they are now, with that name or with those parts, but they are who they are and they know who they are and so do we.

It's those that stepped boldly into the place where mother is traditionally known to be and stared down the barrel of those who would have them removed.

It's the ones that wrapped you in their protection when the other kids were mean; when you didn't get picked for the team; when your first love broke your heart.

It's even those that taught you the lessons of tough love in the home so that it wasn't so hard to learn in the world.

It's definitely the ones that looked different to the other mums and taught you that different is good; that different is necessary; that different is the minority that needs to be cultivated.

It's the ones that smiled through the headaches and the back pain, the shakes and the fatigue and all the visible and invisible disabilities to be there when you got the award, or kicked the goal, or cut the ribbon.

The ones who took your temperature in the middle of the night; who sat on the floor next to the bed to wipe your face with a cold cloth and stroke your hair.

It's the ones who held that same hair back for you when you leaned over the bowl swearing that you would never drink again.

It's the ones who carried you on their backs for days as they walked from one ravaged part of a country to another, displaced and rehomed and hoping that the refuge they sought would give you a chance at a different life.

Its those who have lost their children in so many different ways from sickness and disease, war, hunger, disaster, suicide, drugs, and violence; ways that could have been prevented, and ways that could not.

So after considering all the different ways that the boss mum idea manifests around the world, did I come to see my own mum fitting the mold after all? Yes, but it came about in a strange way.

I realised it was something else that makes my mum a boss mum. And which makes most mums, no matter what form they come in, whether they are a mother through birth or marriage or adoption; whether they came into this world with the equipment they needed or they gathered the pieces and the right to call themselves ‘mother’ along the way.

It's the thing that links all mothers: it's our readiness and willingness to suffer for our children; to trade places with them and suffer in place of our children. It's that thing that we do where we suddenly begin to talk to God when we never have before; our desperate attempts to strike middle of the night bargains in a deal for which we have no leverage if we could only take their suffering upon ourselves.

I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes when I was four so there were a lot of doctor and hospital visits throughout my early life, but twice in the last 10 years I've spent months at a time in hospital and rehab with difficult to diagnose and exceptionally rare illnesses, parts of my body shutting down or exploding or attacking other parts. Illnesses that have left me paralysed days after giving birth to my son. Illnesses that left me temporarily blind. Illnesses that have me using a walker at that age of 42 and that should have come up on episodes of House, and it's been in those periods that I have seen the pain and the fear and the desperation for answers in my mothers eyes. That I’ve heard her on the phone to her sister or her aunt when she thought I was asleep, trying to hold it together as she told them that she wished she could just take it on herself.

And of the hundreds of different ways that I think we manifest as Boss Mums, the ways we try, the ways we fail, the ways we feel like we are never doing enough, we all do this. My mum, and you, and me. All Boss Mums.