My Mom is ...
Written by Joos Slot, 21 years old
My mom. I look at her while we’re in the car on our way to her studio house, where she lives “on her own, by herself” nowadays. After my sisters and I moved out, the family house was sold because she moved into her art studio. I look at her homemade jewelry that, 10 years ago, I would have undoubtedly ridiculed as being “organic hippie bullshit.”
Her cold fingers grip the steering wheel; in wintertime, they appear stubbornly white yet are surprisingly capable of tough manual labor. Felting to create art isn’t an easy task. Her workshop is filled with bins full of different types of wool, and the smell of green soap mixed with sheep poop meets you at the door. The naturalness of her movement in this new habitat only suggests one thing: she’s where she wants to be.
I think back on our journey up to this moment. How incredibly annoying it was when she, my working mom, experienced burnout, after which she was home to recover—just when I had gotten so used to having my own time and space. Those two hours a day that my sister and I spent at home on our own—after our school day ended and prior to our mother’s walk up to the house upon completion of her workday—had been delicious. Before she could put the key in the front door, we would shove all our candy in between the cushions of the couch and hastily turn off the TV. Then my sister and I would pretend to be in a very serious discussion about homework while the chocolate between our teeth was busily melting away. “Hi, Mom!”
Two years later, she quit her job. Annoyed, I asked her, “What do you mean, you’re quitting your job?” How indoctrinated must I have been for this to be my only response at the age of 14? Her response was to start a vegetable garden.
A few months ago, when I opened my Facebook feed, I saw that she had shared a video titled “This woman dared to change everything; did she find happiness?” The video is about her. I chuckle at this reality TV-type title. The vegetable-garden stage passed, and she built a true-felt art imperium. When I asked her if she felt brave, she turned to me with a puzzled look on her face: What do you mean, “brave”? I then understood that she didn’t transform from a career woman into a felting artist, just as she never transformed from a historian into being a mother. She’s all of these things simultaneously because she is who she is.
As a child, the world revolved around me. During the first eighteen years of my life, I felt no obligation to ask my parents how they were doing. All of a sudden, though, now that I am 21 years old, I hear myself asking my mom how her latest project is coming along. I realize I’m actually up to date with her life, and our conversations are actually about my life and her life. I do not know when this shift occurred, which makes my insight all the more unbelievable: that my parents are actual people with their own past and their own problems. “What do you mean, problems?” I hear my fourteen-year-old self critically react.
Over time, I’m getting to know my mom in different stages. The most bizarre fact, to me, will always be that if I spent my first nine months inside her womb, shouldn’t she be the person that I know best? Only after 21 years together is the fundamental humanness of my own mother finally sinking in. I feel that now I want to know all of her different sides, and I can only hope that I’m able to understand her as much as possible.
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