Motherhood’s Inappropriate Feelings
In the age of gentle parenting, what is a parent to do with their big feelings?
One of the hardest parts of motherhood, for me, was figuring out where to put my emotions. The internet is full of gentle parenting coaches that instruct parents (read: mothers) to be calm, neutral, kind, and yet, firm in tone when speaking to your child. Even when they are throwing a tantrum, even when they are hitting you. I’m not going to argue that those techniques could never work. I’m more concerned about, well, myself.
It makes sense to me that a child’s brain development is not to the point where they can calm themselves down. It also makes sense that the adult needs to model correct behavior and help guide what calming down might look like. But what about when I’m flipping my lid too? Where can I put those emotions? My kids’ behavior combined with lack of support and other distressing life circumstances (gestures at news headlines of 2020-2024) can make me angry, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and exhausted to the point of tears. Honestly, just a child having a tantrum-filled day combined with lack of sleep due to night wakings is enough to push me over the edge. I’m not here to debate whether or not I should feel overwhelmed. I don’t need to provide you with receipts over whatever I was dealing with that day to prove it was “bad enough.” The bottom line is: parenting is hard and parents have big feelings too. In the age of gentle parenting, what is a parent to do with their big feelings?
As I sat in the tense limbo of this question, I turned to my art practice. As you may have read in a previous essay, I had a habit of taking pictures of myself or my kids in absurd, yet routine moments that come with caregiving. This soon extended to taking selfies when I was feeling a big, dark emotion, whether it was rage, overwhelm, exhaustion, or regret. Being a primary caregiver alone for much of the day with young children, I found myself swallowing my emotions over and over so as to not express my distress at my children. The act of taking the photo was an act of expression but also of witnessing. It was an act of survival. It was an effort to be seen, if only by the camera, by my future self. Then I began to sketch these self-portraits and finally, when a windfall of stained tea towels were discarded from my kitchen cabinet, I began to embroider these faces. I called them my “Inappropriate Feelings.”
Initially the portraits were camouflaged into the fabric of stained kitchen towels, making them difficult to see, just as these inappropriate feelings are often camouflaged or masked by the caregiver as they go about their daily labors. The difficulty to see the artwork in virtual galleries prompted me to try dark colored thread. These portraits, in contrast to the first ones, are difficult to ignore. They pop out from the stained kitchen towels, they scream, they cry, they beg for help. These inappropriate feelings can no longer be masked. Instead they are glaringly displayed on objects of labor.
The decision to stitch these faces on stained tea towels was both spontaneous and intentional. My eco-friendly self did not want to simply toss these towels because they were stained and I needed cloth I could embroider my first portrait on without feeling like I would “ruin it.” While embroidering (a historically feminine art), I realized all of the symbolic levels of putting an image of an overwhelmed mother on a stained towel.
Here’s how I describe it in my artist statement:
In this embroidery series, portraits are stitched on kitchen towels that have been stained from daily household use. These towels embody the ongoing, repetitive maintenance labor of the mother and become the container for her emotions as well. The portraits are expressive, conveying feelings that are often viewed as inappropriate for a mother in our society to have–rage, exhaustion, regret–with thread color chosen to either render the emotion nearly invisible or to call it out dramatically.
As I mentioned earlier, I struggled (and still do) with how, where and when to express my big feelings, my dark feelings, the feelings that mothers are “not supposed to have” according to current social standards. Therefore all of these feelings I’m stitching are “inappropriate.” I’ve always adored imagining a mother overcome with negative emotion while washing dishes (undoubtedly while her husband asks her to answer the door, the dog barks wildly, and her kids play pinball against her legs). She feels the boil of anger or overwhelm rising, reaches for the closest towel and simply wipes the emotion off her face. Then she can turn, now calm, and tend to her family leaving her inappropriate feelings behind on the towel, a stain of her distress. That’s what this art series is to me, a physical embodiment of a mother’s overwhelm in the moments where they simply cannot allow the feeling out. Or, perhaps, is conditioned to not let the feeling out.
My work normalizes ambivalence as part of the maternal experience. It seeks to allow caregivers’ to hold and express their full experiences of raising children, a life’s work that is at once common and revolutionary in the lives of individual humans. My essays here on Stutter Over Silence are an attempt to combine my writing and art practice together, to allow the words and visuals to fill each other’s gaps and serve as both witness to caregivers’ struggles and instigator to making societal changes.
As contemporary society propagates a myth of the “perfect” mother, my work pushes back by validating the complicated, tense reality of caregiving and asserting the value of caregivers’ complex identities.
All images published in Stutter Over Silence are original artwork created by the author, Katie Gresham, unless otherwise noted.
This sums up my feelings in a nutshell. Thank you!
Love this Katie!