I Swore I’d Be the Best Mom

The unfulfilled promises are the ones that hurt the most

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

In my previous life, it turned my stomach to see mothers scolding their kids. Yelling, threatening, jerking them by the sleeves. Loudly lamenting, “My God, who did you get this from?!”

Back then, I wanted to cry out to God too, because everything I saw and heard felt incredibly unfair. Why give the gift of motherhood to a woman who doesn’t appreciate it? If that were my child, I would definitely do better. And I would never humiliate her or myself with a screeching scene in public.

“Come to me, I promise to be the best mom to you. I promise we will never be like that,” I would whisper in my mind to the child’s soul, just as my fertility mentor had taught me.

I guess I didn’t throw away a fortune on her services for nothing because in the end, that little soul believed my promise.

The next picture is from two years later. Or maybe three — it’s hard to remember exactly now. While other mothers are cuddling their newborns in comfortable beds in postpartum wards, I am sitting on a hard plastic chair in the neonatal intensive care unit.

My head is spinning, and my pelvic bones feel like they are cracking and turning to dust from yesterday’s hell, where my motherhood brutally began. The room is dimly lit; the night shift nurses have scattered. I was given permission to sit here for ten minutes, but it’s already been two hours. And I won’t budge, even if I pass out on this chair.

Right in front of my face is a glass incubator, with a heart monitor flashing cheerfully above it. The incubator is gently draped with colorful blankets, but on my side, there is a circular opening for a hand. You can slip it inside and touch a tiny leg — barely half the size of my wrist — and feel it twitch nervously.

Every time it happens, I burst into tears. And instantly choke them back down into my chest so I don’t make a sound. So the nurses won’t hear me and kick me out.

“Please, I beg you, get better. I promise you, I will be the best mom, just come back to me. I will do everything for you, you will have the best, happiest childhood. Please, just live.”

We are separated by thick glass and a few layers of satin patterned with pink rabbits, but I know she hears me.

And she does come back — because I asked. Because I promised her, yet again, that she would be safe and happy with me.

Fast forward another three years, and we are almost in the present. I am eating ice cream on a bench in the city park, right in the middle of a massive playground packed to the brim with kids and parents. It feels like sitting inside a colorful anthill. My daughter is to my left, on her favorite swings.

But when I turn my head to check on her again, she isn’t there.

I slowly scan the human anthill, then stand up, shoving the rest of the ice cream into my mouth on the move. I walk around the playground, looking into the wooden playhouses, into the tunnel painted like a caterpillar, under the slides, behind the bushes… I call out louder and louder:

“Nina!”

But my voice drowns in the din; no one even looks around. A wave of panic surges from my stomach to my throat, and my limbs go numb. I lost my child. I, damn it all, lost my only daughter!!!

I run in circles around the playground like a madwoman, frantically cornering people with hysterical questions about a curly-haired girl in a green dress. Soaking up the sun, the happy moms and dads shrink away from me in alarm.

“Please come back, I’ll do anything. I promise to be better, I’ll never take my eyes off you again, I won’t sit around with that stupid ice cream. Please, I beg you, I promise…”

She is brought back by some grumpy, bearded guy who immediately starts chewing me out for letting the child sob all alone in the middle of a park alley. I barely hear him because at that exact moment, she clings to me with her arms and legs, pressing her entire body into mine — and I hold her just as tightly, as if trying to hide her from the whole world. Inside myself.

She always believes my promises — especially the ones left unsaid.

Motherhood is fifty percent exhaustion and fifty percent guilt. Everything could have been different if I hadn’t been so reckless.

If I had been wiser about choosing my career and my husband. If I hadn’t blindly trusted doctors. If I hadn’t fixated so much on my own fatigue. Because all too often, it feels like there is absolutely nothing else to motherhood except this all-consuming, cosmic-black exhaustion. Because that is when I forget the words I gave her.

See that woman screaming like a maniac at a three-year-old toddler in a parking lot? Yelling, jerking her by the sleeve, threatening to lock her up at home and never let her out again.

“My God, why are you so wild? Why do you never listen to me?!” she cries out in despair to the accompaniment of her child’s sobbing. It’s uncomfortable to even listen to, let alone look their way. But you see her, don’t you?

Because that woman is me.

I still keep making silent promises to my daughter. And when the exhaustion recedes, the guilt crashes down — because none of them have been kept, even though every single one is burned into my memory. I could have tried harder. I could have been a better mom, but failed.

Motherhood hurts, stings, and chafes. The cliché “you are still the best mom for your child” doesn’t help at all. Unless, of course, you aren’t dragging around the weight of broken vows.

Motherhood drains you and offers no recharge. It opens up as a chasm between selfishness and a morbid attachment to the human being I created — and all I do is leap across that abyss: back and forth, back and forth, year after year.

Fifty percent exhaustion, fifty percent guilt. Which one will take over today?