Being like water, on Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day. As tons of us husks of human beings continue mothering in a pandemic, I say it’s time to acknowledge good ol’ mom. Yes, I know, this is not Mother’s Day. But I’m not talking about honoring us as mothers. I’m talking about honoring us as water.

I’m the mama of two very energetic, very cute, very trying little girls. I know I’m supposed to say this is my most important job in life, but I’d rather say it’s part of a greater whole — a part of the Me that is enhanced by being a mother, even a tired husk of one, not diminished by it. I’m a writer and a thinker and a woman who tried her hand at many a dream — actress, news reporter, artist, poet — and didn’t quite succeed in or follow through on any them.

Until I became a mom, that is. Until I kept getting squeezed through tunnel slides and pushed over blocks and boulders. Until I finally learned to flow, throwing my hands up in the air and releasing myself into the pandemic-shaped kiddie pool where I swim today.

Somehow, from the constraints of this container, I got a book deal on the tome I’d been penning about my beloved Tao Te Ching, the philosophy that taught me to “be like water” in the first place.

And that’s when it finally hit me — I, mom, am a philosopher. I am THE philosopher, figuring out how to live and sustain life, how to flow and lead. And my thoughts — the mom’s thoughts — have been missing from many an arena in this world.

I mean, sure, women with kids have climbed the corporate ladder and the intellectual one, but often we’ve had to compartmentalize: a corner for the mothering over here, one for the work stuff over there.

And before that, we mostly stayed behind the scenes with other marginalized groups, taking care of whatever needed caring for, while the Platos and the Nietzsches of the world thought important thoughts.

But when the pandemic took hold last year, mothers everywhere had to figure out how to do both, often simultaneously — feeding and teaching the kiddos while penning work emails, all at the same freaking time. If finding balance was hard before, it went out the window last March. Balance was no longer possible; shape-shifting remained the only alternative. Plus, I made good use of my own private sanctuary: the mind, where wiping bottoms and cleaning messes served as a backdrop for all my philosophizing.

Many of us form families and have babies because something within us moves us forward along the river of life, unfolding, creating, nurturing — you can call it our biological clocks, or nature — which can rub up against our ambitions and goals far more than it does for men. Yet, in negotiating our divergent needs and desires we become more flexible, more able to vaporize or deluge or flow, as needed; our minds work harder than ever, as do our souls.

And this process of shape-shifting is one that should be recognized.

It would do the men of the world a heck of a lot of good to adapt a tad of the female fluidity that so many of us women encompass daily. And in fact, I know that they will, because some already are (hi, primary-caretaker dads!), and because a sea of fluid females is raising the next generation of men as we speak. It’s only a matter of time before the entire world recognizes that The Great Mother, as the Tao calls this feminine yin force, exists within all of us, that we can all channel her power.

Meanwhile, I’m actively enhancing the yang energy within me — that’s the male principle of the universe. The morning I wrote this, I made multiple runs to the hardware store, acquiring power tools to cut my girls’ old car seats out of our Toyota. Don’t ask; let’s just say this was the only option left to me after relying on others instead of trusting myself. I’m finally learning, though — thanks again, pandemic. That’s the thing. The art of mothering — of multitasking, problem-solving, surviving, maintaining — has made me stronger and wiser in pretty much every aspect.

And after the year we’ve all had, I’m prouder than ever to be a woman, not because I’m a mother, but because in mothering I’ve realized that I am everything — masculine, feminine, hard, soft — all of it as needed. Not by “leaning in” as we were encouraged to do in the corporate world, but by flowing constantly from one form to another. By being fluid.

So please don’t underestimate the philosopher in an apron, the thinker in a nursing bra, the mystic in leggings. She, too, has something to teach you.