The Art of Mothering: Creating Space for Growth, Love, and Belonging

Mothering

By Mia Pohlman

Photos by Aaron Eisenhauer

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o mother is to hold space for another to exist. It’s what our very bodies tell us in the hollow of our wombs. The physicality of this attribute carries over to the emotional needs of others, too; there are all kinds of ways to make a place for another’s mind, heart, body, spirit. Each time we feed, nourish. Each time we receive another to listen. Each time we give attention, do what we said and meant, say, here, I’ll scoot over, let you sit.

One of the greatest things we can do in this life, I believe, is create space for others. Spaces where people can dwell, belong, become. Spaces where people feel safe to discover who they are and grow in confidence to fully inhabit themselves. Spaces where people dare to risk sharing the fruits of their questions, efforts and deepest longings, because these are the things that bear hope in a dying world. If we can help people come alive to manifest — not who we want them to be but — who they are, we will have done something noble and worthy.

We mother who we are, and we are each individually gifted. Let us not think the way mothering manifests itself through our self must look like the way it manifests itself through the woman sitting next to us. After all, as someone needs who she uniquely is, someone needs who you specifically are.

And so, let us mother. Let us make space for the world to develop as it could. Let us clear a path for the people around us to step into opportunity. Let us create for others possibility.

Here, nine women show us how they do, so we might, too.

Coaching

college students

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he ages of 18 to 22 are some of the most developmentally significant in life; as the head coach of Southeast Missouri State University’s (SEMO) women’s basketball team, Rekha Patterson steps in during this time to not only develop athletes through her basketball program but to also raise young women into people who know who they are and who live from their integrity.

“Our goal in the program is for our young ladies to learn some life lessons, so that when they graduate and they leave us, they remember that everything they need is already inside of them, and sometimes, they just need to dig deep to remember that they’re equipped for whatever the challenge may be,” Patterson says.

Patterson grew up in the gym with both of her parents coaching high school athletics and always knew she wanted to be a coach. As a college athlete, her team went through a coaching change, during which time the new coach caused Patterson to feel she did not belong; Patterson says from that experience, she wanted to ensure none of her athletes ever felt like they weren’t hers. She began coaching as a graduate assistant at Baylor University and then coached at Eastern Illinois University, Ball State University and Creighton University before assuming the head coach position at SEMO in 2015.

To create a feeling of belonging, Patterson schedules meetings throughout the semester with each of the 15 players on her team, where the women come in and talk with her about their life outside of basketball and academics. She and the other coaches also plan sisterhood sessions, in which the athletes participate in team-building activities such as discussing their love languages; building shuttles out of paper, paper clips and masking tape; and sitting in the “red seat” to talk about their fears, joys and homes. Patterson teaches these skills because she hopes they will continue to shape the women’s lives in positive ways after they graduate.

“At the core of relationships is trust and communication, a common goal,” Patterson says. “It’s life lessons without their parents being right there with them. They’re figuring out who they want to be and what type of decisions they want to make.”

It’s not a role Patterson takes lightly; she says she recognizes when a student first comes to college, parents are “dropping their babies off, and this is their pride and joy,” and she is “completely responsible for them.” Under her care, she feels it is her job to protect each of the young women on her team.

Part of that, Patterson says, includes having expectations with clear consequences when those expectations aren’t met. And part of it includes allowing room for failure, as well as space for the athletes to figure things out on their own so they are better able to problem-solve when the coaches aren’t there.

“I think it’s important to, No. 1, fail, because that means you’re trying. You’re giving effort,” Patterson says. “We try to tell our players, ‘You either win, or you learn.’ Because a failure, it’s just an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to learn something that didn’t work, so now I need to do something different the next time I’m in that position. Or, I need to work harder at this, so the next time I’m in this position, I can have success, whatever that looks like.”

Helping people grow in these ways, Patterson says, is the point.

“We’re on this earth to give. Give of our time, give of our talents, give of our gifts to others, and we can’t do it alone. We’re not supposed to be here alone. And alone, that can look many different ways to people; while I am single without kids, I have a village, and I’m part of a community, and I have my groups. And so, we’re supposed to give to those people that we come in contact with,” Patterson says. “I think with raising people, you have to give grace — the same grace that we would want to receive. And we have to give space for them to grow and learn and figure it out.”

Patterson says her mother, aunt and grandmother have mothered her with that grace; she carries pieces of them into the ways she makes space for others, including sending birthday and sympathy cards to people like her grandmother did, as well as being the person who will hold her players to high expectations and yet also be fiercely on their side when someone does them wrong, like her aunt.

Patterson defines motherhood as unconditional love, a 24/7 job of being the person someone knows they can call no matter the time of day or night.

“Mothers just show up. All the time and at the right time. And I don’t know how they do it. But they do,” Patterson says. “Mothering is a lifetime. And it’s my hope that the relationships I have with my players is a lifetime. I hope that when amazing things happen to them, when they are graduated and gone on, that they still want to let me know. … That’s my hope, and I think that is probably as close to mothering as I can get, that even when they’re not with me, they know I’m with them.”

She regards mothering as a privilege.

“Shoutout to the moms that do it and do it, however you do it,” Patterson says. “You are brave and powerful and admired.”

Raising children

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iffany Brown of Sikeston, Mo., always wanted to be a mom — she recalls writing in her high school yearbook that she wanted to have seven kids. The dream started becoming reality when her oldest daughter was born with down syndrome during Brown’s first semester of college. Today, Brown and her husband have had seven children — Brown had three children and he had two when they married, they lost a baby, and they have one child together. Their children range in age from 16 to two.

Mi Hoang, also of Sikeston, became a mom three years ago and now has two daughters. She says her journey to motherhood was less sure; she wanted to be a mother when she was younger, but as she got older, realized that perhaps that was only because of cultural norms she’d been taught; she decided, instead, she wanted to be her own person. In her late 20s, she thought since she didn’t already have kids, perhaps she wasn’t going to be a mom. After she and her husband got married, however, he wanted to have a family, and Hoang says she found the desire to be a mom growing stronger within herself, too. After trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for two years, though, she thought again that perhaps she wasn’t meant to be a mother. Then, she became pregnant with their oldest daughter.

Brown and Hoang are best friends; both have earned business degrees and are now stay-at-home moms. They have a podcast called “Balancing Your Bliss,” on which they discuss the challenges and joys of motherhood. They are also in business together with their home bakery, Bliss Bakery.

“It’s fun,” Hoang says of motherhood.

“It’s the best job ever,” Brown says.

To make emotional space for her children, Hoang says she and her daughters lay in bed or on the couch together in the mornings and then spend time together with her husband in the evenings.

“Even though I’m with my girls every day all day long, no matter what we’re doing, I feel like a lot of times, we’re just going, going, going, so we’re just passing by, but we don’t spend actual time together,” Hoang says. “So, for me, it’s important to get the little times in there. … That’s important, to just have that quiet time with them, without TV or the phone.”

Brown, too, makes it a priority to carve out and protect family time.

“I just started saying no to events and things,” Brown says. “If it’s during the school week, we don’t do anything in the evenings unless it is sports or theater rehearsal. We don’t go places, no dinners, we’re not going out to eat on a weeknight. We try to be home. And then, if it’s a weekend and we’ve done something on Friday and we have a commitment on Sunday, we’re probably going to stay home all day Saturday, just so we can hang out together.”

Brown says she and her husband take each of their children on dates individually, and they do activities together as a family and with their children’s other parents, with whom they co-parent. She says it’s important for her and her husband to not speak negatively about the other parents around the children, but instead, for their children to see them speak directly to the other parents when there is an issue that needs to be discussed.

“I have to fight a lot to keep this family, the eight of us, together to the point where my children aren’t saying ‘stepbrother,’ ‘stepsister,’ ‘stepmom,’ ‘stepdad.’ I have to fight for that,” Brown says. “And no matter what happens outside this home, that’s what has to happen here for them to all know they’re loved equally. And so, I think it’s very, very important to make sure that your focus is internal. Have your family dinners — it’s important. Say no to going out and doing things all the time. Take your time at home to sit down at the table.”

For Brown, being a stay-at-home mom is relatively new; although she’d been working from home since the onset of the pandemic as a mortgage lender with the bank she’d worked at for six years, the passing of her grandmother she called Nanny in July caused Brown to re-evaluate the way she was using her time.

“After [she passed away], I was like, you know what, I wasted so many days while she was here sitting in front of that computer checking emails or talking to customers on the phone, when I could have been spending it with her. And I didn’t want to do that to anybody else in my life,” Brown says.

Since Brown quit her job outside of the home to pursue being a stay-at-home mom, she says it’s been wonderful.

“It’s scary when you have six kids depending on you to walk away from something where you make a decent living and you have benefits and you have holidays off and they’re really good people. It’s just the work — I just didn’t enjoy it,” Brown says. “[Now], I get to do things I like to do. I even told my manager, it has nothing to do with the bank, but I have to give up something, because I’m not giving either thing 100%, and I’m not going to give up the thing I love. So I have to [quit the bank].”

Hoang says it’s the best decision Brown has ever made. This type of support is typical of their friendship in which they’re not afraid to hurt each other’s feelings. It’s a friendship in which they say they mother each other.

It’s important, Brown and Hoang say, to have friends who are also mothers, to ask for help and glean ideas about how to handle situations with kids. They also say it’s important for moms to realize each child is different, so take suggestions with a grain of salt and don’t feel like a failure if something doesn’t work; as long as you’re loving your kids, you’re not failing.

What each child needs to feel loved might look different, Brown says.

“I feel like you love your kids the same, but in different ways,” Brown says. “It’s the same amount when you’re quantifying it, but the way it’s happening is different. I love my children differently. They each need different things from me. And that’s with any relationship that you’re in. ... And so you have to parent them differently. And you don’t love them more or less, you just love them differently. And you have more in common with [some than] others.”

There are many challenges to motherhood, but the joys make the difficult parts worth it, the friends say.

“Alone time is difficult,” Hoang says. “I don’t remember the last time I was by myself. … But that’s also the beauty of it — I’m never alone. I always have someone with me. And I talk to my kids like they’re little adults, too, so it’s like I’m having a conversation. … That’s got to be another favorite thing. Watching them learn. And seeing them grow. I like it when I can see something click in her head. You see it in her eyes.”

“It’s so hard. Everything is so hard,” Brown says of motherhood. “Your time is gone, your chores have tripled, there’s laundry everywhere. And at the same time, sometimes I think, gosh, what am I going to do when they’re gone? I’m going to be so bored. So, it’s rewarding enough that you don’t care.”

“Hopefully, they grow up knowing that they are loved and happy,” Hoang adds.

“Yeah. That’s the goal,” Brown says.

Directing an art

gallery

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hen Jae and Paris Newson noticed a lack in venues that cultivate voices different from the dominant cultures of the area, they decided to do something about it. Their dreaming, work and perseverance led to the birth of 20 North Pacific — named after the address where it’s located in downtown Cape Girardeau — a Black-driven urban arts gallery that invites people in to foster conversation, belonging and fun.

“I’m from Memphis. So, when I got here, I noticed there weren’t a lot of spaces for Black and Brown people realistically. Spaces where we can hear different types of music, or we can experience different sides of culture,” Paris says. “It appeared to be pretty one-sided here in this particular area, so we wanted to literally create a space where we could celebrate being different and bring a lot of different people together to experience different sides of Cape’s culture.”

The gallery opened in December 2019. Since, they have hosted First Friday art shows, book signings, date nights, birthday parties, baby and wedding showers, a drama camp for children, and more. The local boutique African Cultural Collective also makes its home in the back of the gallery. In the future, they plan to have an adult sleepover, field day and murder mystery theater at the gallery.

They have also hosted a series called Listen Ins, at which local leaders gathered at 20 North Pacific to have conversations about where they come from and the difficulties of living in Cape Girardeau, which they livestreamed for the community. This, the Newsons say, is one of their main hopes for the space: that people would come into it and have difficult conversations about race, LGBTQ relations and other topics that connect the community.

“We invite all types of people to be in here,” Paris says. “Let’s talk about [how you feel in response to the ideas here]. It’s OK how that makes you feel. Sometimes, people walk out [of an art exhibit here, and we ask,] ‘How do you feel now? Want to talk about it?’ So, it’s important to have somewhere to do that. … It’s just a homey, hold-you kind of place.”

In the gallery, which is housed in a home, the Newsons do the work of making space for others.

“To mother is to bring up with love and affection. So basically, pour into. That’s how I see it,” Jae says. “To nurture. To allow. To express. Whatever your definition of love, doing that with a space or these people or this community.”

“That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re mothering,” Paris adds. “‘Cause from our experiences, we had great childhoods, don’t get me wrong, but we didn’t have safe spaces to just exist as ourselves without the rules, without the ‘You should be this way, you should be this way, you should be this way,’ and, as an adult, I feel like we have to create spaces for people like that because they need them. We met a group of SEMO kids a while back — two are gay, one hung out with them because they were being bullied — and they didn’t find anywhere on that campus where they felt safe until they came here. They felt at home. They walked in and were like, ‘You all are our new aunties.’”

In addition to creating space for others to exist in, Paris is an artist and creates space within her own life to birth artwork. In the neverending process of making art, she says she sees similarities to motherhood.

“I feel like art is a constant expression of life. Life doesn’t stop. The work never, ever, ever stops,” she says. “So, as an artist, you don’t ever stop moving, you don’t ever stop creating, even when you’re not putting [the ideas] somewhere.”

Paris says Kelly Downes, director of the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri, is a mother to her, holding her close and encouraging her to be authentic. Paris and Jae agree Mama D is also a spiritual mother to them; although they come from different cultures — Jae describes Mama D as a “tall Irish lady with red hair” — Jae says from Mama D, she learns how to be gentle, compassionate and empathetic, especially when trying to understand others.

They bring these experiences into their own expressions of mothering.

“You don’t have to have kids to [mother]. Just love. Love every chance you get, love every opportunity, every hug that you should give,” Paris says. “Give lots and lots of hugs and hold a little tight when you do, because it matters. It matters. When another woman embraces me with love, there’s just really something about it.”

This is what the Newsons hope to do through 20 North Pacific: embrace others with love.

“It’s important for us to feel like we’re included and feel like we’re welcome. And so, it’s important for us to keep doing that because since we’ve been doing that, we’ve been giving people space — and ourself a space — to feel wanted, to feel welcome, to feel important and to feel like they’re able to be themselves and express,” Jae says. “That’s what this space is for. It’s for differences, and it’s for being able to talk about it.”

Being sisters

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rowing up, Jennifer Goodman dedicated much of her time to taking care of her sisters, Missy Brown and Riley Brown, who are 12 and eight years younger than her, respectively. After their parents divorced, Goodman says she spent much of her life during high school helping keep their household together, caring for her sisters after school and in the summertime. She says during this time, her role shifted from that of a sister to a mentor. Riley corrects her.

“Like a second mother, basically,” she says.

As they’ve gotten older, Goodman says the barriers between mother and sister are starting to fade; however, the sisters do still mother each other. To make space for each other in their lives, Goodman says she opens her home to her sisters any time they want to come over — she offers them her food, extra room and listening ear. She says she also returns their text messages quicker than they return hers.

“I make space for them by just allowing them into my space, being an available person as best as I can be,” she says.

Missy says she makes space for Riley, who describes herself as “very talkative,” by listening to her. Riley is a connecting force whom the sisters describe as the “icebreaker” in the family; she says she makes space for others by talking with everyone and showing up.

Acts of service and showing up for each other are the sisters’ love languages, they say. And they’ve demonstrated it to each other throughout their lives: Goodman took Missy to her driver’s license test and goes to Riley’s school functions. Missy was Riley’s chauffeur before Riley had her license. Riley comes to Goodman’s home to talk, pet her cats and get help on her homework. And she FaceTimes Missy every day to talk. Goodman also has a twin sister, Heather Filer, who teaches English in Farmington, Mo., and says they mother each other, as well. Filer was also instrumental in helping to raise Riley and Missy as they all grew up together.

Riley, who is currently a senior at Jackson Senior High School, says as they grow older, she wants to make sure she and her sisters continue to be part of each other’s daily lives. When important things happen in her life, she says her first reaction is always to text or call Missy and go to Goodman’s home to tell her about it.

“Always put in effort with your sisters, at all times,” Riley says. “It’s important to go do things [with them] — remember, you’re more than just sisters; you can also have a friendship.”

Missy says having an open mind is important in familial relationships.

“Have patience with people, because you might not know what they’re going through, and you might want to lash out. No. Just have some patience. That is from a mother’s standpoint, that’s my job with the babies [at the preschool I work at] and sisterhood, for sure,” Missy says. “Take time to get to know people.”

Goodman says she’s found acceptance is key.

“Just let the people be who they are,” Goodman says. “I tried to force specific things onto them like, ‘This is what we’re going to do, this is how you need to act, this is the rules, this is how we have to do it,’ and I think it’s just easier to accept that Riley talks a lot and that Missy’s going to make sure that your list is in order. You just have to allow that to be the natural way things flow. Your expectations need to just not exist. They are who they are.”

As she’s gotten older and has faced struggles, Goodman says she’s realized others — including her family members — have their own struggles, too. This has helped her embrace the mothering role she has had in her sisters’ lives.

“You just have to accept that not everyone can be there for you all the time,” Goodman says. “I struggled really hard with having to give up a lot of my life at certain points to help out, and I blamed my parents for it, but they’re not bad people — there was a lot going on. ... I just stopped being so angry with my family, and I’ve started to see them for who they are as real people and not just as parents or just as younger siblings [or] just people that are there to make it harder. It’s not making it harder — it’s your family, and eventually, it’s going to get better.”

Teaching fifth graders

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• n Alyse Bollman’s fifth grade class at Perryville Elementary School in Perryville, Mo., classmates call each other “friends.”

Bollman herself uses the word in place of “students,” to cultivate a warm environment in which students feel comfortable and welcome. In her classroom, she focuses on social-emotional learning, helping students understand their emotions and make space for each other to feel included, no matter their needs. She calls her class a family and sometimes jokes with them that people don’t get to pick their families, so they are stuck there with her.

“More than ever, all teachers have so many roles to play,” Bollman says. “And of course, I care about academics, but academics has honestly kind of taken a middle-to-last lot recently. We’ve had to do a lot of social-emotional [work] in here and really build up self-esteem again and all of that good stuff.”

Bollman, a first-year teacher, says she has always known she wanted to be a teacher, despite people telling her she didn’t want to be in the profession because she wouldn’t make very much money. She says because of this, she changed career paths for a bit, but always came back to teaching; now, she has plans to earn her master’s degree in special education. She calls her classroom her “happy place.”

In her classroom, Bollman says the question “Are you OK?” and the motto “Do what you need to be OK” are key. She makes it a point to help her students self-reflect on their emotional states and know the steps to take when something is bothering them; she encourages them to check in on themselves and each other. If they don’t feel comfortable talking with her about how they’re feeling, they can write her a letter or talk with the counselor. If someone is sleeping at their desk, she lets them sleep and checks in with them afterward. She talks with her students about equity, helping them realize some people need different resources such as moving around the classroom or using fidgets to be able to learn equally.

Bollman avoids labeling behavior as “good” or “bad” and says she recognizes “behavior is usually an underlying symptom of something else;” she enjoys talking with students to understand why a certain behavior is manifesting itself. She attends her students’ sporting events outside of school.

“My philosophy is, meet them where they’re at,” Bollman says. “Wherever they need me, that’s where I try to be. … I tell them, I’m like, you guys are like my 25 kids. ‘Cause whenever something’s sad, we cry, and if it’s happy, sometimes we cry, too, and there’s lots of hugs.”

Bollman says her mentor teacher while she was student teaching taught her so much about social-emotional learning and has been “key” in her teaching journey. Bollman says she also “spills out” any wisdom she can “get out of” her mother, too. She says her sixth grade teacher — the person who inspired her love of reading — is where her “spark” for teaching came from; that is the year she decided to become a teacher.

Grace is another focus of Bollman’s classroom. As someone who used to be a perfectionist, she says grace is something she not only teaches, but something she learns from her students, as well.

“Give grace,” she says of what she wants others to know about making space for others. “Because they are small humans, and we all make mistakes. And I think they have a lot on their plates already, so instead of adding to their plate that’s already so full, to give them grace and help them to take things off that plate while they’re still learning. And I just think grace goes a long way. And always try to meet them where they’re at, and that’s so beneficial to them. Because I think they know what they need to do, and sometimes they just need encouragement on how to do that.”

Seeing the good in every situation is Bollman’s life motto, and she says when something is challenging, she relies on her faith in God to understand what God is trying to tell her through it. All of it, she says, is worth it.

“Be a teacher!” Bollman says. “If you’re wanting to be a teacher, be a teacher. We need so many more teachers, and it’s so hard. It’s difficult right now, but it’s so worth seeing [the students] here at school. And with the teacher shortage, I hope if people are considering teaching, they will stick with it. Of course, all jobs have hard days; you have to choose your hard. So, if it’s something you love doing, there’s way more good days than there are bad days, and it’s so worth it to teach the little minds that teach me more than I teach them.”