In a poem titled “Why Bother?” Sean Thomas Dougherty writes: Because right now, there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.
I sought out to find this exact line before sitting down to read Luana Holloway’s responses to this piece, because that’s exactly what her musings on motherhood have been for me. Luana assembles and bends words with such poetry that it would be impossible to read her writing and not feel something.
So it was ironic, but perhaps unsurprising, that Luana used the word ‘wound’ to explain why she writes (“what inspires me is to offer out a hand in the dark about the times that motherhood left me wounded or awestruck, often at once.”)
And while ‘writer’ might be one of the ways in which she would set out to describe herself, I have a feeling that the title of Mother (with a capital M) is the one she wears with the most pride.
In a world where the definition and experience of motherhood is sometimes reduced to a little matronly, to a little unsexy, Luana holds nothing but reverence for this magical, beautiful, wild, clusterf*ck of a role: her most important role.
Now a decade into motherhood, the school based support worker’s parenting and paid work journeys have seen many evolutions and iterations, and here, she shares them all with us.
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