Motherhood, Without the Card
I've always had an awkward relationship with Mother's Day. The version that is sold to us every year - soft colours, careful sentiment, flowers in pastel; too saccharine, too soft, and too far-fetched from what I know motherhood to be. And because I lost my own mother young, the day also feels like an old scab that shouldn’t be picked at. So I don’t.
I grew up in a household that did not do ceremony. I'm not sure we ever exchanged a birthday card. Festivals passed without fuss. My late mother was not sentimental nor fragile in a way life asks women to be. She more readily expressed her intellect than she did her emotions. She did not seek validation, from us or from anyone. She led our family the way good leaders lead anything, by example, without commentary, and without expecting to be thanked.
Like many immigrant mothers, her version of motherhood was rooted in sacrifice, in taking a back seat, and in long-termism. Deep down, she understood what every immigrant understands: the first generation pays the price so the next can thrive. She made decisions on a horizon her children could not see until it felt almost too late.
Because she was deeply intellectual and unfailingly pragmatic, and because she had no patience for sugar-coating, she was never particularly good at consoling us. There were no liberal I love yous. My mother was not delicate, and she was not soft. She was tough. Loving, but tough. She cared less about making us feel good and more about making us be good.
In many ways, I have arrived at the same style of motherhood by an entirely different path. Mum was a woman of her times and her circumstances; so am I. I became a mother in my forties; older mothers don't have the luxury of pretending we will always be there. My job is not to remove discomfort from my daughter’s life, it is to prepare her to live an extraordinary one without me.
Which brings me to the theme I have been playing over and over in my head lately: Catharsis and how often we let it stand in our way.
I see so many people - landlords, property managers and tenants alike - engaging with tenancy law looking for catharsis not knowing that the apparatus of our dispute resolution process is built to give you an outcome and not to give you emotional release. What the system delivers, at its best, is a way back to ordinary life. A pathway out of the dispute and into the next Monday. And the older I get, the more convinced I am that this is the point. Dispute resolutions do not make us extraordinary. We become extraordinary inside the ordinary: how we hold our ground, how we hold other people, and the small repeated decisions that make up a life. In that respect, motherhood is not unlike tenancy law: it is more about moving you forward and less about making you feel whole. What they offer, if we let them, is the chance to keep going. And this is the work the best property managers do, every day, almost entirely without recognition.
Bex from TED Property Management once said to me that the best property managers are the ones who are mothers. There are approximately 5,000 property managers operating in New Zealand. Trans-Tasman data suggests around two-thirds are women, and the New Zealand proportion is widely understood to be similar or higher. Many of them are mothers. The reason why Bex’s words landed with me is not that mothers are warmer, or kinder, or more nurturing (though some are). It is that the calculus of mothering and the calculus of property management are, structurally, the same.
It is knowing when to hold a line and when to absorb friction. It is enforcing a clause without humiliating the person on the other side. It is saving a landlord from his worst whims. It is preparing a tenant for the part of the tenancy they would rather not think about. It is the soft skills of attention and the hard skills of the law, working at the same time and in the same breath. It is custodianship of someone else's ordinary life — their home, their tenancy, their next Monday — without ceremony, and usually without thanks.
That is leadership. It does not look like the version of leadership that gets photographed. It looks like a woman returning a phone call she did not have to return, writing a notice that is firm and fair, and going home to a family she will, in her own quiet way, lead by example.
To the mothers holding the line in this industry, I see you. From myself and my little family: Happy Mothers Day.
