5:30 pm and we have been inching through construction-obstructed traffic for half an hour. Maia, overtired from a missed nap and a full day of appointments and errands, has screamed through the entirety of it. I am overtired too, and as we crawl forward I offer snacks and bottles, toys and books, and finally turn forward with grim determination just to survive the 45 minutes until we're home. Through the screams that fill the car, I drape my arm around Richard’s neck and lean over to kiss him.
“Isn’t this romantic?” I ask.
“Actually,” he says, “it is.”
And this is one of the reasons I love my husband.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Questioning the Terms
I’ve been starting most days by creeping out of bed around 6:00—sometimes earlier, sometimes later, depending when I wake and how long it takes Richard to convince me that I really do want to do this—and tiptoeing past Maia’s bedroom, down the stairs to my desk to wrap myself in a blanket and write my novel. I like being up while it’s still dark; it’s a different darkness from nighttime, feels like a separate, secret world, the world in which I write my novel. Often Richard joins me, builds a fire, brews tea. I get an hour, occasionally two, before we hear stirrings upstairs, contented babbling and then a more urgent, “Mama!” Richard usually goes to her, changes her diaper and dresses her, and brings her down where she races to my side for a morning snuggle. I write madly through those final seconds, listening to her and Richard chatter at the change table, and by the time she is descending the stairs in her bold forward-facing one-at-a-time step, gripping the railing and grinning, I can’t grab any more moments for myself because I am, all over again, too excited to see her, to watch her descent, to stretch out my arms to her little body and her large personality and the day that waits for us together.
I am a happy mama when I write. When I do not write, I am a discontented, distracted, gloomy mama concocting escape fantasies and wondering how my life disintegrated from purpose into endless repetition of mundane tasks. Because so far, motherhood all on its own, day in and day out, does not fulfill me. This is the truth.
In a gathering of mothers a few weeks ago—a gathering I felt somewhat fraudulent at, because can it really be that I am a mother?—I commented on the importance I’m finding in prioritizing my own nourishment in order to be able to be there for my child. Another mother, a seasoned mother, said, “I actually disagree,” and spoke of the commitment inherent in parenthood to being the selfless one putting them first, to giving and giving and giving, the dangers of feeling you have to get away from your child in order to be fulfilled. I went quiet because, after all, what do I know, I’ve been a mother for less than three months, and I felt suddenly alarmed that to admit such a thing as self-focused needs, personal pursuits, equaled among more experienced mothers an admission of child neglect, of not-quite-good-enough love and devotion. I felt also the precariousness of my situation, mothering a child to whom I did not give birth, for whom the legal paperwork is not yet through, felt I would be wise to express nothing but rhapsodic devotion to this little person, did not want anyone to misinterpret my assertion that my essential self includes more than my mother self. I felt chastened.
But I sat silent while the seed of my own self-knowledge, the burning intuition I am trying to trust, rested hard and stubborn in my gut. I will not be a martyr mother. I have lived quite a number of years with myself, and I have learned what I need for my own self-nourishment. I will not relinquish that.
My stumble into motherhood has been dominated—as so many must be—by my own mother, the kind of mother she was, the kind of childhood she gave me. In my memory, she was an All Mother, a Complete Mother, a Good Mother. A Martyr Mother that I cannot, cannot see myself being.
In Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World, Peggy Orenstein pinpoints the conflict that tore me up as we were considering adopting Maia, as I walked stunned and drooping through the early weeks of pregnancy. Describing her own ambivalence about the choice of whether or not to mother, she writes:
I realized that I was mulling over a choice without questioning its terms. I’d developed my own image of the Good Mother, who “did it right,” and she looked a lot like my own mom—someone who was satisfied as a mother and wife, who was happy supporting others, making her mark through the accomplishment of those she nurtured. It’s a sacrifice that she’s insisted was no sacrifice. I knew I couldn’t be that kind of mother, yet…I felt like hers was the “right” way to do it. I feared devolving into a conflicted, discontented version of her, becoming a person who lost her essential self in motherhood while trying in vain to “do it right.”…Was it possible to be a mother without being a Mother? In an interview, Gloria Steinem, who is childless, once said, “I’m not sure I would have been strong enough to have children, to live that life, and come out the other end with an identity of my own. The way I came to think of it was that I could not give birth to both myself and someone else. It was a choice.” I understood her point (127-28).
I understand her point too. Her point gutted me, kept me awake through panicked nights, saw me standing with my hands in dishwater at the kitchen sink, tears streaming down my face as I realized I’d boarded the no-stop speeding train marked Domestic Life that I’d spent ten years running from.
It was beginning to question the terms of this role I was adopting that gave me the courage, the hope, that I could do this thing. Do it in a way that fit me, do it without losing myself.
In all the decision-making months of ambivalence and fear, the early mothering weeks of tears and freakouts, in the terror of becoming my own mother that undergirded them all, I never once confided in the person who modeled for me these unquestioned terms of motherhood. Hyper-aware of my fears of motherhood stemming from the way she mothered, in anything beyond the superficial I stayed completely away from my mom in my process of becoming a mother.
Until the day two weeks ago, a day of frustrations and tested patience, discontent and purposelessness, a cranky child and a cranky me aching for the old life. A day that seemed to negate all the progress and catapulted me back to my fear-filled mantra from early summer, the I don’t want this life that ran constantly through me then. On this day two weeks ago, I burst into unbidden tears once again at all the accumulated struggles, and the person in whose presence I burst into tears was my mother.
Which was, of course, exactly the thing that needed to happen.
She did not feel criticized as I confessed how much I had struggled against motherhood, against the terms she modeled to me, how I still struggled some days with the mundanity of it all. We talked of my childhood and she reminded me of activities she did engage in, hobbies and interests she pursued when we were young, pottery classes, weekend counseling courses, several years of a part-time home business. I was amazed at my own narrow-mindedness in my definition of my mother, in my summation of her with “My mother had no life of her own; her identity was subsumed.” Perhaps this was only my perception; perhaps she was so there for me that I thought that was all she was. Still, she said, she thought it would have been good for her and for her children if she’d had more of a life of her own as we were growing up. She hadn’t thought so at the time.
“I have to do it differently,” I said. She said, “I know.”
And I think the terms, for me—so far, and do remember it has been only three months—come down to Amy Tiemann’s revelation in Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family, another of the books I clung to like a life raft in a storm during the first exhausting weeks as Maia’s mother: referring to the maxim “Motherhood is the most important job in the world,” Tiemann writes motherhood is not a job; it is a relationship (80).
This is it. This sums up how I feel about Maia, and it is very like how I feel about Richard. As neither a wife—and I did freak out about that one too—nor a mother do I feel I’ve stepped into a job whose description is defined for me, whose constraints limit me, whose terms dictate who I am and where I find my purpose. Instead, marriage is Richard and I in relationship, still ourselves, walking side by side. Motherhood, thus far, is Maia and I likewise in relationship. She is a person with whom I interact and engage, with whom I spend (a disproportionate amount of) my time, with whom I laugh and play, whom I feed and soothe, dress and love, whom I am attempting to accompany and nurture into herself, her life, her purpose, knowing that she will play a huge part in doing the same for me.
My job, the work I do, the source of a large degree of my fulfillment and purpose, happens every morning in the darkness of 6 a.m. And it has nothing to do with either Richard or Maia, who are my companions on the journey but not the purpose of the journey.
So on a day like today, when the two loads of laundry I washed this morning are now being drenched on the clothesline, when I have left my ambitiously-begun bread dough to bake in a hot oven when it is supposed to be only rising in a warm oven, when the dishwater I ran four hours ago is now a cold greasy pool in which the dishes bob unwashed, when my first major cloth-diaper poo sits upstairs on the bathroom floor waiting for me to figure out how to deal with it, when Maia’s lunch burns on the stove while I’m dealing with the major poo and she is cranky and overdue for her nap but I don’t want to put her down before she gets a bit of food into her except the food is now burnt, when all this is happening, still, I have written. I got up this morning and I wrote. I pursued my work, an hour, several hundred words, progress.
My work is what enables me to be in relationship with my daughter with presence and joy.
And those, for right now, three months in, are my terms.
I am a happy mama when I write. When I do not write, I am a discontented, distracted, gloomy mama concocting escape fantasies and wondering how my life disintegrated from purpose into endless repetition of mundane tasks. Because so far, motherhood all on its own, day in and day out, does not fulfill me. This is the truth.
In a gathering of mothers a few weeks ago—a gathering I felt somewhat fraudulent at, because can it really be that I am a mother?—I commented on the importance I’m finding in prioritizing my own nourishment in order to be able to be there for my child. Another mother, a seasoned mother, said, “I actually disagree,” and spoke of the commitment inherent in parenthood to being the selfless one putting them first, to giving and giving and giving, the dangers of feeling you have to get away from your child in order to be fulfilled. I went quiet because, after all, what do I know, I’ve been a mother for less than three months, and I felt suddenly alarmed that to admit such a thing as self-focused needs, personal pursuits, equaled among more experienced mothers an admission of child neglect, of not-quite-good-enough love and devotion. I felt also the precariousness of my situation, mothering a child to whom I did not give birth, for whom the legal paperwork is not yet through, felt I would be wise to express nothing but rhapsodic devotion to this little person, did not want anyone to misinterpret my assertion that my essential self includes more than my mother self. I felt chastened.
But I sat silent while the seed of my own self-knowledge, the burning intuition I am trying to trust, rested hard and stubborn in my gut. I will not be a martyr mother. I have lived quite a number of years with myself, and I have learned what I need for my own self-nourishment. I will not relinquish that.
My stumble into motherhood has been dominated—as so many must be—by my own mother, the kind of mother she was, the kind of childhood she gave me. In my memory, she was an All Mother, a Complete Mother, a Good Mother. A Martyr Mother that I cannot, cannot see myself being.
In Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World, Peggy Orenstein pinpoints the conflict that tore me up as we were considering adopting Maia, as I walked stunned and drooping through the early weeks of pregnancy. Describing her own ambivalence about the choice of whether or not to mother, she writes:
I realized that I was mulling over a choice without questioning its terms. I’d developed my own image of the Good Mother, who “did it right,” and she looked a lot like my own mom—someone who was satisfied as a mother and wife, who was happy supporting others, making her mark through the accomplishment of those she nurtured. It’s a sacrifice that she’s insisted was no sacrifice. I knew I couldn’t be that kind of mother, yet…I felt like hers was the “right” way to do it. I feared devolving into a conflicted, discontented version of her, becoming a person who lost her essential self in motherhood while trying in vain to “do it right.”…Was it possible to be a mother without being a Mother? In an interview, Gloria Steinem, who is childless, once said, “I’m not sure I would have been strong enough to have children, to live that life, and come out the other end with an identity of my own. The way I came to think of it was that I could not give birth to both myself and someone else. It was a choice.” I understood her point (127-28).
I understand her point too. Her point gutted me, kept me awake through panicked nights, saw me standing with my hands in dishwater at the kitchen sink, tears streaming down my face as I realized I’d boarded the no-stop speeding train marked Domestic Life that I’d spent ten years running from.
It was beginning to question the terms of this role I was adopting that gave me the courage, the hope, that I could do this thing. Do it in a way that fit me, do it without losing myself.
In all the decision-making months of ambivalence and fear, the early mothering weeks of tears and freakouts, in the terror of becoming my own mother that undergirded them all, I never once confided in the person who modeled for me these unquestioned terms of motherhood. Hyper-aware of my fears of motherhood stemming from the way she mothered, in anything beyond the superficial I stayed completely away from my mom in my process of becoming a mother.
Until the day two weeks ago, a day of frustrations and tested patience, discontent and purposelessness, a cranky child and a cranky me aching for the old life. A day that seemed to negate all the progress and catapulted me back to my fear-filled mantra from early summer, the I don’t want this life that ran constantly through me then. On this day two weeks ago, I burst into unbidden tears once again at all the accumulated struggles, and the person in whose presence I burst into tears was my mother.
Which was, of course, exactly the thing that needed to happen.
She did not feel criticized as I confessed how much I had struggled against motherhood, against the terms she modeled to me, how I still struggled some days with the mundanity of it all. We talked of my childhood and she reminded me of activities she did engage in, hobbies and interests she pursued when we were young, pottery classes, weekend counseling courses, several years of a part-time home business. I was amazed at my own narrow-mindedness in my definition of my mother, in my summation of her with “My mother had no life of her own; her identity was subsumed.” Perhaps this was only my perception; perhaps she was so there for me that I thought that was all she was. Still, she said, she thought it would have been good for her and for her children if she’d had more of a life of her own as we were growing up. She hadn’t thought so at the time.
“I have to do it differently,” I said. She said, “I know.”
And I think the terms, for me—so far, and do remember it has been only three months—come down to Amy Tiemann’s revelation in Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family, another of the books I clung to like a life raft in a storm during the first exhausting weeks as Maia’s mother: referring to the maxim “Motherhood is the most important job in the world,” Tiemann writes motherhood is not a job; it is a relationship (80).
This is it. This sums up how I feel about Maia, and it is very like how I feel about Richard. As neither a wife—and I did freak out about that one too—nor a mother do I feel I’ve stepped into a job whose description is defined for me, whose constraints limit me, whose terms dictate who I am and where I find my purpose. Instead, marriage is Richard and I in relationship, still ourselves, walking side by side. Motherhood, thus far, is Maia and I likewise in relationship. She is a person with whom I interact and engage, with whom I spend (a disproportionate amount of) my time, with whom I laugh and play, whom I feed and soothe, dress and love, whom I am attempting to accompany and nurture into herself, her life, her purpose, knowing that she will play a huge part in doing the same for me.
My job, the work I do, the source of a large degree of my fulfillment and purpose, happens every morning in the darkness of 6 a.m. And it has nothing to do with either Richard or Maia, who are my companions on the journey but not the purpose of the journey.
So on a day like today, when the two loads of laundry I washed this morning are now being drenched on the clothesline, when I have left my ambitiously-begun bread dough to bake in a hot oven when it is supposed to be only rising in a warm oven, when the dishwater I ran four hours ago is now a cold greasy pool in which the dishes bob unwashed, when my first major cloth-diaper poo sits upstairs on the bathroom floor waiting for me to figure out how to deal with it, when Maia’s lunch burns on the stove while I’m dealing with the major poo and she is cranky and overdue for her nap but I don’t want to put her down before she gets a bit of food into her except the food is now burnt, when all this is happening, still, I have written. I got up this morning and I wrote. I pursued my work, an hour, several hundred words, progress.
My work is what enables me to be in relationship with my daughter with presence and joy.
And those, for right now, three months in, are my terms.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Unconscious Conception & Other Failures to Live Mindfully
Today I heard my baby’s heartbeat. Proof in the form of loud and rapid pulsations from my abdomen that there is another human being inside my body. Sudden, mind-boggling, transcendent confirmation that within this five foot ten space that I have always occupied solo (five foot ten, formerly 129 pounds, formerly small-breasted and flat-stomached), I am not alone. There is someone else here with me, making sounds inside my belly. Oh my goddess. I am having a baby.
I have not been as present in this pregnancy as I would have expected. I did write reams in the weeks after discovery, working through all I felt and feared. But now, for someone who tries to be conscious about each phase of her cycle, to honour what her body and spirit are going through with monthly fluctuating hormones, for someone who takes on new life chapters with piles of book on the topic and pages of ruminations in notebooks, I have been decidedly un-conscious about the unprecedented changes going on inside me. I would have thought I’d be keeping a pregnancy journal, noting daily changes in body and emotions, reading pregnancy books, creating conscious intentions for a spiritual birth, communing with the baby.
I’m not.
Instead I’m feeding and clothing and chasing and playing with a toddler, a much more real, much more in-my-face little person who demands focus because she is here on the other side of my body. The fact of her makes this much less like a first pregnancy than it otherwise might be; she is the first pregnancy I missed out on, the older sibling who I did not actually carry in my body but who is nevertheless resolutely here, demanding time and attention (and very confused every time I point to my belly and say “baby,” when there obviously is no such thing anywhere in evidence).
In the time that’s left over from feeding and clothing and chasing and playing with a toddler, I’m trying to stay me. I’m writing, madly dashing toward my February novel-completion deadline, that indefinite date when sleepless nights and breastfeeding and a post-baby haze and hopefully a post-baby head-over-heels love will take over, when regular time at my desk will become a quaint idea from another era, when I will not be able to forget about this baby any more than I can now forget about Maia. I’m reading, books not about pregnancy: novels, books about writers or various aspects of feminism, research for my own novel, or, if something motherhood-related, social critiques of the institution and expectations on it rather than rhapsodic odes or how-tos. Books that connect me to the creative, intellectual life that I value and that I want to hold onto.
I’ve found myself resisting acknowledging that this is some special period in my life that needs to be treated differently from the life I had and the person I was before that pink line on the pregnancy test. Haven’t there been enough changes? Can’t I just be sort of normal for another five months, when being sort of normal will become completely impossible?
Pregnancy has been easy: debilitating exhaustion in the early weeks, but no nausea. I’m getting a belly, but it can still be hidden. I can’t feel the baby moving yet. I’m busy and focused. I can still forget I’m pregnant.
But not with a heartbeat pounding through my skin. A heartbeat that isn’t mine but is inside me, so intrinsically part of me I’m astonished that I haven’t been aware of it every moment since it joined me.
In the early weeks, I was torn up by the knowledge that conception had been more haphazard risk-taking than mindful intention. Every pregnancy book I opened started months before conception, with these are the vitamins you should be taking before getting pregnant, this is the check-up you should have, this is how to invite the baby’s spirit into your lives, every sentence a reproach. You’re behind, you missed all these steps, and there’s no way to go back! (Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood was a relief not only for its straight talk about the complexity of maternal emotions and about the maternity industry, but for the fact that she—a mature, educated, responsible woman!—had also conceived by accident.)
So much about pregnancy and birth is similar to the process of engagement and wedding and marriage preparation. The rite of passage from one way of being into another, the importance of awareness and ritual, the spiritual in the physical, the need to grieve the loss of a former self and prepare to move into something new. When Richard and I were preparing for our wedding, I put a great deal of awareness into the process, reading books with titles like The Conscious Bride, focusing on the ritual of the ceremony as the most important aspect, largely eschewing the bridal industry’s fluff and frivolity, guarding my pre-ceremony time carefully so that it could be a spiritual, transformative passageway into my new self. I’d thought I would bring similar care and consciousness to pregnancy and birth if the time ever came, but the difference, especially early on, was that—though I worked through some grief at losing my single self and struggled to figure out what Wife meant to me and how I could become one without losing myself—partnership with Richard was something that I chose consciously, that I felt ready for, that I fully wanted. It was a decision, and I could move forward into it with full embracing. Pregnancy, in those early weeks, still felt like something that had been sprung on me.
When I undress at night, Richard and I marvel at my swelling belly and full breasts, gasp, “Oh my god, do you think we’re pregnant?” He takes pictures. When Maia joins us in our bed in the mornings, she reaches for the belly butter on my nightstand, pulls away the covers to get to my tummy, and helps me spread it across my skin. I’m taking prenatal vitamins and trying to eat well and to rest when I need to. But becoming conscious about the pregnancy has largely been something I hope to get around to doing before February, in between finishing my novel and mothering a still-new-to-us child.
I felt a shift, after my appointment with my midwife. I drove to a café and ordered a warm drink and turned on my laptop and smiled the whole time, that heartbeat still thrumming through me. I called Richard to tell him. At the library I renewed instead of returning Birthing from Within, found Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth on the shelf (a book I read five years ago preparing to attend the birth of my nephew—a pregnancy I was more conscious about than I have been about this one, a birth that made me say, “I have got to experience this myself someday”). I drove the whole hour home with one hand on my belly, holding my baby. Richard had given me the day on my own to recharge and renew, was home alone with Maia, putting her to bed now. As I drove the highway, and then the smaller highway, and then the gravel road, and then the single-lane potholed even smaller gravel road that is our new commute between our house and any substantial civilization, I felt distinctly that I too was alone with one of our babies—communing with her, taking care of her, the two of us together listening to jazz on CBC Radio 2 in a car headed home.
I have not been as present in this pregnancy as I would have expected. I did write reams in the weeks after discovery, working through all I felt and feared. But now, for someone who tries to be conscious about each phase of her cycle, to honour what her body and spirit are going through with monthly fluctuating hormones, for someone who takes on new life chapters with piles of book on the topic and pages of ruminations in notebooks, I have been decidedly un-conscious about the unprecedented changes going on inside me. I would have thought I’d be keeping a pregnancy journal, noting daily changes in body and emotions, reading pregnancy books, creating conscious intentions for a spiritual birth, communing with the baby.
I’m not.
Instead I’m feeding and clothing and chasing and playing with a toddler, a much more real, much more in-my-face little person who demands focus because she is here on the other side of my body. The fact of her makes this much less like a first pregnancy than it otherwise might be; she is the first pregnancy I missed out on, the older sibling who I did not actually carry in my body but who is nevertheless resolutely here, demanding time and attention (and very confused every time I point to my belly and say “baby,” when there obviously is no such thing anywhere in evidence).
In the time that’s left over from feeding and clothing and chasing and playing with a toddler, I’m trying to stay me. I’m writing, madly dashing toward my February novel-completion deadline, that indefinite date when sleepless nights and breastfeeding and a post-baby haze and hopefully a post-baby head-over-heels love will take over, when regular time at my desk will become a quaint idea from another era, when I will not be able to forget about this baby any more than I can now forget about Maia. I’m reading, books not about pregnancy: novels, books about writers or various aspects of feminism, research for my own novel, or, if something motherhood-related, social critiques of the institution and expectations on it rather than rhapsodic odes or how-tos. Books that connect me to the creative, intellectual life that I value and that I want to hold onto.
I’ve found myself resisting acknowledging that this is some special period in my life that needs to be treated differently from the life I had and the person I was before that pink line on the pregnancy test. Haven’t there been enough changes? Can’t I just be sort of normal for another five months, when being sort of normal will become completely impossible?
Pregnancy has been easy: debilitating exhaustion in the early weeks, but no nausea. I’m getting a belly, but it can still be hidden. I can’t feel the baby moving yet. I’m busy and focused. I can still forget I’m pregnant.
But not with a heartbeat pounding through my skin. A heartbeat that isn’t mine but is inside me, so intrinsically part of me I’m astonished that I haven’t been aware of it every moment since it joined me.
In the early weeks, I was torn up by the knowledge that conception had been more haphazard risk-taking than mindful intention. Every pregnancy book I opened started months before conception, with these are the vitamins you should be taking before getting pregnant, this is the check-up you should have, this is how to invite the baby’s spirit into your lives, every sentence a reproach. You’re behind, you missed all these steps, and there’s no way to go back! (Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood was a relief not only for its straight talk about the complexity of maternal emotions and about the maternity industry, but for the fact that she—a mature, educated, responsible woman!—had also conceived by accident.)
So much about pregnancy and birth is similar to the process of engagement and wedding and marriage preparation. The rite of passage from one way of being into another, the importance of awareness and ritual, the spiritual in the physical, the need to grieve the loss of a former self and prepare to move into something new. When Richard and I were preparing for our wedding, I put a great deal of awareness into the process, reading books with titles like The Conscious Bride, focusing on the ritual of the ceremony as the most important aspect, largely eschewing the bridal industry’s fluff and frivolity, guarding my pre-ceremony time carefully so that it could be a spiritual, transformative passageway into my new self. I’d thought I would bring similar care and consciousness to pregnancy and birth if the time ever came, but the difference, especially early on, was that—though I worked through some grief at losing my single self and struggled to figure out what Wife meant to me and how I could become one without losing myself—partnership with Richard was something that I chose consciously, that I felt ready for, that I fully wanted. It was a decision, and I could move forward into it with full embracing. Pregnancy, in those early weeks, still felt like something that had been sprung on me.
When I undress at night, Richard and I marvel at my swelling belly and full breasts, gasp, “Oh my god, do you think we’re pregnant?” He takes pictures. When Maia joins us in our bed in the mornings, she reaches for the belly butter on my nightstand, pulls away the covers to get to my tummy, and helps me spread it across my skin. I’m taking prenatal vitamins and trying to eat well and to rest when I need to. But becoming conscious about the pregnancy has largely been something I hope to get around to doing before February, in between finishing my novel and mothering a still-new-to-us child.
I felt a shift, after my appointment with my midwife. I drove to a café and ordered a warm drink and turned on my laptop and smiled the whole time, that heartbeat still thrumming through me. I called Richard to tell him. At the library I renewed instead of returning Birthing from Within, found Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth on the shelf (a book I read five years ago preparing to attend the birth of my nephew—a pregnancy I was more conscious about than I have been about this one, a birth that made me say, “I have got to experience this myself someday”). I drove the whole hour home with one hand on my belly, holding my baby. Richard had given me the day on my own to recharge and renew, was home alone with Maia, putting her to bed now. As I drove the highway, and then the smaller highway, and then the gravel road, and then the single-lane potholed even smaller gravel road that is our new commute between our house and any substantial civilization, I felt distinctly that I too was alone with one of our babies—communing with her, taking care of her, the two of us together listening to jazz on CBC Radio 2 in a car headed home.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Gestation
It’s been a lot of big news to announce all at once.
We’re adopting a baby.
Oh yeah, and we’re having a baby. No, a different one.
And we’re moving to the country, north, to a house on a lake.
Three huge life transitions, any one of which would be momentous, life-changing on its own. I am trying to be gracious with myself. Would this be smooth and easy for anyone?
When I told one old friend, over smoothies on the back patio at one of my favourite cafés on Roncesvalles, I could feel the chasm opening between us that was a chasm between my old life and my new. She is still single and childless—still, not because that might or should change for her, but because it did for me; when we first met, I was single and childless too. She left her good job to move to an ashram in the mountains; she is planning a solo trip to India; she dabbles in dating but doesn’t tie herself down. She is the old me. I could feel—or perhaps, likely, this was my own projection—her rapidly-covered shock, the astonished moment before congratulations that covered the oh thank god that isn’t me. A day from driving north to take over Maia’s care, I felt the enormity of what I was embarking on as I saw the old me reflected in her life, as though we two had been on one ship and I’d now changed to a different one and was waving from the deck, watching as she and her independent, footloose life receded to a tiny speck that would soon have nothing to do with me.
Yesterday was another hard day. Exhaustion that could be pregnancy or could be depression, burrowing back into bed rather than face trying to carve out purpose and fulfillment from another day. Concocting desperate escape fantasies, fearing I am not, I am simply not, cut out for this. One year ago I was living in a fifth floor Manhattan walk-up, writing my novel every day, all day, in Ft. Tryon Park and Washington Square and Think Coffee, meeting Richard for drinks and dinner in the evenings, going to plays and movies. Six months ago I was writing papers and giving presentations and attending classes, my life bursting with challenge and thought. These days I am dressing and feeding a small child, going on bike rides on dirt roads with her close at my back, walking over to visit Grandma, walking over to visit Auntie Mar. Going down for a nap. Making supper. Eating. Changing another diaper. Getting ready for bed. Next day, repeat.
It is an adjustment to move from constant built-in intellectual stimulation, from a life dominated by adult pursuits and regular progress toward goals, to this slowed-down life focused on the interests and abilities of a one-and-a-half-year-old. It is an adjustment for the measure of daily accomplishment to shrink from papers finished or new chapters begun to mundane tasks that must be repeated again and again. Some days my big achievement is taking a shower.
Maia delights me in small, surprising moments: grasping my face in her hand to turn it toward her and plant a big kiss on my lips, taking her bottle from her mouth to blow kisses as she’s going to sleep, her daily "Mama!" when she wakes, the transported smile when she sees me. Who could not love this?
There was a day last week that I declared the happiest of my life. Richard took Maia for two hours in the morning and I sat at my desk overlooking the lake, then moved into the breeze and sunshine on the front deck, and worked effortlessly, steadily on my book, huge leaps of progress, new ideas, old ideas rediscovered, my outline firmed up so that I can see ahead to where I am going, so that finishing this novel by February felt eminently doable, probable. Richard had just received word, after 13 years of knocking on their door, of an audition for the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival, and I could hear his speeches across the yard as he rehearsed them to Maia, and I loved this, that here we were, both back in our art, both pursuing what we love, our daughter here in the midst of it making all of it even better than it would be without her. When it was my turn to take over I did so with joy, and all day long the fact that I had written—not just a grabbed 15 minutes at the end of a day, but whole hours together—coloured my perspective, my ability to be present with my daughter, to love the small moments, to love her. I felt complete, vibrant, fulfilled.
I’ve been baking bread by hand, cooking spaghetti sauce from scratch with ingredients picked fresh in the garden at our doorstep, saving chicken bones for homemade soup stock. Slowing down into a life that doesn’t come packaged at the grocery store, that isn’t carried forward on concrete. Richard and I sleep with our lake-facing bedroom door open, our bed piled with blankets, so we can feel the chill night air and hear the loons, the frogs, the water running over the nearby dam.
I try to keep days like yesterday in perspective, and to be gracious with myself. I have had so little time to ease into this. ("Our five-day gestation period," Richard and I called the period between finally deciding to raise Maia and actually beginning to.) I am 14 weeks into my first pregnancy, hormones running amok inside me. I’m nurturing life both in the form of the curly-haired redhead who’s taken over our house and the peach-sized fetus who is sharing my body. Never before has so much nurturance been required of me, and I am aware that I will not be able to do it if I don’t first nurture myself.
My sister pointed out to me, when I escaped for an impromptu therapy session at her house during one bad day (not yesterday, a different bad day; they are numerous) that during my moontime, I always allowed myself time to rest and recharge, to be gentle with myself, to expect little, without guilt. I have missed moontimes, missed my cycle, this pattern of emotions and strengths that had become a guide to myself. Perhaps, she suggested, I need to consider the pregnancy one extended moontime: a time when my body is working very hard, when I need extra rest, comfort, and gentleness. My initial resistance (nine months of being gentle with myself? how self-indulgent!) has given way to faltering attempts to change my expectations of myself, to not demand that I plough through this transition and this pregnancy at top production, that I let myself feel, and be, whatever I am.
So that on days like yesterday, when the gulf feels so great between me on this foreign ship and the familiar distant shore that I’m unsure I will ever see again, I let myself burrow back in bed, and rest, and cry, and let that be okay. And this leads to days like today, when I am dancing and splashing and playing with Maia in happy abandon, slipping into five minutes here and two there at my computer, working purposefully on my own creative project, somehow managing to mesh the two.
I am being born as a mother in all this transition, and you could say that as this new being called mother I was from the womb untimely ripped. That five-day gestation period for Maia was also only five days for the new me, Heidi, Mother. Perhaps this nine-month moontime is as much my gestation period as the Peach’s, as I come into my new self, hoping it will still contain a lot of the old self in it (I liked my old self) but knowing that a lot will be altered. Stronger, I hope, surer, more aware, maybe.
We’re adopting a baby.
Oh yeah, and we’re having a baby. No, a different one.
And we’re moving to the country, north, to a house on a lake.
Three huge life transitions, any one of which would be momentous, life-changing on its own. I am trying to be gracious with myself. Would this be smooth and easy for anyone?
When I told one old friend, over smoothies on the back patio at one of my favourite cafés on Roncesvalles, I could feel the chasm opening between us that was a chasm between my old life and my new. She is still single and childless—still, not because that might or should change for her, but because it did for me; when we first met, I was single and childless too. She left her good job to move to an ashram in the mountains; she is planning a solo trip to India; she dabbles in dating but doesn’t tie herself down. She is the old me. I could feel—or perhaps, likely, this was my own projection—her rapidly-covered shock, the astonished moment before congratulations that covered the oh thank god that isn’t me. A day from driving north to take over Maia’s care, I felt the enormity of what I was embarking on as I saw the old me reflected in her life, as though we two had been on one ship and I’d now changed to a different one and was waving from the deck, watching as she and her independent, footloose life receded to a tiny speck that would soon have nothing to do with me.
Yesterday was another hard day. Exhaustion that could be pregnancy or could be depression, burrowing back into bed rather than face trying to carve out purpose and fulfillment from another day. Concocting desperate escape fantasies, fearing I am not, I am simply not, cut out for this. One year ago I was living in a fifth floor Manhattan walk-up, writing my novel every day, all day, in Ft. Tryon Park and Washington Square and Think Coffee, meeting Richard for drinks and dinner in the evenings, going to plays and movies. Six months ago I was writing papers and giving presentations and attending classes, my life bursting with challenge and thought. These days I am dressing and feeding a small child, going on bike rides on dirt roads with her close at my back, walking over to visit Grandma, walking over to visit Auntie Mar. Going down for a nap. Making supper. Eating. Changing another diaper. Getting ready for bed. Next day, repeat.
It is an adjustment to move from constant built-in intellectual stimulation, from a life dominated by adult pursuits and regular progress toward goals, to this slowed-down life focused on the interests and abilities of a one-and-a-half-year-old. It is an adjustment for the measure of daily accomplishment to shrink from papers finished or new chapters begun to mundane tasks that must be repeated again and again. Some days my big achievement is taking a shower.
Maia delights me in small, surprising moments: grasping my face in her hand to turn it toward her and plant a big kiss on my lips, taking her bottle from her mouth to blow kisses as she’s going to sleep, her daily "Mama!" when she wakes, the transported smile when she sees me. Who could not love this?
There was a day last week that I declared the happiest of my life. Richard took Maia for two hours in the morning and I sat at my desk overlooking the lake, then moved into the breeze and sunshine on the front deck, and worked effortlessly, steadily on my book, huge leaps of progress, new ideas, old ideas rediscovered, my outline firmed up so that I can see ahead to where I am going, so that finishing this novel by February felt eminently doable, probable. Richard had just received word, after 13 years of knocking on their door, of an audition for the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival, and I could hear his speeches across the yard as he rehearsed them to Maia, and I loved this, that here we were, both back in our art, both pursuing what we love, our daughter here in the midst of it making all of it even better than it would be without her. When it was my turn to take over I did so with joy, and all day long the fact that I had written—not just a grabbed 15 minutes at the end of a day, but whole hours together—coloured my perspective, my ability to be present with my daughter, to love the small moments, to love her. I felt complete, vibrant, fulfilled.
I’ve been baking bread by hand, cooking spaghetti sauce from scratch with ingredients picked fresh in the garden at our doorstep, saving chicken bones for homemade soup stock. Slowing down into a life that doesn’t come packaged at the grocery store, that isn’t carried forward on concrete. Richard and I sleep with our lake-facing bedroom door open, our bed piled with blankets, so we can feel the chill night air and hear the loons, the frogs, the water running over the nearby dam.
I try to keep days like yesterday in perspective, and to be gracious with myself. I have had so little time to ease into this. ("Our five-day gestation period," Richard and I called the period between finally deciding to raise Maia and actually beginning to.) I am 14 weeks into my first pregnancy, hormones running amok inside me. I’m nurturing life both in the form of the curly-haired redhead who’s taken over our house and the peach-sized fetus who is sharing my body. Never before has so much nurturance been required of me, and I am aware that I will not be able to do it if I don’t first nurture myself.
My sister pointed out to me, when I escaped for an impromptu therapy session at her house during one bad day (not yesterday, a different bad day; they are numerous) that during my moontime, I always allowed myself time to rest and recharge, to be gentle with myself, to expect little, without guilt. I have missed moontimes, missed my cycle, this pattern of emotions and strengths that had become a guide to myself. Perhaps, she suggested, I need to consider the pregnancy one extended moontime: a time when my body is working very hard, when I need extra rest, comfort, and gentleness. My initial resistance (nine months of being gentle with myself? how self-indulgent!) has given way to faltering attempts to change my expectations of myself, to not demand that I plough through this transition and this pregnancy at top production, that I let myself feel, and be, whatever I am.
So that on days like yesterday, when the gulf feels so great between me on this foreign ship and the familiar distant shore that I’m unsure I will ever see again, I let myself burrow back in bed, and rest, and cry, and let that be okay. And this leads to days like today, when I am dancing and splashing and playing with Maia in happy abandon, slipping into five minutes here and two there at my computer, working purposefully on my own creative project, somehow managing to mesh the two.
I am being born as a mother in all this transition, and you could say that as this new being called mother I was from the womb untimely ripped. That five-day gestation period for Maia was also only five days for the new me, Heidi, Mother. Perhaps this nine-month moontime is as much my gestation period as the Peach’s, as I come into my new self, hoping it will still contain a lot of the old self in it (I liked my old self) but knowing that a lot will be altered. Stronger, I hope, surer, more aware, maybe.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Suddenly, Motherhood
When I met Maia, the three-month-old daughter of my teenage brother, I was overcome by powerful, unexpected connection. Crying within seconds of taking her into my arms, looking into her alert blue eyes, I felt not like I was meeting a new family member but like I was reuniting with someone I was meant to be with. It was not a meeting but a recognition. I wondered if we’d known each other in another life. Richard termed it The Maia Effect, the way I melted into tears whenever I so much as thought of her. The only time I could remember having such a spiritual and overwhelming response at meeting someone, such an intuitive knowing that something about this person was important to my life path, was when I met Richard on a West Virginia night, the also-blue-eyed actor whom I would marry.
Seven months later, my brother and his girlfriend, struggling with the challenges of teenage parenthood, broke up. Another flash of intuition: I wonder if Richard and I will end up raising Maia.
Another two months, February, and my parents had become Maia’s legal guardians. I was neck-deep in essays and 800-page novels. My mother called and said, "Maia needs parents." My immediate response was Yes, yes, yes. Followed shortly after by This is too huge, can we really do this, it will mean overhauling our lives completely; are we absolutely sure her parents can’t pull it together? I still had another four months of school to plough through, intense intellectual and emotional focus that didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else. Richard and I decided we would decide once I was finished school.
The next four months were filled with conflict. Moments of intense knowing followed by pulling back, uncertainty, deep ambivalence about whether I actually wanted to be a mother, ever, and whether I wanted to be the adoptive mother of this child in particular. Richard and I visited with Maia and with both Maia’s parents, wanting to be certain they were certain, discussing the level of involvement they would each want in Maia’s life, the boundaries and guidelines that would need to be in place.
I read Maybe Baby: 28 writers tell the truth about skepticism, infertility, baby lust, childlessness, ambivalence, and how they made the biggest decision of their lives. The book was divided into three sections: Definitely Not, On the Fence, and Yes. I related to all three. I felt the longing for a child—for this particular child—but I also felt the longing for an unencumbered life in which my own interests and dreams and goals were centre stage and stayed there, in which my partner and I could be together doing what we wanted when we wanted it.
I had never been particularly maternal, despite occasional surges of baby desire, never felt that I had to be a mother for my life to be complete. I worried I would never finish my novel or any other novels, never attain what I’ve wanted all my life to attain. I remembered my years of determination to be different from the women I saw around me growing up, the women who were not the centre of their own lives but lived for the lives of their children. The fear of my early 20s, almost a mantra—"Marriage and motherhood are the enemy of my dreams"—returned. The fact that marriage, at least, had turned out to be a nurturer of and safe place for my dreams rather than an enemy did not completely reassure; marriage was a relationship between two adults, while parenthood required a selfless commitment to someone who needed everything from you. I was not at all sure that I could be selfless.
I found myself afraid both of losing myself into the identity of mother, and of not being able to attach to become enough of a mother, both of being too much mother and not enough mother. I felt a fierce desire to hang onto my individual identity as a woman, a fierce valuing of my solitude, my space, my time, my reading and writing, a fierce desire to be more in life than a caretaker of someone else’s life.
I moved on to Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood, trying to get a picture, particularly from writing women’s perspectives, of what it’s really like to devote yourself to a child. I read one woman’s story of adoption (her daughter’s name was Maia), her fears that she would not be able to feel like a mother to this child, her conclusion with a touching story in which her motherhood of Maia was proclaimed, affirmed. I cried, looked up at Richard, stared at him for a long time until the words came out: "I want to do it."
By the end of May, now finished my degree and preparing to go north for two weeks with Maia to make the final decision, I was reading Nobody’s Mother: Life Without Kids. The concerns and desires of women who had chosen not to have children, or to whom life had not brought children, resonated deeply with me. I could see myself remaining child-free, writing and reading and travelling with my husband, getting more education, loving it. I lay awake at night in a panic, thinking I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother. The pressure felt enormous: my mom, nearing 60 and exhausted after over 30 years of raising her own six children, was reaching the end of her endurance with an active 15-month-old; Maia was getting older, had already been subjected to one huge upheaval, needed to be settled as soon as possible with whoever were going to be her parents; if we didn’t do it, there were no other viable options within the family. I felt guilty, angry, panicked, forced. If child-free women in general are accused of being selfish, how much more selfish would I be to refuse to parent not a hypothetical child but one that was here now, growing older, needing a home?
I grew up in a community and a faith that set wife and motherhood as women’s highest, only calling. Becoming a mother, and being fully and only a mother, was what women were set on earth for, where they would find their fulfillment, the only thing they should do or should want to do. In my examples of womanhood growing up, there were no women who were not mothers, and no mothers who were anything but mothers. I didn’t know any mothers with jobs, let alone careers. There was no being a mother and being something else too. They gave themselves fully, to as many children as God sent them; their children were their life and mother was their identity. (This was not the 50s; it was the 80s and 90s.) When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said "a writer and a wife and mother"—a writer because it was what I really wanted to be, and a wife and mother because I was female and that’s what God made females for.
I was terrified of becoming one of these mothers.
I did not realize how fully I had been running away from the motherhood calling I was raised for until suddenly, after all these months of agonizing, motherhood was no longer an abstract theory but a reality. Reality took the form of a trip north to care for this motherless child, at the end of which we would have to say yes or no. On the morning I was leaving for this trip, on the breakfast table between Richard and I, reality also took the form of a faint pink line on a pregnancy test.
Years before he met me, Richard was told by a psychic that she saw him living on a lake, with twins. I travelled five hours north from Toronto to the lake my family lives on, the hours-old pregnancy test burning in my pocket, the words I’m pregnant repeating in my mind with impossible, shocking absurdity, to care for one child and to nurture the second inside my body: a sort of twins, both come to us, in a way, on the same day.
I spent two weeks in early-pregnancy exhaustion, taking care of Maia in my parents’ home, talking to the spirit in my belly that had somehow made an agreement with my spirit to come here without my knowing. Dropping into exhausted sleep at night (and in the morning, and in the afternoon), adjusting to a completely different life. I felt like I had been deposited into a reality show in which contestants are placed in extreme circumstances to see how they’ll fare: you’re the mother of a 15-month-old, and you’re pregnant! Starting…now! Go!
I had moments of deep contentment, splashing in the lake with my red-headed fairy child, meditating with one hand on my belly in awe at the startling fact of a life growing inside me. I had moments in which I cried torrents, enraged that we had let this happen accidentally, weeping a constant track of, "My life is over, my life is over; I don’t want this life, I don’t want this life." I had dreams in which I wasn’t allowed to participate in my upcoming graduation—cut off from personal and intellectual achievement—because I’d become a mother. Some days, all I could see ahead of me was a life of slavery to a demanding being (or two of them), of never having time for myself, of my large and varied and creative life diminishing to diapers and food preparation and loads of laundry I wouldn’t even have time to hang on the line. After one exhausting day, I handed Maia to my mother and collapsed in a recliner by the lake, trying to read but able only to stare ahead and think, "I have succumbed. I have finally succumbed. At age 32, after successfully evading it so long, I am a victim of biology; I have been caught in the natural system that has helped enslave women for millennia. Goodbye, personal goals and dreams and time for myself, hello, life of small things."
Dr. Christiane Northrup writes about a spectrum of mothering styles. On one end is the nontraditional mother, "the woman who is primarily turned inward toward meeting creative needs that come from deep within her." This kind of mother "has to take care of these needs if she is to remain emotionally balanced and physically healthy. Activating the motherhood and nurturing circuits tends to take a toll physically unless they also have a lot of practical support. Though they love their children as much as anyone, they are not biologically wired for motherhood to fulfill them totally at the deepest levels" (Mother-Daughter Wisdom p. 17).
It relieved me to have this kind of mother acknowledged as a kind of mother that it is possible to be. I began to see that my fears about becoming a mother stemmed not from motherhood itself but from the baggage I carried around it: the examples set for me of the traditional mother—the other end of the mothering-style spectrum—whose personal identity was subsumed; the gospel preached to me of motherhood as woman’s holy duty; the decade-long fear of losing my dreams and goals and independence by becoming responsible for a small person whose needs will come before mine. Was this the truth about motherhood? Was this the way it had to be? I started to hope, as I felt early-pregnancy cramping and fatigue, as I fed and clothed and diapered Maia, that no, it was not, and it did not.
The decisive moment, the moment at which I knew, finally and absolutely, that I was Maia’s mother and she was my daughter, was the night she bit my stomach. She had missed her nap and was overtired, screaming as I tried to get her ready for bed, when she leaned forward and bit me, hard, in the belly. I exploded with words good mothers do not use, cried, "I don’t even want this life! I don’t want this!" I screamed; she screamed harder. At last we both calmed down and I got her into her bedroom. She clung to me, crying more softly, then quiet, her arms around me. When I put her into bed she wanted me to stay, and I lay down on the floor next to her until she fell asleep. I thought of how I had battled my mother as a child, and felt safe to do so because I knew with no doubts that she loved me completely and unconditionally and would never, ever leave me. I thought how even in battling her, she was the only one I wanted, the one with whom I felt absolutely secure. It broke my heart that Maia had no person like this. I knew then, her bite still smarting on my belly, that I would be this person for her.
Tomorrow I enter my second trimester. I’m sitting on my porch facing the northern lake where we have moved next door to my parents and two doors from my sister and her family, to be near the support system we know we need. Richard is swimming with Maia, our daughter, who calls out "Mama!" periodically. She will be almost two when she becomes a big sister. This week I found the time and emotional space to start reading a novel for the first time in two months, something it felt for a while like I would never be able to do again. This week I also made time, at last, to get back into the novel I’m writing at my L-shaped desk now overlooking a lake; I’d like to finish a draft by my February due date, if I can. We are renting a cozy house, a three-bedroom cottage. Maia’s and Baby’s birthdays will be one or two weeks apart, or less, depending. Twins, of a sort.
I am adjusting. It's challenging. I still cry some days for my old life and self. Other days, nestled in my lakeside home with husband and child and baby in belly, I am supremely happy.
Seven months later, my brother and his girlfriend, struggling with the challenges of teenage parenthood, broke up. Another flash of intuition: I wonder if Richard and I will end up raising Maia.
Another two months, February, and my parents had become Maia’s legal guardians. I was neck-deep in essays and 800-page novels. My mother called and said, "Maia needs parents." My immediate response was Yes, yes, yes. Followed shortly after by This is too huge, can we really do this, it will mean overhauling our lives completely; are we absolutely sure her parents can’t pull it together? I still had another four months of school to plough through, intense intellectual and emotional focus that didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else. Richard and I decided we would decide once I was finished school.
The next four months were filled with conflict. Moments of intense knowing followed by pulling back, uncertainty, deep ambivalence about whether I actually wanted to be a mother, ever, and whether I wanted to be the adoptive mother of this child in particular. Richard and I visited with Maia and with both Maia’s parents, wanting to be certain they were certain, discussing the level of involvement they would each want in Maia’s life, the boundaries and guidelines that would need to be in place.
I read Maybe Baby: 28 writers tell the truth about skepticism, infertility, baby lust, childlessness, ambivalence, and how they made the biggest decision of their lives. The book was divided into three sections: Definitely Not, On the Fence, and Yes. I related to all three. I felt the longing for a child—for this particular child—but I also felt the longing for an unencumbered life in which my own interests and dreams and goals were centre stage and stayed there, in which my partner and I could be together doing what we wanted when we wanted it.
I had never been particularly maternal, despite occasional surges of baby desire, never felt that I had to be a mother for my life to be complete. I worried I would never finish my novel or any other novels, never attain what I’ve wanted all my life to attain. I remembered my years of determination to be different from the women I saw around me growing up, the women who were not the centre of their own lives but lived for the lives of their children. The fear of my early 20s, almost a mantra—"Marriage and motherhood are the enemy of my dreams"—returned. The fact that marriage, at least, had turned out to be a nurturer of and safe place for my dreams rather than an enemy did not completely reassure; marriage was a relationship between two adults, while parenthood required a selfless commitment to someone who needed everything from you. I was not at all sure that I could be selfless.
I found myself afraid both of losing myself into the identity of mother, and of not being able to attach to become enough of a mother, both of being too much mother and not enough mother. I felt a fierce desire to hang onto my individual identity as a woman, a fierce valuing of my solitude, my space, my time, my reading and writing, a fierce desire to be more in life than a caretaker of someone else’s life.
I moved on to Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood, trying to get a picture, particularly from writing women’s perspectives, of what it’s really like to devote yourself to a child. I read one woman’s story of adoption (her daughter’s name was Maia), her fears that she would not be able to feel like a mother to this child, her conclusion with a touching story in which her motherhood of Maia was proclaimed, affirmed. I cried, looked up at Richard, stared at him for a long time until the words came out: "I want to do it."
By the end of May, now finished my degree and preparing to go north for two weeks with Maia to make the final decision, I was reading Nobody’s Mother: Life Without Kids. The concerns and desires of women who had chosen not to have children, or to whom life had not brought children, resonated deeply with me. I could see myself remaining child-free, writing and reading and travelling with my husband, getting more education, loving it. I lay awake at night in a panic, thinking I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother. The pressure felt enormous: my mom, nearing 60 and exhausted after over 30 years of raising her own six children, was reaching the end of her endurance with an active 15-month-old; Maia was getting older, had already been subjected to one huge upheaval, needed to be settled as soon as possible with whoever were going to be her parents; if we didn’t do it, there were no other viable options within the family. I felt guilty, angry, panicked, forced. If child-free women in general are accused of being selfish, how much more selfish would I be to refuse to parent not a hypothetical child but one that was here now, growing older, needing a home?
I grew up in a community and a faith that set wife and motherhood as women’s highest, only calling. Becoming a mother, and being fully and only a mother, was what women were set on earth for, where they would find their fulfillment, the only thing they should do or should want to do. In my examples of womanhood growing up, there were no women who were not mothers, and no mothers who were anything but mothers. I didn’t know any mothers with jobs, let alone careers. There was no being a mother and being something else too. They gave themselves fully, to as many children as God sent them; their children were their life and mother was their identity. (This was not the 50s; it was the 80s and 90s.) When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said "a writer and a wife and mother"—a writer because it was what I really wanted to be, and a wife and mother because I was female and that’s what God made females for.
I was terrified of becoming one of these mothers.
I did not realize how fully I had been running away from the motherhood calling I was raised for until suddenly, after all these months of agonizing, motherhood was no longer an abstract theory but a reality. Reality took the form of a trip north to care for this motherless child, at the end of which we would have to say yes or no. On the morning I was leaving for this trip, on the breakfast table between Richard and I, reality also took the form of a faint pink line on a pregnancy test.
Years before he met me, Richard was told by a psychic that she saw him living on a lake, with twins. I travelled five hours north from Toronto to the lake my family lives on, the hours-old pregnancy test burning in my pocket, the words I’m pregnant repeating in my mind with impossible, shocking absurdity, to care for one child and to nurture the second inside my body: a sort of twins, both come to us, in a way, on the same day.
I spent two weeks in early-pregnancy exhaustion, taking care of Maia in my parents’ home, talking to the spirit in my belly that had somehow made an agreement with my spirit to come here without my knowing. Dropping into exhausted sleep at night (and in the morning, and in the afternoon), adjusting to a completely different life. I felt like I had been deposited into a reality show in which contestants are placed in extreme circumstances to see how they’ll fare: you’re the mother of a 15-month-old, and you’re pregnant! Starting…now! Go!
I had moments of deep contentment, splashing in the lake with my red-headed fairy child, meditating with one hand on my belly in awe at the startling fact of a life growing inside me. I had moments in which I cried torrents, enraged that we had let this happen accidentally, weeping a constant track of, "My life is over, my life is over; I don’t want this life, I don’t want this life." I had dreams in which I wasn’t allowed to participate in my upcoming graduation—cut off from personal and intellectual achievement—because I’d become a mother. Some days, all I could see ahead of me was a life of slavery to a demanding being (or two of them), of never having time for myself, of my large and varied and creative life diminishing to diapers and food preparation and loads of laundry I wouldn’t even have time to hang on the line. After one exhausting day, I handed Maia to my mother and collapsed in a recliner by the lake, trying to read but able only to stare ahead and think, "I have succumbed. I have finally succumbed. At age 32, after successfully evading it so long, I am a victim of biology; I have been caught in the natural system that has helped enslave women for millennia. Goodbye, personal goals and dreams and time for myself, hello, life of small things."
Dr. Christiane Northrup writes about a spectrum of mothering styles. On one end is the nontraditional mother, "the woman who is primarily turned inward toward meeting creative needs that come from deep within her." This kind of mother "has to take care of these needs if she is to remain emotionally balanced and physically healthy. Activating the motherhood and nurturing circuits tends to take a toll physically unless they also have a lot of practical support. Though they love their children as much as anyone, they are not biologically wired for motherhood to fulfill them totally at the deepest levels" (Mother-Daughter Wisdom p. 17).
It relieved me to have this kind of mother acknowledged as a kind of mother that it is possible to be. I began to see that my fears about becoming a mother stemmed not from motherhood itself but from the baggage I carried around it: the examples set for me of the traditional mother—the other end of the mothering-style spectrum—whose personal identity was subsumed; the gospel preached to me of motherhood as woman’s holy duty; the decade-long fear of losing my dreams and goals and independence by becoming responsible for a small person whose needs will come before mine. Was this the truth about motherhood? Was this the way it had to be? I started to hope, as I felt early-pregnancy cramping and fatigue, as I fed and clothed and diapered Maia, that no, it was not, and it did not.
The decisive moment, the moment at which I knew, finally and absolutely, that I was Maia’s mother and she was my daughter, was the night she bit my stomach. She had missed her nap and was overtired, screaming as I tried to get her ready for bed, when she leaned forward and bit me, hard, in the belly. I exploded with words good mothers do not use, cried, "I don’t even want this life! I don’t want this!" I screamed; she screamed harder. At last we both calmed down and I got her into her bedroom. She clung to me, crying more softly, then quiet, her arms around me. When I put her into bed she wanted me to stay, and I lay down on the floor next to her until she fell asleep. I thought of how I had battled my mother as a child, and felt safe to do so because I knew with no doubts that she loved me completely and unconditionally and would never, ever leave me. I thought how even in battling her, she was the only one I wanted, the one with whom I felt absolutely secure. It broke my heart that Maia had no person like this. I knew then, her bite still smarting on my belly, that I would be this person for her.
Tomorrow I enter my second trimester. I’m sitting on my porch facing the northern lake where we have moved next door to my parents and two doors from my sister and her family, to be near the support system we know we need. Richard is swimming with Maia, our daughter, who calls out "Mama!" periodically. She will be almost two when she becomes a big sister. This week I found the time and emotional space to start reading a novel for the first time in two months, something it felt for a while like I would never be able to do again. This week I also made time, at last, to get back into the novel I’m writing at my L-shaped desk now overlooking a lake; I’d like to finish a draft by my February due date, if I can. We are renting a cozy house, a three-bedroom cottage. Maia’s and Baby’s birthdays will be one or two weeks apart, or less, depending. Twins, of a sort.
I am adjusting. It's challenging. I still cry some days for my old life and self. Other days, nestled in my lakeside home with husband and child and baby in belly, I am supremely happy.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Completion, Celebration, and Gratitude
I am cocooned in my fluffy white-pillowed nest on a dark, wet, blustery morning, white lights twinkling, surrounded by frivolous novels and the remains of cups of tea. A bit fuzzy-headed from last night’s celebratory champagne and a lot tired from a month of intensive essay-writing, but oh so cozy and happy and thankful. I am done. I have done it. Two days ago I turned 32 and handed in my final paper of my undergraduate career. I drifted the streets in happy shock, too tired to quite appreciate the magnitude of completion, emotion striking me in periodic stabs of pride—I did it, I went back and did this thing that I thought I could never do—and gratitude—thank you, universe, for this gift—before I returned to numb, exhausted can’t-quite-comprehension. That evening Richard and I went out for cocktails and dinner and a lot of toasting and exhausted laughter and “I can’t believe I’m done.”
Yesterday I soaked up a Thai massage, sinking into a soft mat while my limbs were stretched and kneaded, took myself out for lunch and then didn’t know what to do with myself. Wandered, a bit at a loss, until I recognized that all I wanted was to be in my own cozy home on my own cozy couch, drinking tea and reading frivolous novels. I kept experiencing a sort of phantom limb sensation, a feeling that I must rouse myself from my comfy seat and go get some work done, before I realized a split second later that there was none. Richard and I celebrated again with champagne in the evening, because celebration has suddenly become the order of the day around here.
Anna sent me an email I sent her in June 2005, in which I danced around the finally-acknowledged-and-articulated thought that I WANT A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION, my body leaping into tears as I read course descriptions, my mind conjuring obstacles, wondering if I could get in without a highschool diploma, wondering how I could put my life on hold to leave work and Richard and the home we shared for this longing within me to read and study and learn and have teachers and earn marks and get a piece of paper that said I had done so. Exclaiming, aghast, I’ll be thirty-two by the time I finish!
Everyone is rushing to ask, “What next?” At the moment, my answer is “Rest.” I want to read books because they delight me. I want to play in my own novel. I want to enjoy patios and open air and films and my husband. And I want to honour this transition from one important chapter of my life into a new one, to recognize that it is a transition, to process whatever feelings might come up as I move out of this intense focus on one thing that has given me purpose and fulfillment and built-in intellectual stimulation and a solid identity for nearly four years. There are decisions waiting to be made, money to be earned, a novel to be completed (and not just played in), an unsightly pile of clothing on my dresser and a thick film of scum on the bathroom floor. A next unknown chapter to step into. But they can wait a little while longer.
I’m grateful for this gift, this education I once thought had passed me by. Grateful for Richard who supported me through it. And grateful, just now, that it’s after 11 a.m., rain pounding on the roof, and I am still in my bed.
Happy exhaustion - May 25, 2009.
Yesterday I soaked up a Thai massage, sinking into a soft mat while my limbs were stretched and kneaded, took myself out for lunch and then didn’t know what to do with myself. Wandered, a bit at a loss, until I recognized that all I wanted was to be in my own cozy home on my own cozy couch, drinking tea and reading frivolous novels. I kept experiencing a sort of phantom limb sensation, a feeling that I must rouse myself from my comfy seat and go get some work done, before I realized a split second later that there was none. Richard and I celebrated again with champagne in the evening, because celebration has suddenly become the order of the day around here.
Anna sent me an email I sent her in June 2005, in which I danced around the finally-acknowledged-and-articulated thought that I WANT A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION, my body leaping into tears as I read course descriptions, my mind conjuring obstacles, wondering if I could get in without a highschool diploma, wondering how I could put my life on hold to leave work and Richard and the home we shared for this longing within me to read and study and learn and have teachers and earn marks and get a piece of paper that said I had done so. Exclaiming, aghast, I’ll be thirty-two by the time I finish!
Everyone is rushing to ask, “What next?” At the moment, my answer is “Rest.” I want to read books because they delight me. I want to play in my own novel. I want to enjoy patios and open air and films and my husband. And I want to honour this transition from one important chapter of my life into a new one, to recognize that it is a transition, to process whatever feelings might come up as I move out of this intense focus on one thing that has given me purpose and fulfillment and built-in intellectual stimulation and a solid identity for nearly four years. There are decisions waiting to be made, money to be earned, a novel to be completed (and not just played in), an unsightly pile of clothing on my dresser and a thick film of scum on the bathroom floor. A next unknown chapter to step into. But they can wait a little while longer.
I’m grateful for this gift, this education I once thought had passed me by. Grateful for Richard who supported me through it. And grateful, just now, that it’s after 11 a.m., rain pounding on the roof, and I am still in my bed.
Happy exhaustion - May 25, 2009.Thursday, May 7, 2009
Present
I am so deeply exhausted. I have so much to do.
That’s as far as I got on an email to Anna this morning before falling apart into tears. That pure exhaustion that can find no other expression. Then I cried myself into my running shoes and took myself out for a walk, which made a whole lot of everything better. My walks these days have been not so much fitness walks as walking meditations. I bring myself out of my head and into my body, focusing on each present moment, this step, and then this step, and then this one, and breathing deeply, and keeping myself present too by noticing and focusing on each piece of the natural world that I pass. Flowers and trees and new leaves, everything bursting into bloom right now. The cherry tree is taking over our front yard in white blossoms that look like a snowstorm when you glance out the livingroom window.
I have…oh, I’ve lost track, but I think it’s seventeen days left. 17 days, 4 essays, 2 take-home tests, freedom. Yesterday I loved my classes, felt a jolt of nostalgia as I walked across my familiar campus, saw students meeting in the cafeteria with advisors of departments regarding next year’s course selection, realizing suddenly it would all soon be over with no coming back next year. Today I am just exhausted, cannot think much beyond that. I’m deep inside a research paper on the medieval trobairitz due Monday, every one of the days after that tightly programmed in order to get done, try to get done, all of the essays lined up after this one. Spoke yesterday with classmates who can write papers in one or two days, and why can’t I be one of these? I may be forced to discover this ability in the next couple of weeks.
Trying to nourish myself. Trying to stay balanced. Trying not to work myself into the breakdown I have worked myself into before.
Two nights ago my grandma died, aged 96. This weekend I leave the work I would not have thought there was any possible way to leave, for family reunion and the celebration of a long life and a wonderful woman. My parents and all my five siblings and partners and offspring, and Richard and I, are all staying together in a cottage on Long Point. There will be a lot of singing, and country air and waves on Lake Erie, and family, and memories, and tears. There will not be any essays.
So, this strange mixture: exhaustion and academic pressures, funeral celebration—because that’s what it is, when someone precious has lived so long—tears for Grandma, tears for me and this breaking point I am stretched to, and a pause from it all to be present in this commemoration of a life.
That’s as far as I got on an email to Anna this morning before falling apart into tears. That pure exhaustion that can find no other expression. Then I cried myself into my running shoes and took myself out for a walk, which made a whole lot of everything better. My walks these days have been not so much fitness walks as walking meditations. I bring myself out of my head and into my body, focusing on each present moment, this step, and then this step, and then this one, and breathing deeply, and keeping myself present too by noticing and focusing on each piece of the natural world that I pass. Flowers and trees and new leaves, everything bursting into bloom right now. The cherry tree is taking over our front yard in white blossoms that look like a snowstorm when you glance out the livingroom window.
I have…oh, I’ve lost track, but I think it’s seventeen days left. 17 days, 4 essays, 2 take-home tests, freedom. Yesterday I loved my classes, felt a jolt of nostalgia as I walked across my familiar campus, saw students meeting in the cafeteria with advisors of departments regarding next year’s course selection, realizing suddenly it would all soon be over with no coming back next year. Today I am just exhausted, cannot think much beyond that. I’m deep inside a research paper on the medieval trobairitz due Monday, every one of the days after that tightly programmed in order to get done, try to get done, all of the essays lined up after this one. Spoke yesterday with classmates who can write papers in one or two days, and why can’t I be one of these? I may be forced to discover this ability in the next couple of weeks.
Trying to nourish myself. Trying to stay balanced. Trying not to work myself into the breakdown I have worked myself into before.
Two nights ago my grandma died, aged 96. This weekend I leave the work I would not have thought there was any possible way to leave, for family reunion and the celebration of a long life and a wonderful woman. My parents and all my five siblings and partners and offspring, and Richard and I, are all staying together in a cottage on Long Point. There will be a lot of singing, and country air and waves on Lake Erie, and family, and memories, and tears. There will not be any essays.
So, this strange mixture: exhaustion and academic pressures, funeral celebration—because that’s what it is, when someone precious has lived so long—tears for Grandma, tears for me and this breaking point I am stretched to, and a pause from it all to be present in this commemoration of a life.
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