As you know, I've been thinking quite a bit about the meaning of motherhood, both in the abstract definition and to myself in particular. I read a lot about it in my magazines--Kiwi, Parent & Child, Mothering, Wonder Time, Family Fun (okay, the second title from Disney, but they create great magazines), Parenting, and my new favorite Brain, Child--and think about it regularly. But they don't much help me define motherhood and my relationship to/experience with it, though they give me great techniques and exercises to utilize as I actually perform "motherhood." Nor do the thought-provoking essays of modern mother-writers like Judith Warner or Ayelet Waldman. Not enough of a philosophical paradigm to guide my thoughts or actions. I also talk (and email) to my friends and my mom about their ideas of motherhood and it is mostly through those discussions that I have had some amazing insights.
Anyway, I think I've been having an identity crisis. It was something a friend said, that she had always known that she wanted to be a mother, that it is who she was always meant to be. Not me. I never really thought of myself as a mom. I didn't play with dolls too much (except my Star Wars action figures). I didn't like babysitting. I did love being a counselor at camp for children with special needs, though. Why not children? Was it the need of a man (because of course I didn't know you could have kids without one, figuratively speaking, when I was a teenager)? I didn't often picture myself married either. All of my self-definitions and predictions revolved around academic achievement. I wanted college then a career. When I got to college, I went on to graduate school and then a career. My entire sense of self was defined in a very professional, fairly academic, mostly intellectual way. Achievement could be quantified with grades or degrees or titles.
Which is the direct opposite of my mom. My mom was (is? are you a SAHM if there are no kids at home anymore?) a stay-at-home-mom. She had been a teacher but left her career to have children and never went back. She did an immense amount of volunteering--with a domestic violence shelter, as a museum docent--and sometimes worked in my dad's business. And as a career girl, I just didn't understand. And I remember thinking, and probably even saying to her and to my career-oriented sister, that she probably didn't quite understand our workaday world either. Neither of us had really done what the other had. She always said that being a mom was the best thing in the world. And I didn't get it.
Until now. Because, after growing up surrounded by SAHMs, with my own SAHM, I am one. And I think it is because of that experience and background that I am good at it. It's in the training. Not that my mom reared me to be a mom, just that it's what I saw and know, even if I spent the first 15+ years of my adult life doing the exact opposite. And I think it's why I'm good at "it", at motherhood, even though I don't always know what it is or what I'm doing. My mom was fun. Is fun. Okay, let's just use the past tense, even though she is still very much alive and will be reading this soon (and crying, a trait I laughed at as a child but have fully inherited as a grown up), but I'm talking about the mom of my childhood here and my childhood is very much not in the present tense (unless that you follow the belief that in mothering we fill the holes of our own childhood; this doesn't work for me--I don't see any holes. So maybe I'm just revisiting it? We didn't have this many cool toys.) She was fun. She would play with us, be silly, as she likes to note, she was the mom on the floor doing stuff. I try to do that. She also loved to give us different and new experiences. Ditto. She was pretty relaxed and laid back. I struggle at this but am getting there. We felt comfortable talking to her about anything--did your mom tell you masturbation was okay when you were 11? Mine did. And that homosexuality was okay? Didn't think so. Well, my kids aren't there yet, but they do know the proper names of their bodies parts and use them without any self-consciousness. And there was/is still unconditional love all of the time.
Thank goodness for the wonderful examples she gave me because I now find myself where I didn't ever expect to be. Not that I didn't want to be a mom. Duh. I didn't accidentally become a mom. Lesbians don't. It was months of infertility treatments (and we were lucky that it was only months) and then, let's just call it, a challenging pregnancy. It wasn't enough time for the change in my thinking though. A friend of mine, from graduate school actually, said you need all that time to really get used to the idea. Well, she was always a more efficient worker than I was because I'm still working on it. I'm having to rearrange what I had learned to be my whole sense of self. Nothing is the same--not my daily routine, not my body, not my goals, not my priorities, not my values, not my obsessions, not my worries, not my self-examination. And I don't know how to understand this new me. It's not the me I knew. Gone are the good grades as a benchmark; motherhood is only ever judged negatively as far as I can gather--what you're not doing right, what you didn't do--if it is judged at all. It's certainly not rewarded in any way I'm used to--there's no money, no degree, no honor society, no raise, no nice word from the boss. (Let's not get me started tonight on the professionalization of motherhood, with all of us career women becoming moms and bringing with us heightened organization, competition, focus on status and achievement, etc. I don't really like it one bit). The only proof of what I'm accomplishing is sleeping in two cribs in the room next to ours. And, well, we won't truly know how they'll turn out for years. And that's not even in my complete control, as they came to us as already unique people--all I can do, as my friend Lambeth rightly reminds me, is try to guide their path and warn them of the pitfalls.
Motherhood is very much an ongoing process with no end. Even my dissertation had an end. Eventually. I used to joke that writing a dissertation was very much like having a baby. Of course, that was before I had two babies, because what I didn't count on was what happened afterwards. My dissertation is on a shelf, the Ph.D. I could post behind my name is rarely seen. Not so the kiddos. The work has only just begun. Which is something my graduate school advisor alluded to once. She said that once you receive your Ph.D. you enter a whole new playing field where everyone has advanced degrees so the degrees just don't count anymore; it's what you do with your career that matters. Just like it is what I do as a mom that matters.
I even get caught up in what "mothering" is. It's not "fathering," which is traditionally the physical act of creating a child. But what is it? Oddly, I'm not an academic-achievement oriented mom (yet)--I don't stress about counting or identifying letters like some of my friends do. I figure the kids will get it when it's time. I'm much more interested in personal, emotional development--taking turns, expressing emotions, caring and loving, exploring both independently and together. Sometimes I confuse motherhood with homemaking. And I'm not a great homemaker in a few senses of the word--I don't keep an especially neat or clean house and I don't always have a well-rounded meal on the table. But my own mom laughed at me and said those things really weren't what being a homemaker was about, that it was about creating a warm and loving and welcoming home for family and friends. I often get caught up in the mess and the lack of a great meal, though, forgetting that my children like the stuff all around and prefer rice krispie treats for dinner once in awhile (it's only happened once). Maybe even in being a mediocre homemaker (or whatever word my mom would use for house-cleaner and food-provider--my dad would say "mopswinger"), I'm being a better mommy (though of course, all this philosophizing--perhaps a vanity of my own motherhood--belies a certain insecurity about the whole experience and my abilities).
Which is why I think it's funny that when I express some SAHM stress (for instance when I list the three little things I miss as a mom: listening to the radio as loudly as I want in the car, going to the bathroom by myself, and, the one I realized this week, being the one to choose when I'm done reading something), working moms (including my doctor) tell me to go back to work--get this, that I'm too smart to stay home with kids. What does that mean?!? I stress about this as well. Would I be a better mom if I went back to work now? What is "better"? I do plan to go back, eventually, because I like my work and am good at it. I just consider myself extremely fortunate that DP's career doesn't make this a necessity now (and talking about DP and her own relationship to motherhood, as a working mom, is a whole other post). And I know that staying home is the right choice for me, for us, especially when I practically hyperventilate thinking about them going off to school in 9 months. But I've written about that before, I think.
And so, even in loving motherhood and my children, I search to understand who this new me is who is "mommy." I think the search makes me a better mommy, which in turn, I hope/I guess, makes them "better" children. Socrates told the Athenian jury that "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think that's how I feel about motherhood--if I don't think about it, really deeply think about it--I'm not really living it to my fullest.
Besides, it allows me to do what I used to do best, which is research and study and think.
(Though, ironically, I think I am a much better mom than I ever was a scholar).
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* "Know thyself." From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Gotta use those 8 semesters of ancient Greek and that degree in classical studies sometime.
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