We’ve taken well over two thousand photographs of our daughter Lucy and she is only nine months old. Sometimes I lose myself for hours in browsing through those photos after Lucy has gone to bed, and when I resurface I always ask myself what I’ve been looking for. After all, she’s just a few steps or a fitful cry away. But I’ve just been highjacked by seven photos of another baby and they’ve sent my thoughts into a tailspin. I had ordered prints from an online photo processor, but what arrives is a small stack of someone else’s photos—images of a couple and their brand new baby.
I seize on the photos with an avidity that surprises me. In the first one, the new mama wears an expression of exhausted contentment, the baby’s head nestled on her shoulder. There is a bandaid on her right wrist and it makes me wonder how her labor went. Both the mama and the baby look healthy, though, and the rest of the photos are from the couples’ home. Is the baby a girl or boy? The next photo, a changing-table shot, puts that question definitively to rest: a boy, circumcised. He has a scrim of hair, enormous ears, a broad face like his papa. He must be at least a week old in that photo because his belly button looks quite official. I’m ambushed by sourceless affection for these strangers. I actually find myself counting the baby’s fingers and toes, something I hadn’t done when Lucy was born.
Like a detective I scrutinize the evidence casually arrayed in the misdirected photos. How much can I discover about them? The couple is older, maybe mid-40s. This must be their first child because there are no shots of siblings holding the new arrival. In fact, there are no other people and no photos of the two parents together, and I imagine them alone in a cozy house somewhere, taking turns with the baby and the camera. Are they from Wisconsin, as his tee shirt proclaims? Their sunburned noses suggest they live somewhere sunny or have just returned from their last vacation as a childless couple. He wears glasses, I think to myself as I peer at the indentations on the sides of his nose, and my obsessive acumen is vindicated by the next photo which depicts the glasses themselves lying on the couch next to the baby. They clearly had a baby shower, as the gift boxes of Gap clothing attest, and I bet they knew they were having a boy since most of the outfits are variations on the theme of blue.
Another photo shows the papa and the baby sound asleep on their sides, facing each other, one big and one little arm outstretched, their hands clasped. My partner Jay took a nearly identical photo of Lucy and me in the first few days of her life and that image has become my dad and my partner’s favorite. I’ve never really liked what I consider its cloying sentimentality, but now, gazing at someone else in that same posture, I think proudly to myself, “He is going to be an exceptional father.”
But it is the last picture which most arrests me. It shows the baby awake and peering blearily at the camera, wearing the exact sleep sack that my daughter wore in her first week. I am jolted by the familiarity of the image. I don’t know this baby, but I know something about how it must have felt for his parents to take that photograph. When Lucy was born, Jay and I had a blessed two-week bubble of time to ourselves before he went back to work and our families began to arrive. With no distractions and nothing to do, we simply lay in bed and stared at our daughter, wholly absorbed in her presence, our world telescoped down to the size of her tiny body. I’d heard new parents describe the wonder they felt for their newborns, but when it happened to us I realized that “wonder” was shorthand for a much larger emotion that couldn’t be put into words but that was understood by parents everywhere. We’d been inducted into a club where you could say something like “wonder” and initiates would nod knowingly and remember their own first weeks with their newborns, while outsiders would hear only the tinniest echo of the word’s meaning. Now I am a veteran of the club, holding photos that depict two new inductees as they experience “wonder” in its most expansive sense. I know their bubble of time will end soon and it will only take a few short months before, like us, they become old hands at parenthood who feel nostalgia for the days when their son was “little.”
Gradually I begin to understand my obsession with the new family. I think I enjoy looking at the other family’s photos because they are fresh to me. Scrutinizing them allows me to enter the memory of Lucy’s first days from a new portal and to be surprised by what I remember, rather than revisiting the same familiar touchstones. I like these strange photos not for what they depict but for how they make me feel: the violence of my love for my own baby girl.
I do my fair share of misty-eyed gazing at my sleeping child, but I am not generally a sentimentalist. For me, motherhood is most intense when it hurts. I most feel like a mother when I’m hit in the solar plexus with nostalgia, when something jolts me into remembering Lucy when she was new and I am blindsided by the disparity between the newborn Lucy and her present self. Or when I feel vertigo at the thought of what I could lose—not Lucy herself (that fear is too submerged to be articulated), but my memories of her, how I’ve steadily accreted my knowledge of her. I’ll always remember that we called her Piglet and Thunderpants for the first few months, but will I always be able to hear in my mind’s ear the sounds that prompted those names? Will I always be able to animate each successive manifestation of Lucyness that has been astounding us for nine months? That the answer just might be “no” provides a recurrent pinprick of pain in my sense of myself, like a needle sewing me ever more tightly to her.
As I writer, I’ve been trying to catch my daughter in a net of words since before she was born. I began writing letters to her as soon as I could feel her roiling in my belly. I keep a daily journal, my chicken scratch a serge stitch to stop the unraveling of time under my fingertips. I write longer essays in her baby book to give permanence and heft to her milestones. But my words only seem to hover near her, vaguely approximating her shape in the air, never truly capturing her, and so I’ve also turned to photography.
My photographs do a better job of capturing Lucy, in part because they aren’t inventions of my mind. They enthrall me and keep me up late at night because, unlike my writing, I can discover new things about Lucy in them. Yet I have to be gentle with them. I am afraid that if I revisit them too often, they will deaden. I’m scared that my memory will shrink to fit only what I’ve documented. At last, I get it. I can look at the photos of the new family with the absorption that I can’t quite permit myself with my own photos of Lucy. I can feel for this family the unalloyed, sentimental wonder that I haven’t felt for Lucy since those first few weeks because I need not be scared that I will lose them in the slow dissolve of memory.
I show Lucy the pictures of the newborn boy and, as she does when she sees pictures of herself, she screeches and flaps her arms like she is attempting flight. I’ll think about this little boy every time I look at Lucy’s baby book, where I’ve pasted his photos. His story belongs to Lucy’s story now—he has become a small part of my memory of Lucy as a baby—and someday I’ll tell her about this gnomic emissary from an unknown world who arrived in our mailbox wearing her clothes and made me love her even more ferociously.
Amy Reading has just finished graduate school and this is her first nonacademic publication. She lives and writes in upstate New York with her partner, daughter, and a baby on the way.
The rain pelted relentless. All was dark. As the taxi driver exited the highway, snaking the narrow rutted streets leading to Ciudad Colón, I closed my eyes, exhausted. The day had been interminably long. For starters, I'd arrived at the airport late and come within minutes of missing my flight. The six hour delay in Miami was enough to make me swear off flying forever. Then there was the flight itself: A tropical storm off the coast of Nicaragua cut the cabin lights, throwing the plane into such a dive that my seat mate -- a woman with whom I hadn't shared a single word since boarding -- suddenly snatched my hands, attempting to pray us both into heavenly divine. If ever I'd wondered why I thought it a good idea for someone seven months pregnant to travel alone to a foreign country, now was certainly the time.
But then again, I'm the sort known to suffer benign neglect when it comes to making decisions -- especially the major ones. For instance, I hadn't planned on getting pregnant. Even if I was sure I wanted to one day be a mother (I wasn't), the timing couldn't have been worse. After squandering my twenties on a bad marriage and succession of dead-end jobs, I'd met a sweet man and landed a full time gig teaching community college. There was also that one-bedroom condo in the city Chris and I were hoping to buy, as well as a ton of other reasons why having a baby was most definitely a Bad Idea. The more pressing of these, however, was the book I was working on. An ethereal swirl of character and conversation first imagined six years ago, I'd been striving to finish it in the little free time I possessed when not grading papers, planning the next class or commuting forty miles a day. Motherhood? Are you kidding? I was far too busy pursuing my dreams to even think about bringing a new life into this world, much less dedicating the time and attention that life would require to blossom into a healthy, happy and whole person.
So what happened?
I got pregnant, of course.
The first to go was the condo we never had.
Thankfully, we'd lost all potential bids to the ever-growing caste of millionaires calling Washington, DC home and retreated back into our 500-square foot apartment more happy than we had a right to be, given that we were expecting to add a third family member to our shoebox in just a few short months.
Finishing out the semester was easy enough. Barring the one after-hours meeting in which I single-handedly devoured an entire pizza ("Anyone like a slice? Anyone?"), no one but my boss and a good friend knew I was pregnant. The last final turned in, I finally broke down and confessed my secret -- by then I was five months along. My students' shock delighted me (not that fat, yet!), and when one of them blurted, So that's why you were always eating yogurt in class! We thought you had acid reflux! I smiled bemusedly, surprised to discover how fond of them I'd become. Was it possible to skip that blissed-out maternal instinct and go straight to feeling like someone's grandmother? Because so far, that blooming belly pushing at my waistline was nothing more than cause for a new wardrobe surprisingly hipper than my old, a sudden taste for all things peanut butter and my absolute favorite -- Friday Night Steak(s). Motherly, I was not. When a friend asked if I wanted to hold her seven-month old, I was as reluctant to do so as I'd been when he was just born. And my four-year old nephew, I'm told, can't pick me out of a lineup. Now that's just sad.
Just what kind of mother would I make?
These days, it's hard not to get angry when books like The Mommy Wars come out. Stay-at-home vs. Working Mother vs. the World. Maybe I'm naïve, but aren't we all in this together? I wish women would stop this vicious in-fighting and realize that until society supports both decisions, competing factions among the oppressed set does nothing more than help tow the capitalist patriarchal party line. Affordable daycare and reasonable maternity leave surely won't come as long as we're bickering with each other instead of those cursed powers-that-be.
I mention this now because for me, the prospect of having a child at a time in my life when I hadn't yet accomplished my most major of major goals (the novel), had plunged me into despair. Maybe for some this isn't a problem, but for the self-absorbed type like myself, it was hard to imagine dividing my time and attention between my passion, the paycheck that put the booze on the table that enabled me to pursue that passion, my lover and my child. And when you're broke in a town as expensive as Washington, staying at home simply isn't an option. Something I loved had to go, but I wasn't ready for sacrifice just yet. School was out, and that meant I had the summer to write, write, write. And that, I decided, was what I would do. With maniacal zeal, I whipped through the application process for a residency at the David and Julia White Artist Colony, located twenty miles outside of San José, Costa Rica. Although most resident-hopefuls apply a year in advance, it just so happened they not only had an opening, but were willing to take me on. I was ecstatic! Didn't this prove something? Maybe it was possible to have everything I wanted, after all.
I mean really. How hard could it be?
Flying high on pregnant machisma, I hefted my bags to the curb and hailed a cab, feeling better about the month to come than I had en route to Costa Rica. The driver my captive audience, I happily practiced my Spanish as we drove along, delighted to discover I was at least in some part understood and possibly even charming. Pretty soon we'd left city lights behind, coasting up and down the meandering mountain roads that would take us to Ciudad Colón.
But then trouble started a second time. The taxi driver couldn't find the colony; I couldn't locate their phone number. And then there was the problem of converting American greenbacks into colones -- a task far too mentally exerting for someone like myself, suffering as I was from both a math deficiency and pregnancy brain. When we finally did locate the orange gates set to usher us inside the colony, I was too tired, too hungry and too full of self-pity to care. But it was an hour later as I slipped into bed that I finally allowed myself to fall into tried-and-true despair. Why have I come here? I thought. I'm hormonal! I'm hungry all the time! I forgot my Omega-threes!
Maybe my sister was right: It was selfish of me to have traveled to another country so far along in my pregnancy. After all, my life wasn't just about me anymore, a concept I was having a hard time accepting. Maybe it was time to shelve my dreams. Sinking lower and lower, I couldn't help but feel as though I'd proven true the maxim I'd for so long believed but had been trying like hell to defy: Wedding babies to professional goals will only land you a marriage in which one partner -- I'm not saying which one -- is soon stashing empty vodka bottles under the couch every night in between back-to-back repeats of "Roseanne."
Better to not marry in the first place.
There are no shortages of clichés about how life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. Before I became a mother, I thrived on goals: Short-term, long-term. Goals to get me through my morning commute. I still have my professional goals. There is, after all, that job I love and the novel to finish. But unlike before, I now realize that the moments we often find most fulfilling are the ones that sneak up on us, challenge our neatly-constructed ideas of ourselves and what it is we think we want out of life.
That first morning I awoke in Costa Rica, all my worries about managing life as a mother, teacher and writer dropped in an instant. Sunshine splashed the room warm and shiny. Birds called to me in foreign tongue and the view from my window -- missed the previous night, when all was dark and soggy -- rose magically into sight: Verdant mountains sponging heat in the near distance while just outside my window coffee plants, butterflies and banana trees lurched sleepily in the sun. I stretched my hands behind my head, smiling. Despite my best efforts, I'd landed right where I was supposed to be.
I have no idea what kind of mother I'll make. But I do know this: There is not one single event in my life that has brought me as much joy as the moment my daughter was born. Her birth didn't go exactly according to plan. She was late, the car broke down en route to the midwife. I had a pinched back nerve and ended up at the hospital after 24 hours of excruciating labor. But most surprising of all was how vigorously Lucy charged into this world. Gone was the idea of the fragile infant! My girl had strength, substance. Seconds old, she quietly took in her new surroundings, alert and full of wonder. And when her eyes met mine, it was then that I knew the truth of all my travels, both those far away and those close to home: Life makes happy accidents of us all.
Aren't we the lucky ones!
Janet Freeman writes, photographs and otherwise relishes the new wild life that is hers since becoming a mother. She lives in Portland, OR with her partner Chris and their daughter Lucy. Her work can be found at: http://www.janetinportland.com.
I felt the departure of my oldest son, Jasper, when he left for college, like the breaking of a bone. I had been under the illusion that his going away to college would be the same as his going to camp or traveling alone to Europe; his independence had long been tested and proven, as had mine. I would have more time to concentrate on my painting and my life, having been a parent since I was 25 years old. This was supposed to be a normal and healthy separation, the next step toward adulthood for Jasper. I actually felt confused when mothers who had been through this experience told me about the sadness they had felt as their children had left home.
I broke Jasper's collarbone when he was born, his ten pound baby body had been that reckless in its desire to escape. That was twenty years ago. Last year, I was the one who broke, when we deposited him, God knows why, at a college across the country. Grief found me, I wasn't looking for it. In the plane on the way home, I took the window seat and hid behind my husband as I leaned against the glass and looked down at the miles of arid hills now lying between me and Jasper. I sobbed, at first quietly, and then uncontrollably, wracked with the useless effort of trying not to cry. It seemed as if some hidden enemy was unwinding a panorama of hills on an endless scroll, laughing as I looked down with disbelief at the expanse of barren territory. From the sky I pictured myself miniaturized and alone, walking feverishly for days, futilely searching for my child in an unrecognizable, gigantic landscape. I don't know why this split between us felt as serious and as physical as when we were first ripped asunder, at his birth. That had been a biological necessity , but now I had left him, by choice, 1000 miles away.
When we arrived back home from our college odyssey, our two dogs were overjoyed to see me, my younger son, Hart, 16 at the time, was relatively happy to see me, but nothing could smooth my fresh edges and jagged wounds. I was flooded with the knowledge that we had to sell this house, immediately. There was no way it could ever be our home again, not when any car that drove up would never be his, coming home from school or a friend's house, the sound of anyone's feet coming up the front steps wouldn't be his, and when the dogs ran to the door it wouldn't be to greet him. The knowledge that this was more than a brief interruption in the way things had always been was unbearable and irrefutable, and already everything was reminding me of his absence.
It was as if I was in some kind of play, some Shakespearean drama, or maybe I was just a robed figure in a Victorian tableau. I didn't know who I was, what I was doing, but just that I suddenly embodied Sorrow herself, and that with no rehearsal, my body had this role down cold. Josh suddenly reminded me that he needed to go on an overnight business trip, "tonight", something extremely routine for us, a shorter trip than usual, in fact. But now this script called for me to be a medieval peasant woman, throwing herself at her husband's feet as he is sent off either to war or to a dungeon. My knees buckled and I didn't even know that that happened outside of fiction, I had no bones, certainly no backbone. I think I managed to gasp, "don't leave me", although I am not proud to remember that. I heard Josh on the phone in the next room, canceling his trip, saying, "She just can't be left right now", and I was conscious of not being embarrassed by the fact that whoever he was talking to in Washington was now aware of my pathetic state. I was gratified that Josh's voice sounded like that of a doctor with a dying patient, appropriately grave, even delicate, as if he needed to hide my prognosis from me, and I was grateful, too, that he was not teasing me.
It could be only the parent who feels the separation like the snapping of a bone. I remember my own adolescent escape as an endless frustration, where I was met at every turn by people intent upon denying me my idea of freedom. As a teenager, I attended a yet-to-be-coed high school whose Episcopal legacy required the entire student body, two hundred boys and only thirteen girls, to attend chapel twice weekly. I remember an end of the year ceremony when we were all squeezed into that small building, the air inside hot from the day of spring sun, as we sat, incubating and unlistening, to the minister. Because listening in chapel couldn't really be enforced, I gazed at my enemy, this tall man with dark, indirect eyes and a pitted face, on that day wearing an ungodly costume of cream and light green, his special occasion robes. His throat, as usual tightly collared, was cinched by a hidden fastening like a zipper on the back of a dress, unreachable by the wearer, who would need assistance to put it on. And I stared, as usual, at the opaque stained glass windows that didn't let the outside in, black lead lines defining the designs, holding in the colored glass, as if ruby and emerald light could be contained. We sat, ready to spring forth into the beautiful afternoon, and the chapel was like a thin skin stretched over a skeleton that was too fragile to hold us back. We fanned our embers by letting our shoulders touch and our knees brush against each other.
And finally we were released outside, into the tiny surrounding cemetery where lilies of the valley grew in the shade, in the corners and in the circular shadows under the trees. I was wearing my white sandals, which would sink deeply and suddenly into the moss when I stepped off the path. As we had streamed from the chapel, I had been unable to avoid a personal enemy, a boy who had called me a cunt, tauntingly, as if he were the one who knew what the word meant, as if he could divine the secret parts of me. But for every boy I hated, there was at least one I loved, and I was walking safely between two of them, our shoulders fused together in a loose and jointed line. My skin was hot where it had been sunburned earlier, where the straps of my sundress grazed my collarbones. I remember that I was happy, in a sudden soft and bone melting way. And I remember that being hidden was its own reward, and that we stayed away until we were ready, nominally, to be found again.
Liberating myself from my current and bereft "parent's point of view" has been impossible; the vivid memories of my own adolescent excitement and escape don't help me here. Of course I have survived Jasper's college departure. It's quieter in our house, although Hart, a senior in high school, is still here. Still, my hidden enemy is capable of morbidly and coldly ambushing me. The other day, I went for a walk in a nearby cemetery, beautiful and old, a relatively secret place. The marble carvings have softly eroded, conveying the illusion that grief doesn't hurt, at least not anymore. The beauty is not an illusion, but the emotional and physical pain of death is hidden, muted, as is the physical pain of loss itself. The atmosphere encourages resignation and the acceptance of loss. People are now only soft, grassy mounds, tucked in to rest, gently, at the foot of every stone. Sadness and despair are also buried deep inside the body of the earth. Walking along one of the paths, I saw a little cylinder of white marble that must have fallen from its base; someone had stopped it from rolling completely away by jamming a few rocks underneath. The stone was discolored from its journey over the dirt, but the inscription was still plain; a name and dates that were too close together, the brackets of a seven month long life. And then the words, "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." There is nothing consoling to me about the image of children in heaven. I hope it consoled the baby's parents, whose grief, unmentioned, hovers in the spaces between the carved letters, alive for these last one hundred years. There is, of course, no comparison between our pain, grief can't be the word for my pain at all.
I found a small piece of wood on my walk, grey and soft from the weather, a hole at one end where a narrow branch once grew. Holding it up, I see the sky through the hole, the unbearably blue Colorado sky, as unbearably beautiful as the visibility of bone seen through skin. It has the shape of a collarbone, an arch with blunted ends. A wooden bone that once grew and arched away from the body until the tension was too strong, until the skin couldn't stretch anymore, and then, before the bone broke, it sailed off into the sky. The hole looks like it could have held a screw to fasten the bone at one end, attaching it to the sternum, forever, allowing it to swing gently back and forth, as if it were on a hinge.
Wendy Clough is a 45 year old artist with an MFA in painting, and have two boys, ages 18 and 20.
Abigail is walking toward me across the bright pavestones of the town plaza, petite hipster-chick in tow, an emissary from the elite club I'm about to join: mothers with more than two children. The raised eyebrows of the single- and double-childed majority make us seek each other out for brief sanity-confirming, or perhaps sanity-reviving, exchanges. Those mothers with their singlets and pairs sit relaxed on shaded benches, taking their picnic breaks from the day's errands. This plaza serves the exact purpose some long-ago town planner had in mind: it's the hub, the gathering place where we watch each other's lives unfold. In one corner, disaffected teens pretend to an urban sensibility, while sprawled under the big evergreens are the few familiar homeless faces. In the concrete center, spots of glare bounce off neon helmets as preschoolers practice on their first two-wheelers and preteens balance on carefully scuffed skateboards. A pack of kindergarten-aged boys, including my own two, are busy conquering the public art with a game of King of the Sculpture, a tall totem from which they hurtle into the damp grass with endless repetition. In a small community like this, everyone is watching after your kids, and everyone knows your business. I'm right in guessing that Abigail has already heard the news that the swell in my belly has been spied on, discovered to be a girl. Like me, her first two are boys, and she's coming to commiserate.
"Ever since she was born, everyone keeps saying to me: 'You finally got your girl,' as if that's what I was hoping for, as if that's why I had a third," mourns Abigail behind her large-framed glamour sunglasses.
"Well, you know, they think we're just crazy for having a third, so they're looking for a reason," I suggest vaguely. I never remember the clip-ons for my glasses, so I'm squinting in the sunglare.
"I mean, I love her, and I love that she's a girl, but no more than I would love a boy, and love that he was a boy. I don't feel like I 'got my girl,' so now I can stop having kids." Abigail is baffled and exasperated by these comments.
"Yeah, I know," I pretend to agree. "I would almost be relieved if the ultrasound were wrong and this one's a boy, because we feel like we know what we're doing with boys by now. " I am lying outright. I squint off in the direction of the gamboling boy-pack, relieved by the excuse not to have to try and meet her gaze. We blather on a bit about society's preoccupation with gender, etcetera, but I'm not really paying attention. I have preoccupations of my own.
Prior to the ultrasound, the pregnancy seemed fraught with gender-related tension, the world populated with gender-obsessed "well-wishers." Acquaintances would adopt a salesman's pitch about the benefits of raising girls, as if I could somehow make a post-conception decision: let there be girl, and so it would be. My vague 'we'll be thrilled with whatever we get' was more than once met with disbelief, and an unexpected urgency of tone: 'but girls are so much fun!' As if I didn't already feel enough pressure.
I was the one who wanted this third (fourth) child. And it wasn't so I could try for a girl, at least not until after the fact. I just wasn't done yet, not ready to decide: okay, that's it. So I alternately pleaded, cajoled, and waited, until I got a green light for another pregnancy from my partner. Of course, once I was pregnant, I was plagued by second thoughts—'buyer's remorse,' we call it, the distinct feeling that the new sofa you couldn't wait to get just takes up too much space in the room, the fabric is wrong, you can't believe you already spilled juice on it and can't return it to the store. What was I thinking? This was going to mess up everything: my new career, our intricately-worked childcare arrangements, my sons' happiness, my marriage. It was a tiny, living wrench thrown into the works of our lives. Over and over, nauseous and cranky, I asked myself: what was I thinking?
But if, by some generous miracle, the baby were a girl, it would all make some sort of sense. In some mysterious, gender-determined way, the wrench would come alive, twist its cold metal into a softer shape, and transform us all with it. We wouldn't just be having another child, we would be doing something we hadn't done before: raising a daughter.
This time, I wanted to know. I have read enough anti-medical propaganda to believe that routine ultrasound is probably not a wise use of the technology, especially just for curiosity's sake. I wished I weren't so well read. Our other kids were all surprises, even the son with whom we had several medically-advised ultrasounds—we declined the knowledge when offered it. But this time, I wanted to know. With our second son, I felt a pang, just a pang, but one I remember well enough to feel guilty about, of disappointment at the moment of his birth when I was told: he's a boy. This time, I wanted to be prepared, to be ready to love the inevitable boy the very second he came out. So when I had some preterm contractions and spotting, I jumped at my midwife's suggestion of an ultrasound.
The poor technician didn't know what she was getting into with us. We went to our small town's small hospital, and as I sat in the row of welded chairs that serves as an all-purpose waiting area, my turn for the ultrasound machine was delayed by an ambulance driving in. My legs crossed tighter and tighter as twenty minutes turned into an hour. Before we even entered the tiny sonogram room, I was already overwrought simply from waiting in a public place with an overly full bladder and the knowledge that I hadn't been doing my Kegels nearly enough. The technician focused on first things first: length of cervix and location of placenta – all good. Then she let me get up and pee, which should have dissipated much of the tension. Next comes the fun stuff--time to measure all the little parts, and the inevitable, obvious question: did we want to know? It's amazing how something which feels so weighty can be answered so lightly: sure, okay, yes. She made no promises, gave us the standard disclaimer, and an instant later said, 'it looks like a girl.' I burst into tears, seemingly literally—I was lying on the table taking a pretended scientific interest in the proceedings, and then I was taking up the whole room with my sobs.
I pulled it together quickly enough, but we could tell the technician was a little bit afraid of the emotions she had unleashed in the closet-like, darkened room. She knew, really, nothing about us. The form I had handed to her said that this was my second pregnancy, that I had given birth to one child, that I was twenty weeks pregnant, that the woman with me was my partner. There's no place on any forms for the whole story of our family, so she didn't know that before my first pregnancy, my partner had already borne two children, the first of whom was born dead. She didn't know that our first child was a girl, a delicate, long-haired, perfect girl who never drew one breath. She just knew that for us, the declaration of gender was big, big enough that she would decide to check it over and over again, between each other measurement. She didn't want to be wrong this time. Each time, yes, it still looks like a girl.
Once the initial shock wore off, I immediately went into denial. The ultrasound machine was so old it didn't even print pictures, it was the lowest level, it was just our little rural hospital, which struggles to pay its bills, a place to go for a broken arm, not for anything high-tech. Once offered the possibility, I was terrified of being disappointed. If I was really having a girl, it would be a redemption of sorts, for having gotten pregnant in the first place. I would be giving my partner a daughter, not a replacement for the one we lost, but a chance to let go of the generalities of the grief, and let it shrink into something particular, individual to Cedar.
For six years, we ran after our boys on the plaza and from the corners of our eyes watched the mothers of girls, watched them putting their daughters into frilly dresses and eschewing frilly dresses in favor of gender-neutral jeans and t-shirts. We watched them teaching their daughters gentleness and strength. We watched them helping their daughters stand up to boys on the playground and dress their baby dolls. We watched and watched, from the other side of an invisible, impenetrable window of longing and loss. We were supposed to be doing all that, reading the books on raising strong girls, not just the ones about raising gentle boys. The container of our grief, the world of girls, was just so vast.
Of course, it's also scary to let go. If we no longer grieve for decisions about frills, are we grieving for Cedar less? If every girl we see doesn't cause a twinge, will we forget her? It's the eternal question for the bereaved: if we let in happiness, does that mean we no longer love the one we lost? And so, with the foreknowledge of the (probable, possible) girl growing, we wonder if she will grow between us. If we can both let ourselves love her with abandon. Plus, there's always the fear. For us, boys live, girls die. Totally irrational, but totally true, until now. This one keeps on not dying.
The comments continued throughout the pregnancy, the pro-girl cheerleading that eventually sent me into the passive-aggressive mode of responding with a confidential tone guaranteed to quelch enthusiasm: "A girl would be nice. My elder son, he keeps saying, 'I hope I get a sister who doesn't die this time.'"
*****
She is born, alive, and we find ourselves in the strangeness of feeling like we have no idea how to do something that we've done twice already. There is an unspecific but vast disparity, as if she's not a different gender, but a different species than the boys. Just to spite our beliefs in the "nurture" influence of gender difference, this child Zari sets a different tone from day one. We actually had no idea that there were people out there who didn't walk their babies up and down the hallways for half the night, every night. We were in a bizarre twilight zone: we had a baby and we were getting plenty of sleep. Which was good, because as expected, there were some complicated emotions to navigate.
Like the clothes. Theoretically, I believe in gender-neutral clothing; I put the boys in dresses when they were little enough to let me ("Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something just because you're a boy," I'd say.). But my mother laughs at my plans for a boy-clothed Zari, reminding me how much I hated wearing my brother's hand-me-downs, leaving them in the bureau in favor of the laciest, princess-est dresses my grandmother would make for me. And the truth is, I really do enjoy little not-too-cute girl clothes on her, to balance out the boy stuff. I find a couple of dresses at the consignment store and buy some tiny woolen tights. My partner can barely look at her at first--the dresses bore a hole right into her grief, and it spills out again and again. I back off, then put the dresses back on—we'll have to work though this, better now than later when she's more aware of what's going on. I don't want Zari to feel bad about being a girl, or choosing traditionally feminine clothes if that's what she wants. Until now, I've felt that this girl was a gift to my partner, but I become less sure.
And then there's the whole, larger than life, mothering-a-girl thing. Suddenly, I feel that I'm supposed to heal all my old gender-related wounds so that I can walk my daughter into womanhood intact and unscarred. But those wounds are deep and I'm spending most of my energy just trying to get healthy food on the table and earn enough money to pay one of our mortgages. I tell her she's pretty, and I tell her she's strong and smart and capable, and I hope that for now that's enough. And just as I try to hold a space for my partner's grief, she holds me while I worry that I'm not up to the task of mothering a woman-to-be. We move from day to day, grief and fear and, yes, joy, all flowing through our family as the months (and laundry) pile up.
At fourteen months old, my daughter, temporarily diaperless, pees on the kitchen floor as I am trying to get through a bowl of already-cold soup. This is a familiar occurrence: the boys did it often, after which they would dance in the pool of urine and track it around the house as I chased them with a rag. But Zari, before I can even put down my spoon and get up, has toddled off to the changing table and returned with one of her cloth diapers. She bends over and wipes at the mess, with surprising effectiveness. I shrug off the heavy cloak of exhaustion that I wear most afternoons, and follow my daughter into the bathroom, where she pushes the wet diaper into the pail. For just this moment, I let go of the angst associated with raising a woman in this so-called post-feminist world, I let go of my struggle against genderized generalizations, and for just this moment, I revel in her difference from the boys, in her idiosyncratic cleaning-up-after-herself girl-ness. I reach down for her naked body, pull her up into the cradle of my neck, and nuzzle her, murmuring gleefully, "Who's got the girl? Who's got the girl?" I swing her up in the air over my head, letting the cascade of giggles shower over me. "I've got the girl. Mama's got her girl."
Kenna Lee-Ribas co-mothers three children and works as a hospice nurse in the liberal paradise of West Sonoma County, California.
Childbirth was a shock, no question about that. I wasn’t prepared for any of it, not the pain, nor the intensity, nor the unabashed gush of bodily emissions. And certainly not for how seeing my son for the first time was, in a lightning flash, the most transformative event of my life.
My pregnancy itself had been uneventful. Besides the tendency to nap throughout the day, I had remained healthy and fit. I’d watched my body change with interest, felt the little kicks and hiccups with excitemement, was generally prepared and happy—I had the right number of receiving blankets and sleepers lined up, after all. What more could I do? But labour seemed to transport me to a different realm entirely. One akin to what I imagine torture to be. I fell apart. I lost control of myself.
The evening my labour started—I mean really started, not the menstrual-like cramps I’d had through the day where I was still able to eat and chat to friends on the phone—I couldn’t believe the pain. Despite the weeks of practicing hip opening asanas and deep breathing techniques, I felt an unabiding panic set in. Yoga went the way of the hot ginger compresses and homeopathic pellets I’d been advised to turn to for natural pain relief. I remember thinking, “No, this can’t be real,” as the pain came in wave after wave of what felt like violent assaults, but with no hope of getting away. I felt utterly trapped. But at the same time another part of me was aware of my mental fragmentation and amazed by it. Hadn’t I read books about birthing, gone to pre-natal classes, prepared my mind and body with exercise and mantras? How could I be so utterly shattered by this very natural process?
I watched in astonishment as I became animal-like, up on all fours, rocking and moaning, clawing at the bed sheets. Eventually my arms gave out and I rolled onto my side panting and shaking. I heard someone say, “You’re fighting it. Don’t fight it, it only makes it harder.” And I wanted to scream out Fuck You!, may in fact have done just that, I can’t be sure. But it was true, I was fighting it, pleading, beseeching it to stop. All my energy was narrowed into one thought and that was: Make it stop! My focus on the pain was so complete that if for a moment something changed--a hand that had been rythmically rubbing my back one way switched direction or the melody of some music stopped--it was as if my world had dropped away and I would grow frantic and yell wildly until it started up again.
At one point during my pregnancy when I was sitting in my back yard with a friend of mine I’d pointed to a thick bough of the large apple tree that branched out over my garden. “I think I’ll give birth there,” I’d said, “hanging onto that branch.” She looked at me oddly. She had a couple of kids herself. “I don’t think you will,” she’d said wryly. But somewhere in my mind I felt confident that I would be one of those women who would conquer the pain of childbirth and remain calm and poised throughout. But there I was, despite my previously unshakeable resolution to give birth at home, moaning to the midwife, “I want an epidural. Take me to the hospital.”
“That’ll take an hour,” the midwife snapped back and proceeded to enumerate every step that stood between me and the needle. Being no light weight she was prepared for the last-minute, desperate pleas of the inexperienced, overwhelmed home birther. It was clear she knew what she was talking about and so the matter was firmly closed.
I dilated fairly quickly, given that it was my first child. But when it was time to bear down I had no idea what to do. One of the midwives offered up a description of the pelvic cavity, the dip and tilt of it and how pushing was simply the act of following its natural curve down and then out. But I could make no sense of what she was saying, couldn’t connect it to the burning, ripping sensations that had engulfed the lower portion of my body. And so I raged on imploring it to stop, just stop, finally stop.
Somewhere into the second hour of pushing I was struck by an important thought: the only way this torture would end would be to get the baby out. It was as if something clicked into place and I became an active participant in the matter at hand instead of someone fighting for my life. All this time my husband, the midwives, and a friend or two had been holding the reality of what was taking place. While I was in some jungle in my mind running from a pack of tigers they were in my bedroom trying to deliver a baby, and now I was finally joining them.
And so I bore down and pushed in a way I never had in my life, pushed so completely it felt dangerous or harmful, certainly to the veins and arteries in my neck and possibly to my rectum, which I feared might leave my body with the baby.
Finally, finally, the baby slipped out, the pain ended and the midwife jabbed a long needle into my thigh. I wondered why she was turning away, suddenly losing interest in me after having made me the centre of attention for the past twelve hours. But then I heard her say “Call 911” and a strained silence fell over the room. I vaguely remember my friend, the one who’d flown in from Montreal to be at the birth, say in a frantic voice to someone on the phone, “Yes, a home birth.” Then a mad scrambling over on the other side of the room.
Apparently the umbilical cord had been wrapped tightly around my son’s neck. As he’d hung halfway out of my body he’d opened his mouth to take his first breath with no success, then his second, still with no luck. Then he’d given up. Secondary apnea, the mid-wife explained later and apparently in learning how to breathe it’s two strikes you’re out. Friends present at the birth spoke later of the terror they experienced during the two interminable minutes it took to resuscitate my son and hear his first lusty cry. But, oddly, I was calm. It seems heartless to say, but I don’t remember being alarmed in any way. I felt no concern or anxiety. Perhaps I had some sense of the unfolding script, a glimpse into the final outcome and I knew everything would be fine. But I don’t think it was that, much as I’d like to pat myself on the back for my prescience. I simply didn’t know who they were referring to in their frantic maneuverings and ministrations. It was as if my son didn’t exist yet. I had been in such intense pain for so long I noticed only that it had finally stopped. It was over. Something had been whisked away from my nether regions around which the mid-wife and her assistant were now huddling, but I couldn’t make the connection to what it was.
Within minutes, during which I heard a baby’s cry and pounding at the front door as the emergency crew attempted to gain admittance and save a baby’s life, a small bundle was handed to me. It was May, a warm night, and the receiving blanket was wrapped loosely around my son. He had a fair amount of brown hair and he was very beautiful. His eyes were open. They were more like slits than eyes but I could see into the gray liquidness of them. One of his tiny legs was crossed over the other one; I remember noticing this. His legs hadn’t been arranged that way by someone, he had put one ankle over the other, had placed it there himself.
After that nothing was the same and I imagine it never will be again. After seeing my son for the first time, his face turned up toward my face, his daintily crossed ankles, after recognizing the arduousness of his journey to reach this moment, I could never be the way I’d been even a moment earlier. Here was this being, someone I’d created out of the fluids and churnings of my own body, whose care I was being entrusted with. The enormity of it all was stunning.
To lie there beside him later that night after he’d been weighed and prodded and a small point of blood had been extracted from his heel was godliness itself. I was in a state of exaltation. To think I’d lain with him night after night during my pregnancy—lain on him at times—and been nonchalant. To know him, to see my son, opened up a whole new level of meaningfulness for me. And after that, nothing in my life was ever the same.
Sarah Byck is a psychotherapist and writer living with her husband and two sons in Toronto, Canada.
I have decided to focus on what is working in my life.
I have been emerging; slowly and with fits and starts, from a very difficult period. I look over my shoulder and see deep valleys and think “I was there?? And though I still fear, at times, that a landslide will return me to the nadir, I am determined to continue climbing up, with all my might and strength.
Zachary is 9 years old and a full-fledged fourth grader. I am amazed at his independence and his strength of character. His hairy shins remind he will never be “my baby? again. Technology of almost any sort is the center of his universe now and his Star Wars obsession persists. In art camp this summer he completed two paintings on canvas. The first was of an X-Wing and the other a Tie Fighter.
We have discussed distant stars and galaxies as astronomy has newly caught his wonder and I marvel at how ideas awaken within him for the first time and fill him with excitement and awe. I explained to him what is meant by light years and he responded with genuine enthusiasm. “Mom, that is amazing? and for the first time in quite some time I realized that it really was.
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Zachary bought me roses recently and though my youngest son Sam chanted “flowers, flowers? as if to imply he was in on the purchase, Zach took me aside and said “it was all my idea?. Zachary stood in front of me proudly displaying a half dozen long-stemmed red roses and I realized in that moment how far I have come. Ironically, the flowers came on a day when I truly needed them and I accepted them with great and genuine enthusiasm and gratitude.
I stood in the kitchen cutting the stems and placing them in water when I noticed in a detached way that I was crying. I wasn’t sobbing or weeping but tears escaped as I prepared the flowers for the vase. Parenthood has been a strange journey for me. In my mind I often experience myself as the 24 year old I was so very long ago. Then moments hit me that remind me that the 24 year old me exists only in a place in history and she is not the me of today. As I placed the flowers in the vase, I remembered other flowers, other vases, and other gift givers. I looked over at Zach who was smiling proudly watching me arrange the flowers as artistically as I could.
“I love you Zach. Thank you so much. This was a wonderful gift.?
“You’re welcome mom. I love you too. By the way, you are beautiful.?
With that last declaration he ran away, perhaps of embarrassment. And I found my tears again. Though now they were flowing as I smiled. Unlike other flowers and declarations of love, I could fully accept these gifts from Zach. Life is made up of moments and this moment, I determined, was a keeper. Later we would argue about dinner, bath, and bedtime but none of that would negate the flowers and the sentiments we so freely shared with each other.
I am learning a lot about love from my nine year old son. He is in front of me much of the time but I often don’t see him entirely. I live inside myself a lot. Too much. And my tendency has always been to focus on what I perceive to be my flaws. My flaws are real as I am terminally human but I am realizing as I focus on them, they grow. Like sun on a garden, my attention to my failings empower them, make them stronger, and define who I am. I am left with a perception of myself that I do not like but which I ultimately created.
“You can change that, you know?. My friend of many years knows me well and can sum up what I am trying to say in a line or two. “Just start watering another part of the garden. You are the one with the watering can. You are in charge. Create the future you want and don’t base it on your past. I like you better now anyway.?
So I am working on being grateful because I see now I have opportunities that I denied myself in the past. There are possibilities that I never would have thought existed. And my decision to allow myself to embrace a different future has left me as exhilarated as the notion of light-years. And besides, my nine year old son brings me roses, tells me he loves me, and thinks I am beautiful.
Regina Walker is a writer and psychotherapist living in NYC. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Hip Mama, widdershins, Moondance, and Literary Vision. She can be reached at cswcasac@aol.com
I read a quote years ago by Renita Weems, “I cannot forget my mother. Though she was not as sturdy as others, she is my bridge. When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.” What bridge, I thought? How jealous that quote made me feel. I have had many years of psychotherapy and don’t know that I will ever understand the unanswerable “whys” of my childhood. I can only guess it was a mixture of my mother’s past abuse and a cocktail of untreated emotional and psychological problems. Suffice it to say that I was significantly abused and though few visible scars remain there are deeply embedded memories I have yet to drive away. In all the years of my mother’s instability, not once did I feel it was safe to run across. I leapt blindly on my own.
My childhood home was a scary place, maybe not often but at times violent and loud; definitely unpredictable. My first husband’s childhood was lonely, with no siblings, a detached unemotional mother and a bullying father. As a result, we sought refuge in each other. Marrying early, I’m convinced in order to create our own safe haven and vision of what we were convinced a family could and should be.
Over the years though, I have healed much of the hurt. My mother loves my children and I don’t mind them spending time with her as long as my father is nearby. I feel like she is stable enough at this point and would never hurt her grandchildren. She has herself sought treatment and apologized for the emotional and physical pain she caused me as a child. I cannot forgive or forget, only move on, and had been doing so thinking maybe she grasped some of the damage she had inflicted upon my sister and I but it was over a recent phone conversation I realized just how much she did not understand. She wanted my daughter to spend two nights at her house but because as a family we had made other plans I told her that it would just be a one-night sleepover. She went off on a rant about her rights as a grandparent, a behavior I hadn’t seen in some time.
I tried to explain to her that since our older son was home from school this particular weekend we had planned some family time. Our mission as a family, based on our own childhoods, has always been to create a safe, warm home for our children. This is the one place they know they can come and be loved, supported and accepted no matter what. They will not be hurt here. I explained, as I have before, that their father and I make a conscious effort to factor in time so that we can have family meals, watch movies, just hang out, or be together and bond. My little yellow frame house is their safe place and when we are all here together everything is right in the world. That really set her off -a direct insult to her parenting style, or lack there of, opposite from the home of my youth.
She commented on what an obnoxious child I had been, I had always tried to provoke her, deserving every beating I had ever gotten. I was a difficult child. Just wait until I had to deal with a teenager. (I have a sixteen year old.) She just did to me what was done to her. It wasn’t all-bad; didn’t I remember the good times? “You think you are the perfect mother,” she screeched. Besides, she’d apologized for all that years ago. I was stunned and taken aback. My first reaction was to attack, my second was to hang up the phone but instead I took a deep breath.
I very calmly told her that nothing ever justifies hurting a child. I appreciated her apology and have accepted and moved on and yes even forgiven her to some extent but that does not mean that I have amnesia, it does not erase memories of wire coat hangers, hard plastic hair brushes and cute knee socks to cover bruises. For better or worse, her actions shaped the woman I became.
I will never have a mother that I call for parenting advice. I will always have boundaries to be aware of and enforce. I will always be on guard. She is my mother and I love her but I do not love what she did to my childhood and though there may have been ice cream cones and afternoons in the park that is not what I dream of that is not what haunts my sleep.
I do not think I am a perfect mother but I am a mother who loves my children. I hold them, I worry about them, I fuss about the overflowing kitchen trash, we read together, bake cookies, I cry when they get hurt, I tell them they are precious, we talk about religion, we very poorly sing Broadway musicals in the car, we argue about clothes, we bicker over chores, we laugh and cry and live an amazing blessed life. I love them so intensely.
I love them just as fiercely as I was beaten.
My daughter does to my art much the same as she does to my life—she devours it. Omnivorous from birth, she consumes me whole: meat and bones, hair and nails, milk and sweat, and (yes, both) hands. That goes for truth and lies as well, twice over—along with poetry, plays, and pretty things. "I just don't have time anymore," is a thing that I say a lot. And then I sigh and I sigh (twice over).
To see her, you wouldn't peg her as the villain. But she is—oh, yes!— a thief of time and talent. "But!" you'd say. "But just look at those cheeks—she's storing you for the winter!" Is she, though? I'd ask. Because I'm feeling half-digested already. Aren't we all? And who wants to think about it, hear about it, or write about it for another mama-where's-my type moment?
Even in the night, she is there. "Bathroom," I hear, an inch from my face at two in the morning. We stumble down the steps. I slip and sway in the blue bathroom light. "Wipe," I say. I watch her flush and wash. I tumble her back into bed. No-mama-can't-stay replays automatically, ‘cause-mama-needs-sleep-to-write. I trod back up the steps, both a greater and lesser thing than I was a few years back: I groan, the bed groans, and my husband stays asleep, not groaning or reaching for me. I won't write, I think when the clock shows an eight. So I don't.
And then one day, I do. Or, I try. Because Big Girl's gone off now to be a saint in a school with a boy's name. Don't worry, though, she'll show ‘em. But for me, well, I don't have her toes to rub anymore. Not for luck, or inspiration, or even to ease a cramp. Easing, these days, is something that I do less of. She does more: "It's okay, Mommy. I always come home and I love you." And she does, both—I hope twice over.
But still, she's no baby anymore. I have no baby anymore.
And how could I miss such a crying-in-the-halls type time? Or good ol' agony-in-ankle-sox me, for that matter? But I do. Oh, I do. And not just that, but I grieve: I think that I forgot to suck the sweetness from the peach.
And how could I, an artist, have done that? How did I let my spark of creation slip into her snow pants and head for the drifts? It's a place far too cold for me, and so I cannot follow. What is the story, I wonder, for moms without children? It's just one word, isn't it? I'm left with only "once."
I wonder. At two in the morning I listen for "bathroom," but don't hear it. She is tired from school and sleeps now, like the rest of us. So I won't get to stumble, slip, sway, or tumble tonight. I'll just stay in my room with the walls, the bed, and the husband in the posture God gave us for waiting. I'm watching the clock as it slowly grows a three and am planning to write tomorrow. Maybe.
But I actually do. And (surprise!) it is all about her. I give birth to her again on paper and can barely stand the agony or suffer the joy. There I am again: open and bleeding and drugged beyond belief. And there she is: feathers for hair, grey eyes on my face sizing up God's choice for her mother. Well, who is she to judge? But, then, who else could? This thinking circles back on itself and has me in a panic over my baby at recess (warm enough?), her in the classroom (everyone nice?), and just her and her and her (will I ever create her measure again?). This gets me nowhere. I shut down the machine. I drink my tea.
I calm down. I turn the machine back on.
This really all comes down to figuring out what to do with all of this excess milk and sweat. It turns out that what she pulled from me for so long continues to want to be drawn. Writing is a far different thing, a much less physical thing, than mothering. And in some unexpected ways. When my kid falls, my spine hurts; when she is cold, my fingers go numb. Finding the right word can make me gasp, but it cannot transport me in the same visceral way that motherhood does. Even sitting here now, my heart, my brain, and my hope all tug in her direction. I really can't think of much else and (surprise!) I find that I seldom want to.
Giving birth to my daughter was not the death of self that I had been warned it could be. It is a much bigger thing, really, with ramifications that are far greater: One goes on living. And expanding. And, it would seem, writing. Happily and better I think when she comes home every day; and when I recreate her here in keystrokes, a sculpture in letters, spaces, and mindless punctuation. She always comes home a brand new kid again. And then I hug her and thank the heavens that she's here. And then, very gently, I squeeze her cheeks just to see if she'll spit me out.
Monica Crumback's essays have appeared in Brain, Child; Mom Writer's Literary Magazine; and on hipmama.com, mothersmovement.org, and mamazine.com. She is married and has one daughter.
I think this is the third time today that we are all crying at the same time. My sparkly-eyed toddler, parading her impossible two-ness before the world; my three-month-old, desperate for something I can only determine on the 11th guess; and me—with the intolerable decibel level reverberating through my ear canals, the heart rate and stress level in tandem with the noise, and soon I have decided to join their chorus rather than be the hero that I had always meant to be. Of course my rash reaction does nothing but exacerbate the situation, as my toddler's wide-mouthed screams are not startled into silence but rather disconcerted into crisis-mode, and my baby is anything but consoled by such an addition to the emotion flooding the room. These two girls need a crying mother like, as the Russians say, a dog needs a fifth leg.
Of course these episodes are not a daily occurrence. I like to think the emotional intensity level in our few square feet of living space is generally kept within fair degrees of normalcy for a young family. Making our apartment in the center of Moscow an asylum from what lies outside our windows has been an essential survival skill in braving this feat to live abroad. A quick glance out one of our windows and the harsh reality of what this city so generously offers comes right to life: smothering gray heavens falling around the smorgasbord architecture, pillars of cement and steel representing every proud era; a trillion automobiles congesting both roadways and lungs, racing here and crawling there, each the same color of smut, a gift from the black slushy street below; an ant farm of hustling people, donned in their animal skins from top to bottom, stern looks on their faces, made cold on the outside either by freezing temperatures or years of learning that it's better not to trust; billboards and advertisements littering every possible square foot, all screaming testimonies of the radical change that has taken place recently in this country; gaudy, showy, flashy dress and shiny expensive cars, where favorite words are "elite," "VIP," "status," and "prestige," witnessing of the importance the Russians put on class, as everyone scrambles to be on top, no matter who has to be trampled to get there. Living in such an intense place demands a certain amount of adaptation. In some ways we try to fit in, in others we don't.
That part of the American dream that includes the two-story house with a white picket fence in middle-American suburbia, lush green grass to run through, gardens to water, and a porch to sip lemonade on is not only a sweet memory of my childhood, but also a disappearing image of the mold my life would ooze into as I grew up and began my own family. Fate has landed me in a foreign place, where city living laughs in the face of that cute, simple suburban life. Everything is different—more complicated, more involved, more difficult. And this fact is not overlooked in family planning. Nobody in their right mind has kids two years apart, as we do. And it's at moments like these that I think, maybe I'm really not in my right mind . . .
I try to hold my head high as I struggle with my wimpy stroller through the brown slush, the two-year-old seated and the three-month-old slung from my shoulders. My high-heeled boots make great ice skates, especially as I try to push that stroller across the streets, and end up turning it around to pull it, the only way we can plow through what feels like sand. Inside I'm cursing my boots, this lousy stroller not made for this weather, this darned ugly snow, the frost biting my cheeks, the people for their stares (and refusal to lend a helping hand), and this mad city that has become my home.
Returning to Moscow a few months after the birth of our second, our new life greeted us with open arms. We were thrust back into the depths of the long Russian winter, during which you hardly want to leave the house, dealing with jet lag, not only ourselves, but of the two girls who took turns waking up screaming all night long for a week, a two-year-old blossoming in her defiance and independence, a young baby who had to be rocked to sleep for each of her 8 naps a day, a husband whom we only saw a few hours during the week, and a gaping hole of loneliness where a group of friends wasn't.
Within the first couple of days back, my father-in-law asks, "So how is it? Uzhas?"
Uzhas in Russian translates to horror, dread, nightmare, atrocity. . . And I proudly answer, "No, it's just fine."
"I don't want to be the project," I later tell my husband, " I don't want people wondering why we would do this to ourselves and thinking that we're in dire need of help and just can't make it on our own. We're just fine!"
But however hard I try wear my we're just fine sign on my forehead every day, I am still hounded with the question from the whole family, and stared at on the street with looks that scream: When are you going to get a nanny???
Nanny? Okay so I don't have a white picket fence, but that doesn't mean I have license to toss everything I had planned for the "Mother Era" of my life out the window. Never in my goals and imaginations had I slated in some other person to take care of my children. My whole life thus far had given me both ample time and enough material with which to formulate a complete and perfect impression in my head of the mother I was to become. We all know who she is—the ever-elusive embodiment of perfection in Mother form. The one that holds everything together at every moment without flinching, with ease, efficiency, style, and grace. All my efforts I have meant to steer in that direction, however far I may still be. But in all the plans for myself and who I was to become, no nanny had ever entered the equation. I mean, what perfect woman needs a nanny?
"Getting a nanny would be admitting defeat," I tell my husband. "It's like saying, ‘ I failed, I can't do it on my own.'"
However, the thought repeatedly bounces around in my head like a ping-pong ball in slow motion. What if there was someone to hand the baby to right now, so that I could finish making Milla's breakfast? What if there was someone I could ask to run by some milk for me, instead of bundling everyone up and hauling over to the grocery store? What if there was someone to entertain Milla while I try to write an email? What if there was someone to play with the girls while my husband and I go to dinner one Saturday, since we only see each other so rarely?
We braved to go out, just the three of us, only a few times. By the time both girls were dressed in sweaters, coats, boots, hats, scarves, and mittens, the baby inevitably screaming the whole time, myself also donned in all of the same winter garb, I made sure I had the keys, the wallet, the sippy cup, the diapers, the wipes, the bottle, the burpcloth, the change of clothes, the phone and the purse, and we stumbled out of the apartment with the stroller in one arm, the baby hanging over the other, the purse over one shoulder, the toddler dragging from my hand, got into the tiny elevator, down the 10 stairs, out the heavy door, to our car wherever it was parked on the street, and both girls into the car before Milla had darted out into traffic or we were hit with a falling icicle. . . I was nearly convinced we had to have a nanny.
But what finally pushes me over the edge was when I slyly and casually run it by my mother to see what she thinks. After describing what I have to go through just to get out of the house, not only does she think it is a good idea, I am finally starting to even feel justified.
And the search is on.
As Tanya takes her coat off the first thing I notice is a periwinkle fleece jacket. Its American-ness speaks calm to my soul. Her short brown hair falls around a very serious face so common to Russian women which tells stories of hardships in every nobly-earned wrinkle. As she sits across from us at the kitchen table and we speak quietly to avoid waking the girls, our conversation drifts comfortably from her past experience with others into her future experience with us. The contrast she is from the two women before her with a resume, a sense of responsibility and kindness to boot quietly confirms our hopes for this woman and we ask her if she will commit to us.
Watching this woman on her first day of work for us step across the threshold from her world and into ours with hardly a glance at me and such a casual air about her, as if she'd done this a million times, reels through my vision in slow motion. My "happy to see you" smile is front and center as I speak to her.
"Good morning, Tanya, come on in. Can I take your coat?" -- also playing the casual I've-done-this-a-million-times role, while inside the Intruder! Intruder! alarm is sounding so loud, I think surely she can hear.
As I methodically show her around the house, opening every cupboard, closet, drawer, box, nook and cranny to explain what is where and how she should take care of my children I feel I may as well have been leading her straight to my jewelry box to show her a strand of pearls.
I remember that conversation with my mother-in-law not long ago: Under too dimly lit lights for such a dark winter night I sit in a beige-colored living room across a long, dark table from my husband's mother, her busybody, high-strung, help-everybody intentions bringing the conversation once again to the Nanny Question.
"So where are we going to find you a nanny?"
"I wouldn't even know where to start. In fact, I'm not even sure I can pull it off, getting a nanny."
"I think you have a hard time trusting your children to someone else," she says, almost accusatorily.
"And, what, you had an easy time? Who is it easy for?" I say in my always-ready-Mother-in-law-defense-shield-voice. "I'm handing my children over to a stranger!"
"The idea is for that stranger to become a part of the family."
I fold my arms, sigh and put on my thinking stare.
Her presence in our passenger seat is subtly awkward and the heavy silence demands an attempt at the forced conversation Americans call "small talk."
"So where do your sons live?"
I'm paying her to do this. She's working for me right now.
"And how old is the youngest?"
Russians don't feel that pressing need to squelch silence like Americans do.
"Do you have grandchildren already?"
And they never feel the need to ask you anything about your own personal life. How much longer can I sustain this?
"And what does your oldest son do?"
When will she ever feel like part of the family?
If our foursome in the car had been somewhere around a 4 on the awkward scale, our all four being in our home together at the same time was approaching somewhere around ten. I nearly trip over it as I come home for a few minutes between errands and choir. Milla is successfully put down for a nap, so it is technically just the three of us. I fumble for my play-it-cool cards, as if it's every day I come home to a stranger holding the pearls I had carried for nine months. My motherly instincts are lining up ready for battle and it takes painful measures of self-control to keep from snatching my baby out of her hands. I wade through the awkwardness down the hall to the kitchen where I can be alone to wrestle with my emotions.
Here was a sweet, responsible, kind, trustworthy woman we had chosen to spend time with our children so that I could more easily take care of housekeeping tasks and take a little time for myself for personal interests. Why was I hating every minute of this???
My nerves lead me to the phone and I dial my friend in order to shake the weight of my thoughts and numb my conflicting feelings for a few minutes.
"So when do you want to get together for lunch?"
"What are you guys doing this weekend?"
Unfortunately the light conversation only serves to make me feel worse. What, I can rightfully justify paying someone to sit with my baby while I am in the other room yapping with a friend? The awkwardness I had been running from is now morphing into guilt and creeping its way into the kitchen toward me. A nervous glance at the clock reveals it is time for the baby to be fed. I hurry to hang up the phone, flee the kitchen and the guilt that is starting to suffocate me, rush to the living room, and swoop up my baby like a vulture with all the casualness I can muster.
This time around Milla is no dummy. She's only falling for the "Hey-Milla-Show-Me-The-Kitchen" trick once—second time, forget it. While she holds nothing against Tanya, she was anything but going to quietly let her mother slip out the door as she was left with a woman that had walked into her life just two days before. She turned on all lights and sirens, everything that comes so naturally to a proud two-year-old: the beet-colored face, the headache-yielding screams, the deep eyes that house a hundred emotions, the fishlike flopping and flailing. The performance that is, to me, so familiar, and which usually stirs up impatience and frustration at such irrationality, now yanks out of me my own host of a hundred emotions, topping the list: shame, compassion, torment . . . I may as well have been leaving her on a lonely highway at night, telling her to wait for me just a bit, I had things I needed to do. I dress to leave and do my best to console her as Tanya does her best to distract her. Both efforts are fruitless and I am forced to peel her off me as if peeling off my own skin and close the door behind me as she lays in a soggy heap on the doormat. Our high-security steel door does little to muffle her desperate screams, and the increasing distance between us does little to placate my self-inflicted pain.
Tanya sits across from me in the living room with that same stone face that seems to experience zero emotion, that walks into my house every day and says hello so casually, the eyes that never change shape, the wrinkles that tell their own history, and the mouth that never really breaks into a smile in its truest form. As I prepare to discuss our schedule, she masks her nervousness with that phony casualness we both went to such lengths to put off. And then she forces out the words:
"I think I'm going to quit."
For the hundred emotions that had been drowning me for weeks as I panted and dog-paddled to keep afloat with some strained degree of composure, at this moment it seemed the sea went calm. I felt nothing.
My "that's really too bad-I'm so sorry things didn't work out-how can we pay you?-thank you anyway, we were very happy with you-good luck to you" escorts her to the door and closes it behind her, while my mental self slowly lays back on the couch and swallows the calm and the relief that it brings for a moment or two before my emotions once again subjugate my soul.
And I begin to sob.
My thoughts begin swirling in my head with tornado force. Did this mean I was wrong for trying to get some help in the first place? Had I been compromising the ideas I had for the mother I wanted to be—the one that does it all—by hiring someone? Had I been selling out? Should I just accept that things are going to be hard and get a grip? Maybe I wasn't meant to have any balance in my life, to reach all of my goals, to do anything but be a mother for now. Oh how I had been tortured by the decision to hire somebody to make things a little bit easier, and here I was, back where I had started, flat on my face in that same puddle of decision. Now what? Do I give up on trying to make my life easier, to perfectly organize my life so that everything fit? Was I asking too much? Did I have an impossible dream? Should I quit wanting so much from my life?
And I am once again dog paddling through my own tears, thoughts, motherly instincts, emotions and dreams.
We say goodbye that day to Nanny #1. We say goodbye with both sadness and pleasure, my conscience and I. She will never know, as most won't, about the crying chorus day. She'll never know about the feelings I had each time she walked in the door, and each time I walked out. She'll never know what Milla means when she says "a-ca-po," and will never feel the same pride I do when my baby begins to understand she can move her hands at will. She'll never know me, and the battle I face in trying to reconcile dreams with reality and the discrepancy between the person I want to be, and the person that I am. She'll never know what I go through, to try to do it all, to be it all, for myself, my husband, and my children. She'll never know the love I have for my sweet children, or the sacrifices I make to try to give them everything.
Of course, then again, maybe she does know all this. After all, she is a mother, too.
Jen Prokhorov lives with her husband and two girls in Moscow, Russia, and dabbles in creativity whenever possible. This is her first published piece.
I need to come clean. My name is Suzi, I’m a mother and I am crazy. It’s painful to admit and probably difficult to hear but I take comfort in knowing there are millions of others who share my dilemma. You see, motherhood is a state of insanity and if you are not a mother, then you had a mother and if she wasn’t crazy, then you definitely had a friend whose mother was crazy – so you know what I am talking about. It’s inescapable, unavoidable and totally inevitable. When a woman becomes a mother, she enters into a state of insanity that only grows worse with age and I’m sorry to report, is totally irreversible. And sadly, it happened to me.
How exactly did this happen? How did I get from point A - an educated, young, well dressed woman, acting and speaking quite rationally, to Point B – a middle aged woman, dressed in a cotton wife-beater tank top, mismatching flannel pajama pants, no bra (with breasts that have no business being unleashed in public), barefoot, hair disheveled, last night’s mascara under my eyes, at 3:00 in the afternoon screaming at the top of my lungs to my kids while standing in the middle of the neighborhood? I’ve thought about this often. It’s a surreal moment to realize that I’m that mother; I’ve become that crazy woman who, in our old neighborhood, yelled at her kids obnoxiously loud because her frustration carried more weight than her pride.
"Lucas. Lucas!" The screen door slams behind me and when he doesn’t answer right away, "LUCAS!" I holler even louder and in a pitch that makes my voice almost crack, but I know he can hear me from wherever he is.
"What?" It’s very faint but definite.
"Come here!" Some of the kids playing in the street look up.
"What?" He hollers back just a bit more loudly.
"COME here!" Now all of the children stop what they are doing and look up in terror.
"WHAT?" Lucas appears.
"COME HERE!" I now have the attention of everyone within a half-mile radius.
A few seconds later, and a few seconds too late in my mind, poor Lucas shows up.
"When I call your name, don’t keep asking me what. You come to me when I call your name." I now had a new frustration on top of the original one, which for a moment, I completely forgot. "I’ve said it to you before. Don’t make me yell for you!" I’m still shouting at the same decibel I was using when I had yelled ‘COME HERE!’ the last time.
"Sorry," he says but I know he’s not.
"Lucas, didn’t I tell you not to leave the cat in your room with the door closed?"
"Yeah."
Now at this point, we both know what I am about to say and if I was a normal person, in a normal state of mind, that would be the end of the situation. We’d quietly walk back into the house, and my son would know what to do. Nothing more would need to be said but no, remember I’m slightly mad and I mean in all ways, so I continue.
"Then why in the hell did you leave Raven in your room with the door closed?" When the word ‘hell’ was spewing from my mouth, I had a choice to use ‘heck’ instead, but was unable to stop myself.
"I’m sorry, I forgot." Lucas starts for the doorway, maybe thinking the cat was still there and I was calling him to let her out.
"Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you." The nerve.
"Wha-at? I’m going to go let her out."
"I already did that. She crapped all over your room and it stinks like shit. Damn it, we just had the carpets cleaned, too!" Again, I’m totally aware that I’m now using cuss words as I speak to my twelve year old, but oddly over the years the ability to use discretion with tongue has slipped away with my sanity. "Now go and clean it up. Properly!"
Yes, that’s me. Sometimes I catch myself in mid-sentence. Well, actually that’s not totally true – I might catch myself in mid-screaming rage and quiet it down a notch but more often than not, my husband rushes out to save the kids and I with, "Suzi! Shhh. The neighbors can hear." Giving a gesture with his hands for me to lower the level, while raising one eye brow throwing me a questioning look which reveals he’s embarrassed for the whole family and at the same time can’t believe it’s his wife and not his mother that’s acting like a lunatic.
"Oh, I don’t give a shit!" Is my humble answer and I mean it, but get his point and storm back into the house.
At what point did I begin this mysterious transformation? After completing the necessary research, I discovered the answer. The onset of motherhood madness begins at the moment of conception – the moment of the first child’s conception, that is. Studies confirm that a woman’s brain shrinks 3%-5% during pregnancy and that it takes about six months after the birth, for the brain to return to normal size. There you have it! This was very comforting news to me, to know that I wasn’t the only one who was experiencing a noticeable loss of intelligence. The problem is that during those six months following childbirth, like all other young mothers, I learned that I was completely responsible for keeping another human being alive and was largely responsible for what kind of a person they were going to be for the rest of their life, which further propelled my lunacy. The responsibility is a tremendous burden to bear.
And what about childbirth? I’ve pondered how possibly the trauma of labor and delivery affects the long-term mental health of women. Today, the field of psychology recognizes the condition of post-traumatic stress syndrome, PTSD, defined as an anxiety disorder than can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Well, what the hell do you call it when an object the size of a cantaloupe pushes its way through the opening made for a cucumber? I say that’s a slightly traumatic event. OK, maybe it’s a stretch and unfair to associate true PTSD sufferers with childbirth but I’d say post-childbirth stress disorder, PCSD, isn’t a far cry.
Women have been experiencing the pain since the beginning of time. Epidurals and other pain relief medications are only a recent contribution to birthing mothers, yet women have chosen to repeat this childbirth thing over and over. Some women do it several times. They experience the process one time, and actually choose to do it again, and perhaps again and again. I recall the moment I realized that mothers were slightly off their rockers. I had just given birth to my son and was on my first outing. I looked around at all the other mothers and had an epiphany. Oh my God. They all went through that? That’s ludicrous! I should interject that I was one of those self-righteous martyrs who believed natural childbirth was the only way to go and was determined to have it so. You might ask why I chose to have a natural childbirth, without the aid of any pain medication for my second child. Let’s say it together, now: I was insane.
Some say the reason why women continue to have more children is because they forget the pain of childbirth. Bullshit.
January 10, 1995 3:00 am
"Ffff. Fffff. Fffff. Heeee. Heeee. Heee. Wh. Wh. Wh." I sound off to no one in particular.
"Try counting the tiles," my labor coach (yes, labor coach) instructs me.
"Four, five, six, seven…" I count the square tiles in the hospital shower as a means to distract myself from the pain of the contraction. As if that’ll do it but after enduring the past seven hours of labor, my brain and body were incapable at doing anything more complicated. I take a simple pleasure in the hot water falling on my back.
My husband waits safely outside the shower, watching helplessly and awkwardly as my labor coach stands inside the shower next to me, wearing her swimsuit. I could care less who sees me naked. That’s the sign when a woman is in her last stages of labor – that she has absolutely no concern for who sees her naked. It could be her father watching, the nurses, the next-door neighbor, or the mailman. No difference. Doesn’t matter.
"Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six…" I cringe and focus every fiber of my being into counting, "Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one." Holy shit. Contractions are supposed to last only a minute. "Ninety-nine, one hundred. Oh, shit. God. Oh God, finally. I feel the contraction slowly loosen its grip. I need the rest, desperately. I had not slept all night, as my contractions rarely spanned more than three or four minutes apart. "Oh, shit, here it comes again" I shake my head. It hadn’t even been a minute. "One, two, three, four…"
And that’s how water and time flowed for the next forty-five minutes before the joy of pushing came into play. We don’t forget; I remember it very vividly, but the truth is I did it again because…yes, you guessed it: I had lost my mind. You see, the first time we mothers become pregnant, we don’t know any better. We’re innocent, naïve and think "Heck, women have been doing this for years. What could be so bad?" But then why do so many women repeat this process over and over again? I propose that Motherhood made us that way.
How can it be that women go through this most painful experience and don’t caution the next generation: "Don’t do it! Never have kids!" We warn our children to be careful around fire, so as not to burn themselves, because after all, we know from experience that a burn .really hurts. So why don’t the wise elders alert the younger generation, "It really hurts!" Are we mothers slightly sadistic and secretly want to see others in pain? No, we’re just suffering from a slight psychiatric disorder.
Then comes the stage of labor, I mean life, when our closest companions are under the age of five. Our activities revolve around the capabilities and intellect of young children. We crave adult conversation but finding time to shower possesses enough challenge for the day; carrying on a phone conversation with constant noise and objects flying overhead is just about all we can handle; arranging a date with a friend is simply pushing it.
In our conversations with them often find our self constantly arguing. We debate with them their bed time, if they need a bath, what they can eat for dinner or whether or not they can bring their lunch into the family room to watch TV. We are actually discussing this.
At four years old, Lucas carries his plate of macaroni and cheese in one hand and a sippy-cup of juice in the other, making his way towards the couch.
I know where he is going but for reasons I still contemplate, opt to begin the dialogue with a question. "Where are you going with that?"
"I wanna watch Bob da Bewder."
"You can watch Bob when are finished with your lunch." I’m calm, patient and actually have a pleasant tone when I speak, for now.
He keeps walking. "I won’t spill."
"You know the rules. Please come back to the table and eat with Mommy."
"No-o. I wanna watch Tee-Wee."
I realize it’s time for a nap, which won’t happen unless I lay down and sleep along side him. "Lucas, I said come back to the table. I don’t want you to eat in the family room. The family room is for playing and watching TV. The kitchen is where we eat."
"Please. Mommy, please. You wet me before."
"And remember what happened with the spaghetti? Accidents happen, you’re just a little boy. Now please come to the table to eat. You can watch Bob when you are finished."
"Plea-ease."
"No, I said. I don’t want food on the carpet."
"I won’t spill. I promise."
"Lucas, I know you try to be careful but you know the rules. Now come sit down or you’re going to get a time-out."
He keeps walking, just a bit more slowly.
"One….twooooo…three!"
Simultaneously both his body and plate drop to the floor splattering tears and pretty orange noodles onto the carpet.
Sometimes, on a rare awakening of sanity, I step back and realize I’m engaging in a debate with a child who learned only recently to wipe his own butt, as if he or she is an equal and there is actually some uncertainty as to the outcome. Actually there is because sometimes the four-year old or nine-year old or twelve-year old actually wins the debate and convinces you to overturn your verdict in favor of theirs. And carpets need cleaning.
Once a mother, your life immediately becomes about someone else’s. We give ourselves completely to these little things. Our life, even when the kids are gone and out of the house, still in some direct and indirect ways, is still about the children. Are my children okay? Are they making good choices? Are they safe? Are they involved in healthy relationships? Are my children able to support themselves financially? The concerns never end.
All of the sudden mothers transform from slightly selfish, often self-centered girls whose every day consists of pursuing their own personal goals, taking care of only themselves to mothers who are willing to put on hold all of their dreams and aspirations, if necessary for the well being of their children. What seemed so important before now pales in comparison to the significance of raising and loving our child and making choices that are in their best interest.
My son, Lucas, now in the seventh grade, recently presented me with such a situation that once again forced me to reprioritize my life.
"Mom, I don’t want to go to school anymore." He speaks sincerely into my eyes.
These were words I knew one day but secretly hoped not, would be spoken. Lucas’ brain works differently than most children. The world today categorizes his brain function as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, and the public school system is in no way prepared to effectively educate these children. He’s bright, acutely aware of his surroundings, remarkably attuned to others motives and weaknesses, has an amazing curiosity about the world and has plans to be a great entrepreneur one day. His experience in school has been ineffective in providing him with the self-confidence, self-esteem and education for which he’ll need to recognize his strengths and pursue his life’s ambitions.
After seven years of us fighting each other and the school system, trying to work it to our advantage and after a year and half of him suffering from debilitating stomach aches every single day of school (but not on non-school days), Lucas had finally reached both the insight to recognize the problem and the maturity to effectively communicate it to me.
I take a breath deeper than my lungs can fill, "Really? How come?" I know the answer, but wanted to hear it from him directly.
"I can’t deal with these stomach aches any more. I’m miserable at school, Mom. I can’t even concentrate in class most days because my stomach hurts so much. And it’s just so hard. Going from one class to the next, to the next, to the next. And there’s so much homework. It’s just so hard. I can’t keep up. And God, Mr. Lopez is just soooo boring. I’m not learning anything in his class." Lucas expresses himself clearly, without his usual whining. He speaks to me in a sincere, mature voice that I cannot ignore.
"Are you having any problems with friends at school?"
"No." He shrugs his shoulders, and I believe him.
"Do you want to be home-schooled?"
"Yes. Please, Mom."
This was a question I had asked almost every school year at some point or another and he had always answered no; he wanted to be with his friends and I always thanked God for that answer. As my children got older, I had begun to pursue some of my own goals that had been put on the back burner for quite some time, and home schooling would have put quite a wrench in my plans.
After a week of several heartfelt conversations like that one, we decided to withdraw Lucas from the public middle school and embark on a journey not originally part of my 2007-2008 plan. That’s the state of motherhood: constantly stripping away our selfish desires and repeatedly putting on hold, perhaps forever, our dreams for the better of our children. And in that we discover new dreams. Yet, amazingly, there exists in this state both pain and joy. We mothers suffer the pain of losing one part of our identity only to find it again in our strength by doing what is best for our children, and in that we find tremendous joy. However, this confusing state also propels our insanity.
Then there are the moments when you are trying to accomplish one of your many daily, seemingly important goals, and your child reminds you of what is most significant in life.
"Mom, will you come watch TV and cuddle with me." Lucas is almost a teenager, but still such a little boy.
"I can’t right now. I’m working." I don’t take my eyes of the computer screen.
"Please, Mom. Just for a little bit."
"Lucas, just let me finish these emails."
"When will you be done?"
"In a few minutes."
"Will you cuddle with me then?"
"Sure." I really mean it, but time slips by.
"Mom, it’s been thirty minutes. You said you’d be done in a couple of minutes."
"I know, I’m sorry, Lucas. I just need to finish this last email." Another twenty minutes passes.
"Are you finished, yet?"
"Yup, all done." I look up at the time, realize I didn’t get dinner started and it’s already 6:00pm. "Oh, wait, Lucas. Just a couple of more minutes. I need to get dinner going."
"Mom, you said you’d cuddle with me, and that was an hour ago."
"I know, I know. But I need to get dinner going. I’m sorry. Just a few more minutes. I promise."
He abandons his seat on the couch and storms to his room. "You always say that and you never cuddle with me." He attempts slight manipulation with the painful, almost-truth.
I accept the fact that my tasks for the day are endless but time with my young son is not. "I’m sorry, Lucas. Come here. Let’s cuddle." Dinner can wait. We’ll eat sandwiches again.
I don’t always accept defeat so graciously. I often fight with every fiber of my being to complete a goal I’ve set out to accomplish. I do. I would have thought by now that I would have figured this thing out - that I need to be more flexible with my daily and life goals, but as a mother I can’t win. If I don’t give up my immediate goals to tend to my children’s immediate needs, I’m stricken with guilt and continuous guilt will drive anyone out of their minds. However, it’s just as maddening to rarely have a sense of accomplishment. Sure, if I were wise and patient, I’d see that I am accomplishing so much by raising my children. Please show me the mother who honestly feels that most of the time. I’d love to meet her.
But I suppose I haven’t been completely honest. There is another reason why mothers are slightly insane: the power of love. From the second a little life comes out of your own body, there exists a piece of you. A sample of your soul is living and breathing outside of you in your arms and it loves you. And the most amazing thing happens: at that moment you would give your life to save theirs. This little baby is nobody you’ve ever met before, no one you know yet, at that moment of birth a mother would sacrifice her life to save her baby’s. The love is overwhelming and consumes you completely and becomes the driving force behind every single thought, word, action and desire, in some way or another, for the remainder of your life, and that makes us crazy - crazy in love.
I never chose motherhood. It chose me. One of my many life’s aspirations, motherhood has been a constant as long as I have been breathing. A part of my thoughts since my earliest memories, a desire of which I was not originally conscious and ingrained in me like taking my next breath, so was raising children. I also sought to be a dancer, a college graduate, an architect, a successful business owner and a wife. Some ambitions came into fruition, others not; some I am still pursuing. Sacrifices had to be made but never did I contemplate motherhood. Sometimes the sacrifices were, and still are, small like cooking a well-balanced meal for my family, clean carpets or a daily shower. Often they are more difficult, like finding the peace to hear my own thoughts and remember who I am. The lack of sleep, lack of time to pursue friendships and the lack of energy to make-love all affect a mother’s ability to find happiness and therefore, stay sane, but nothing quite troubles the soul more than the lack of spending time with oneself.
What gives mothers the strength to continue rather than fall into a state of being permanently institutionalized? I believe it’s moments. Simple moments filled with love and meaning keep me on the brink of functioning sanity. There are moments when the love is so grand it fuels my lunacy even further. At night when I’ve tucked my son into bed, he’s shared with me in a love fest that goes something like this.
"Good night. I love you." I start.
"No, I love you." Lucas looks into my eyes, trying to see my heart.
"No, I love you."
"No, I love you more."
No, I love you more."
"I love you this much." He stretches his arms as wide as they can reach.
"I love you this much." My stretch is bigger.
"I love you all the way to the moon."
"I love you all the way past the moon, past Jupiter, into other galaxies, universes and back!"
"Wow. That’s a lot."
"It is." And these aren’t just words. Both mother and child speak from the deepest corner of our hearts.
Or there’s nights when they crawl in bed next to you with their velvety soft skin, nuzzling perfectly– okay, maybe an elbow jabbing into your side and the child’s leg is pushing against your husband’s. But nevertheless this perfect body finds ultimate comfort and security in just being next to you. Their breath is shallow and stinks perfectly and miraculously, all of your pain is forgotten until the next morning, when it’s time to do it all over again.
When I was a nanny, the older boy in the family spent some time identifying as a girl. He was three and luckily his mom thought it was great. His favorite getup was a hot pink towel wrapped around his head, a hot pink feather boa wrapped around his neck, white nose picker pointy high heel shoes on his feet and nothing else. He once waltzed out to say good night during a dinner his parents were hosting in said duds. To the unruffled and genuine delight of his amazing mother and the awesome embarrassment of his well-intentioned father, the boy girl appeared in birthday suit, plus plush accoutrements. I watched the many emotions play themselves out over a butter lettuce salad and a beautiful piece of fish. I gave a small sigh. You just can’t encourage gender bending at a business dinner without a justified fear of the family meeting.
The next morning, at the same table, I advocated in favor of toddler transvestitism using the following argument, “If you don’t let him do it now, he’ll be doing it when he’s thirty.? I thought this a neat and cheeky reply to the father’s petty protests. What could be the harm in a pink boa, really? I get a kick out of cross dressers; I love the pageantry of passing and the inherent reminder that we all play at our identity, sexual and otherwise. I love to see what people come up with in the “self? category. My only caveat being bad drag. Give me the sexy shims at the club, give me boys in heels and wigs, give me girls in trucks and straight-leg Levi’s, but please lord spare me the house coat and five o’clock shadow. Ain’t nobody into ugly. I thought my opinion was so urban, so…open minded. I thought I had a point. I thought I was hip to the theater of the self, to the politics of identity pastiche. And maybe I was. But I was also missing the point.
The father was expressing his fear. My charge was his first born son and he had an identity in mind for the boy. The ideal obviously involved neither pink nor feathers, turbans nor nakedness. While I approached the son in play, as if in a game of fantasy and semantics, the father approached him in stern determination. As a parent, I can now see how I operated then - with a lack of understanding and a carefully crafted misunderstanding. I don’t think I was mature enough to face the enormity of the task of parenting. I still clung to my hours, the children were my job and not my life. I flippantly skimmed along the emotional depths of parenting, refusing to allow that identity might be a sticking point for me as well. I didn’t really get it until now.
I have recently encountered the “Princess Phase.? My daughter spent the first two years of her life in boy’s hand-me-downs from the mid eighties. She never wore pastels nor watched Disney. I was careful to gender bend and blur at every play opportunity. My daughter lives with two women who wear pants. She is my daughter, the daughter of a devoted, self-declared feminist and yet still, she has developed a passion for princesses. She wants to see them, she wants to be them, she wants to wear their dresses. The hinges of my mind rust shut. All the years of theory and forward thinking come to a grinding, stubborn, mulish halt. I cannot accept the princess thing. I do not agree, I do not accept. I object!
By my own logic, I should indulge her chosen identity so that at age thirty, my daughter is not donning square dancer duds and heading out to kiss frogs. This should be the “princess empowerment phase.? I should enable my daughter’s inner princess and allow her to play at whatever person she needs to be. What I know about the Magic Kingdom’s shady politics and cultural corruption should not be the limiting factor. What I know about girls and silence and self-esteem should stay my hand. I should embrace this phase in all its puffy, pink, spinning, and sparkling glory. I should appreciate the pageantry and the pastiche of my own inner princess. I should, for the love of god, at least play along. But the princess shtick makes me feel sick with its sticky, prissy cotton candy palette. I can’t help it - I don’t want her wearing tiaras and tiered dresses with lace overlays. I don’t want her wearing purple bejeweled plastic fuck-me pumps with feathers. I don’t want to call her “Cinderella, or Belle or Sleepy Beauty.? I don’t want to be caught in the good mother/bad mother dichotomy as my daughter wanders the woods turning and bending curtsies to the birds.
I want my daughter to be tough and smart and dirty. I want her to be loud and crass, insistent and savvy. I want her to care about human rights and social justice and the fate of the universe, not armored knights, social functions and the fate of the pink sparkly purse. Can’t she be a firefighter or a dinosaur or an insect of some kind? I’d be happy with a puppy, a kitty, a dragon, maybe even a queen. Can’t she aspire to some other antithesis of all that I am? But no, the princess it is. Why does it bother me so much? She is after all, tough and smart and dirty, regardless of her dress. She is loud and she is insistent and she is savvy. And now that she can properly used the phrase, “damn it!? I can say with assurance that she is also crass. Regardless of her dress.
The dress, in fact, is only a limiting factor for me. My daughter does everything in a dress. As soon as we walk through the door at her preschool she strips naked and heads for the play house. There they have a mad assortment of old party dresses and hand-me-down lingerie. Once in costume, she continues with her day, swinging, digging, riding trikes, painting pictures, reading books, climbing, fighting, nursing, crying, napping, screaming, laughing and spinning and spinning and spinning. It’s as if the princess dress facilitates her day. So who am I to say no? Who am I to decide that the princess thing is a hindrance, holding her back? Perhaps I am holding us back. I forget that now, and for a little while yet, my daughter’s epistemology is mainly composed of me. I am the main source for information and discernment. I have been, till lately, the last say, the only say. With this in mind, maybe the problem isn’t the princess but the parent.
Parenting, and mothering in particular, can feel like such a raw deal. There is so much to do and clean and organize and read and cook and make and fix in my every day and no one does it but me. If I don’t do it, whatever it is, it will mostly likely not get done. There is only so much I can delegate to my two-year-old. I am, by default, for better or worse, in control. So now, when she makes a move to take control, am I reacting with a dictatorial negative. I immediately think, “Hey honey, that’s my job! I have gotten you dressed several time a day, for every day of your life. Since when do you dress yourself?? The answer, spoken clearly and in many passionate moments is, “Since right now, now hand me that lacey getup and those furry little accidents and get out of my way!?
She has imposed a moratorium on pants. It is now tights and “spinning dresses? or nothing at all. “Nothing at all? used to be my daughter’s modus operandi. She’s stripped naked at the slightest provocation. Now, to be precise, it is “tights and a spinning dress? or else. If I force the pants thing or, god forbid, one of the dresses is in the dryer, the possession begins. My sweet baby girl grows horns and her head spins around and she spews green vomit. I hear voices from the dark side speaking through her tiny mouth, demanding a new dress. I am inconsolable. There is no way that a new spinning dress can be my child’s reson d’ etre. But it is, and perhaps, it isn’t.
Maybe my girl will be a girly girl. Maybe she will be, like me, shy and retiring by nature. Is that what I fear? That only a supreme effort will buy her the ability to speak up? Am I nervous that she’ll be crippled by what people might presume to think of her in pink? Am I afraid that she’ll be hobbled by misogyny and a foreshortened Achilles’ tendon? Yes, and rightly so. These have happened to me, they will probably happen to her. What will be the cure? Well, to begin, she will need to feel confident making her own decisions. She’ll need to believe that what she likes, and that what she thinks, is valid and has a rightful place in the world. She’ll need to believe that I love her even when we disagree. She’ll need to be able to get out of bed and get dressed for her day. She need to be able to defend her decisions and yes, to discern the revolutionary power of play and artful pastiche. So, if she has something to say, at two, and she needs the princess phase to say it, well…okay.
My solace, here in the bowels of the princess phase, is a pair of red boots. With her spinning dress and tights, my daughter usually wants to wear a pair of red boots. Bright red boots with reinforced toes. Awesome red ankle boots that she can run in and splash in and put on herself. Boots, by the way, that I picked out. I take it one day at a time. It requires an enormous reserve of strength to indulge my wee princess, to let her be who she wants to be, to let her try on an identity I loathe, in the comfort and safety of our own home. When I sit down to my sewing machine tonight, to mend her tutu and, in compromise, make a new spinning skirt, I will have those red boots in my mind’s eye. I will add the image of those boots to my permanent collection.
My father arrived to this country in 1971 with seven American dollars in his pocket. He landed at JFK airport with one suitcase, a thick Indian accent, and clothes made by a Hyderabadi tailor to accommodate his particularly slight South Asian stature. As he was exiting the airport, confident, arrogant even, in his new homeland, he saw a man sitting on a curb playing a guitar with its case splayed open on the sidewalk next to him. My father briefly paused and watched as other Americans walked by and tossed change into the musician’s guitar case. And because he was now in America, and very eager to assimilate as quickly as possible, he approached the musician, handed him his only $5 bill (the vast majority of his wealth) and awaited change. The musician took the money, briskly thanked him, and turned back to his music. My father was shocked. Not only was he not receiving change, the remaining $2 that meagerly lined his billfold was all that he had left on him to get him to El Paso, Texas for an awaiting job. He was just twenty-two years old.
My father tells this story often and I am always eager to hear it. It is a tale filled with adventure and suspense, anecdotal evidence of the American dream, and it is the string that links my brother and me from this nation to another. And although his two children are only half Indian (my father married a mixed Austrian-Puerto Rican), my father has a saying, which he believes most accurately conveys his contribution to our heritage. “A pinch of sugar makes a whole glass of water sweet.? He grins widely when he utters this phrase, a testament to the fact that no matter how small the amount of Indian DNA my brother and I possess, even the slightest deems us fully Indian.
And so far, at least in my own life, I have found this to be true. Regardless of my genetic make-up, I have always felt wholly Indian. It’s no disrespect to my other parts, but it was the culture that I was most frequently exposed to and the community I felt most comfortable with during my childhood. I love Indian clothes, music, contemporary literature, and food. I love the accents, the smells of curry, the jewelry (who wouldn’t love 22 carat gold), and the weddings and festivals. Because I look Indian, when I walk around the mall or the zoo or a museum, other Indians who I have never met smile or briefly nod their heads at me, subtlety acknowledging the link to our common ancestry. And if they need directions anywhere, it’s me they’ll approach to ask, instead of my non-Indian husband.
Because I did not marry an Indian, I knew my children would be only one-quarter Indian. This made me a little sad at first, knowing that my half-Indianness would diminish further in my progeny. To honor my Indian ancestors, we gave our girls Indian first and middle names, pierced their ears as infants, and placed black and gold beaded bracelets on their tiny wrists. Still, I had hoped that when each of my daughters were laid on my chest after birth, that there would be something about them – some physical characteristic, that would announce their South Asian roots to the world. There was not. There are some similarities between Mira and I – she has my same chai tea latte-colored skin and espresso-colored hair and eyes, but otherwise, her facial features are strikingly similar to my husband’s. And Leela is a fairer complected, lighter-haired version of her sister. Though beautiful and perfect, the girls resemble the other parts of our diverse family, my husband’s Spanish relatives.
Despite their non-Asian looks, I do my best to immerse the girls in Indian culture and tradition. I explain to Mira the significance of Diwali, the festival of lights, and other holidays. I show her India on the map. We play dress up in traditional Indian clothes sent abroad from our relatives and visit Hindu temples. The girls know my father as “Tata.?
On a recent trip to visit my parents, we took the family to an Indian restaurant. Just shy of eleven months, it was Leela’s first taste of Indian cuisine. Imagine my surprise when she polished off several of the spicy curries on the table, licking her fingers in between, before plunging herself into another dish. Mira gorged herself on papadam, a flattened chip made out of lentils and spices. Our waiter was shocked and delighted that such small children couldn’t get enough of such spicy foods. My father, the Indian immigrant, swelled with pride to see his granddaughters relishing the tastes of his childhood.
It was at this moment that I finally realized that India, with its rich history and culture, could still significantly influence my daughters’ young lives. Although they are one more generation removed from that great county, India runs through their blood, their histories, and their souls. And even if they don’t see it within themselves, the girls will always have their Tata, the once young and wide-eyed immigrant with seven dollars in his pocket, to teach them about the sweetness of their heritage.
Anjali Enjeti-Sydow resides in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and two daughters. She has been published in Catholic Parent, MotherVerse, Big Apple Parent, and online at Mamazine, The Mothers Movement Online, and VerbSap. She blogs at http://www.lifeinthehundredacrewood.blogspot.com