Thinking about identity: Being a Mother

I grew up in a happy and healthy family. My parents were really terrific parents, with a strong marriage, and I feel lucky to come from a background that gave me such a good foundation. Oh, we had the usual troubles, and sibling spats, but we genuinely enjoyed each other, and I have many great memories of sitting around the table at dinner, arguing cheerfully or going off into gales of laughter. There was nothing about my family of origin that made me feel, yuck, I don't want to have kids myself. On the contrary, Rob and I discussed the possibility of kids before we married, and were pleased to learn we were on the same wavelength: we both wanted them.

We were married for six years before we started our family, waiting two years past the point I would have been happy starting, because of financial reasons. Once we went ahead, we had no trouble conceiving--although we nearly had a tragedy with our first pregnancy. I was mistakenly told I had miscarried the baby (I had been bleeding and cramping). When the tissue didn't pass as expected after twelve days, I went in for a D&C. My doctor (and I will always be everlastingly grateful to her for this) decided to do one more pregnancy test, just to be sure--and we learned, to our astonishment, that I was in fact still pregnant.

Delia's pregnancy was much rougher on me: I got very sick with a virus halfway through that flattened me, I got an internal infection, I had hives all over my body, and I walked with a cane for the last four and a half months because the pregnancy seemed to utterly unhinge the ligaments in my hips and I literally couldn't walk without extra support. But both deliveries were normal, with no complications.

I had seen my older sister birth and raise her kids years before I embarked upon motherhood myself, and I'm grateful for that, because it helped to have an idea of what to expect. It's true, however, that it's only an idea: actually experiencing parenthood for the first time is an amazing experience which you can only understand by going through it yourself.

Two things that struck me especially about conceiving a child and carrying it to term: the first was I had never really thought about the fact that in the most intimate possible relationship that a human being can have with another human being (where you are literally carrying the other inside your own body) it is very strange to not know that other being's gender. I realized how much of our thinking (the way we actually use the language with "he" "she" "his" and "her") starts from gender awareness as the foundation. But I did all my gestational thinking about this new person I would be responsible for without knowing that person's gender. So when I thought "when I'm a mother I will hold my baby and ____" and I was forced, by my ignorance of that basic fact, to expand my thinking. This had never occurred to me before becoming pregnant.

The other discovery was the realization that the locus of my immediate survival instinct had changed in a profound way, to a place outside of myself. Guys, you may not always realize it, but women in this culture usually have a sort of security awareness operating all the time: we are walking in the parking ramp, or on the street, or into the convenience store, and we're thinking about picking up a quart of milk, but we're also thinking, on a subconscious level where are the exits? Do I have my purse tightly against my body? If that guy walking towards me lunges toward me suddenly, which way do I dodge? About a week after bringing Fiona home, I realized that my internal security monitor was not focused on me, as it had been my entire life up until now, but on this tiny baby I had to cart around everywhere. I realized that I wasn't so concerned with saving my life in an emergency life as her life. And if I had to choose between the two, I would choose her. Making this discovery tapped me into my animal-instinctual brain, which I hadn't entirely realized was there. Becoming a mother suddenly made me hyper-aware of myself as an animal, with heretofore deeply buried but suddenly powerful instinctual urges, in a way I never had been before.

I think I have personally avoided taking "sides" in the so-called cultural mommy wars. I don't think of myself as invested in one path over another, i.e., in a hostile camp opposing women who have made different choices than I have, like kiramartin who stays home with her kids, or kijjohnson, who chose not to have children at all.

As important as I believe my job is as a mother to my girls, I am not satisfied with thinking of that as my be-all and end-all: that my purpose in life is raising my girls. I want to be an independent person with my own vocation, apart from shepherding them to adulthood.

I think, on the whole, that in a lot of ways I'm a pretty good mom. I want to be, which is half the battle right there. I read to them, engage them with a lot more in life than many American parents do. I talk to them with respect, I don't hit them, and I am trying to find ways to teach them what they need to know to make their own way in the world. As a feminist, I am trying to inculcate in them the sense that as women they can be powerful, that they deserve to be safe, that they should be taken seriously, that they can go anywhere and be anything they want to be.

What is more, I think that Rob and I make a good parenting team. One of the strengths of our marriage manifests itself in the way we trust each other to take over parenting when the other isn't there. He has always been deeply involved in their upbringing, a true co-parent, and the girls absolutely adore him.

God knows, however, I am not perfect. I have my own struggles with depression, which unfortunately too many times makes me too irritable and impatient with the girls. As I am hard on myself, I am afraid that sometimes I am too hard on them. I know that minnehaha B. has twitted me in the past about being slow at allowing them the freedom they need to become truly independent. I worry all the time about the scary things that they will have to face, things that never were an issue for me growing up. I was a pretty goody two-shoes kid. Will I keep my head and help them navigate the teenage years successfully if one of them really goes off the rails?

Rob and I always thought we would have just two, but when Delia was born, I surprised myself by realizing that I didn't want to stop there. Specifically, I longed for a son. It is still painful to me to realize that I will never experience that.