What is the ideal family?
I took a short walk with a neighbor – a mother of two girls – and we started talking about the “reality” of motherhood. Not too far into the walk, I felt like we were using each other as priests: confessing our shortcomings as mothers, the moments that we feel like we are failing our children, disappointing our partners, half-assing our work, shaming ourselves in grocery stores by our appearances, and all the while carry the motherload (no pun intended) of all emotional baggage: GUILT.
As informal as the conversation was, I felt monumentally renewed. We walked briefly but stood outside her house longer, not ever completely finished with our sentences before the other person started a new topic of complexity: letting your kids be exposed to germs and bacteria to build up their immune system, feeding them ready made toddler food instead of homecooked table food, not child proofing every last inch of your house, and, finally, talking to other mothers about your shadows and imperfections. “It’s isolating,” she repeated more than once, “this whole mom-n-kid thing, it’s isolating. And I don’t care what anyone says – I love my kids. I’d walk through fire for them, they’re my life, but a lot of this just sucks. There. I said it.”
She said it alright: (a lot of times) IT SUCKS.
I’ve got all kinds of data to support any decision I make regarding work vs. staying at home. I’ve got attachment parenting on one hand which allows me to heave one big sigh of relief when I feel all I want to do is comfort and be close to my child. On the other hand, I’ve got the modern whistleblowers to the domestic dream when all I want to do is feel a sense of personal and professional fulfillment which diapers and lullaby songs cannot offer.
The problem with being an independent thinker and cowboy/girl of rebellion is that you often find yourself alone; on the other side of the tracks, walking the opposite direction of mainstream. Some think it’s a lovely walk. Some think confident women make confident mothers. Let me just clarify those misconceptions: NO. It’s not true. It’s confusing and upsetting. I think people assume that once you give birth, you have the knowledge of veteran mothers. Not true. My identity as a mother is still forming and, perhaps even moreso now, I’m uncertain which paths are best for me and even more uncertain about which paths are best for my family.
In my previous life, before I knew the glory of sleeping in a rocker with my arms protectively and instinctively flexed around a child, confidence was my best friend. And now, there’s a perpetual haze of doubt surrounding both my cerebral cortex and ventricular arteries. I cannot walk down a grocery aisle without stopping to rethink what I just picked out for Isaiah. I can’t envision what my professional dreams are without wondering if my dream resides in a good school district.
In this early new year, in a year of unprecedented uncertainty, I have found that the best way to move forward is to abandon, as best as I can, expectation. Comparisons. Measurements. Milestones and charts. Supposed to-s and Shoulds. All of these are poisonous to the healthy mind of motherhood. It’s critical to spend more time narrowing down one’s true desires and formulating a plan to accomplish it than to read one more God awful opinion on what worked for Nancy Jane, Wonder Mom in Jeans, who taught Billy to swim at 18 months and Johnny 23 words in sign language by the time he was 8 months.
Nope. I’m spent on opinion. And while I can never entirely wipe my memory of all that I’ve ingested, a daily reminder that just a few houses down, there is another mother allowing her kid to eat an unearthed cheerio or forgetting for the umpteenth time to dry the wet laundry, gives me a small space of company. Of much needed company.
And the isolation is that much less.
That’s my plan: Run. Run as far away from other people’s experiences as I can. Run.
Then find someone real and talk about what I think. What I’m finding. And then formulate my own rules.