Advice

We went to a children's birthday party tonight, for the five-year-old twins who live across the street. And if you've ever been visibly pregnant at a children's party (or visibly pregnant in the presence of parents in general, really) you know how people like to tell you about how much life changes once your child is born. I have come to accept that most people are incredibly well-meaning in their dispensations, but I have observed that many people tend to reflect on their children's early years in terms of battle, sacrifice, and loss. The warnings and admonitions outweigh the endorsements considerably, leaving the impressionable expectant parent either terrified or determined to become the exception to the apparently dismal rule. On few, but meaningful, occasions have parents told me how wonderful parenting is without endless qualifications about sleeplessness, loss of personal time, deterioration or renegotiation of marital and platonic relationships, inability to get work done...

I could go on. For a while.

I so appreciate the parents who encourage us, who tell us about how becoming a parent changed their lives in positive, affirming ways. Parenthood, I am inclined to believe, is not a competition to see who can put up with the most misery.

So I thought I'd share some thoughts that the Adrienne Rich shared with her readers in 1976, in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Rich was the first poet I remember falling in love with, having been given a copy of Diving into the Wreck in eighth grade. I don't remember who gave it to me but it's a collection I continue to return to. Her prose writings on motherhood are no less powerful.

This first rang true instantly, for myself as a woman who has not yet crossed the bridge into motherhood and who has been voraciously devouring any information that can help prepare me for that for which one can never prepare:

"Most of the literature of infant care and psychology has assumed that the process toward individuation is essentially the child's drama, played out against and with a parent or parents who are, for better or worse, givens. Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother, one of those givens, when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself. That calm, sure, unambivalent woman who moved through the pages of the manuals I read seemed as unlike me as an astronaut."

And this, to which I have no experience to compare. Yet it still sits right with me in the face of all this talk about how parenthood is a thief of so many personal things:

"To have borne and reared a child is to have done that thing which patriarchy joins with psychology to render into the definition of femaleness. But also, it can mean the experiencing of one's own body and emotions in a powerful way. We experience not only physical, fleshly changes but the feelings of a change in character. We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be 'innate' in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being. We are also, often to our amazement, flooded with feelings both of love and violence intenser and fiercer than any we have ever known."

And this, from an interview with Marguerite Duras, captured in Tillie Olson, "Writer-Mothers: The Fundamental Situation," in her book Silences (1978):

"Why discourage women from the colossal swallowing up which is the essence of all motherhood; the mad love (for it is there, the love of a mother for her child), and the madness that maternity represents? For her to feel like a man, free from the consequences of maternity, from the fantastic shackles that it implies? That is probably the reason...But to me the historical reasons for the burden and the drudgery seem the most superficial, because for those there is a remedy. And even if men are responsible for this enslaving form of motherhood, is this enough to condemn maternity itself?"

Both of these writers were working in the context of second wave feminism, at a time when husbands were not yet sharing as much in parenting as I fully believe my husband will, or as much as he desires to.

But interestingly, over the last few months I have observed that it is usually women who share the trials and men who talk about how great parenthood can be. This is perhaps because women still feel the obligation, the expectation to fulfill what are supposed to be our "innate" qualities as mothers, that makes women reflect less than favorably upon the whole early childhood experience.

I do not know if I will be different, if I will be able to speak glowingly about my experience as a first-time mother. But I will try, at least, to say the good things first, and to not assume that anyone else's experience will mirror my own, good or bad. Because we all, I think, remain as individual as parents as we are as people, as unformed and unsure and yearning, and we all need encouragement.

My enduring thanks go out to one of my graduate student colleagues, a man who has two kids, who wrote to me in an email: "I always tell parents-to-be that raising a kid is half as hard and twice as fun as parents make it out to be. Everyone just likes to scare new parents. So don't listen to those people. You will have a ball." Thanks, Jody.