I know I've been writing a lot about my struggle with an eating disorder/disordered eating and my postpartum biz, but it's helping.
See...these evil voices that tell me I'm worthless until I feel dizzy and empty in my stomach, that I'm a failure if even an inch of belly rolls over the top of my leggings/shorts, that every mouthful I am chewing too quickly and forcing into an already full stomach at night, in front of the fridge, in the dark is making me a shittier person, an uglier person, a person undeserving of success or love, these voices have plagued me since I was 18 years old (which I know is late. Some girls start their horrific self loathing as early as 8 or 9 these days, and are battling full blown eds by the time they hit puberty, that doesn't make my journey less valid, just different. Everyone's journey is different).
Still, it's something a lot of people are talking about now. Which is wonderful. It's hard to let something that thrives on secrecy and shame take over your life if you are constantly talking about it with people and comparing your scars and building each other up and sympathizing with one another.
The body positive movement is really wonderful I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it is helping me a lot, because I am in a place I never thought I'd be.
I'm on the verge, the edge, the tippity tip tip of getting better. Really better, like well enough that I stop caring, stop assessing, stop weighing, balancing, comparing, and hating. I'm really close.
The thing that has helped me get here the most?
Pregnancy.
I know it's so crunchy and hippy and earthy, but truly it was. The need to take care of myself properly, as I hadn't done since I'd been a kid, had never been more important as when it was fostering a new life. Because I couldn't do it just for me. I had to do it for us. And once I started doing it for us, I realized I was also doing it for me, and IT ACTUALLY WASN'T EVEN THAT HARD.
Now, of course, the baby is on the outside, and he's wonderful obviously, but it means i am no longer directly caring for him when I eat, so it's trickier. The voices...they try.
I was doing pretty well for the first four months. My body bore the obvious signs of childbirth: a soft tummy with a pouch of extra skin, humungous, hard, sore boobs that leaked and sprayed and generally sought to embarrass me whenever I left the house, deep dark under eye circles, hair loss, and a few other tasteful things I shall not mention.
Because everything was a mess, I was okay with it looking a mess. I ate when I was hungry, and I ate what I wanted. I craved carbs a lot, so I ate a lot of bread and pastry. I also ate a lot of fruits and veggies and nuts and cheese. My body was gearing up for breastfeeding armageddon, I let it do what it needed to do.
Then colic came. Colic hit the babe so hard we started frantically trying to find the cause. The doctor said it was most likely something his undeveloped colon couldn't handle in my breastmilk, so I started trying to cut out things that could be making my baby scream and cry and writhe in agony at all hours.
See where the trouble began?
Where it always does.
Cutting things out.
When I first began my disorder, I had read an expose on factory farming and I went from comfortably omnivorous to vegan in the space of an afternoon.
This was in 2001, before almond milk, before Quorn, before kale and quinoa, gluten free, quest bars, Siggi's dairy and all the trendy trendy treaty ways to be healthy we have right now. I had a college meal plan, and the only thing that was vegan was the salad bar. I could eat tofu for protein. They didn't even have peanut butter at the toast station.
But you know that story.
So fast forward to colic times.
I'm healthily omnivorous again, but I have, like, a lot of baggage.
I cut coffee out of my diet first.
No change.
Then dairy.
Then peanuts.
Finally, in the last ditch effort before we started trying prescriptions, my pediatrician told me to cut out wheat.
So I cut wheat out of my diet, and the colic went away.
Like magic.
And then, I started to lose weight.
It was the losing weight that first made the voices come back. They didn't even speak at first, just lurked, loitering in the shadows when I realized there was nothing at the potluck barbecue I could eat except naked hot dogs and watermelon. They skulked in my periphery when Bob ordered a pizza and I had to get another salad with chicken.
I replaced the cravings for toast with peanut butter and oats. I replaced the pastries with trail mix and yoghurt. I would see an eclair and I would reach for a banana.
Then, one day, I looked in the mirror and I just knew.
Between breastfeeding my little baby, and this new complete lack of wheat, I was losing weight.
And not in the slow way that my body had been shedding the baby pounds. I was losing it in the way that most people who are trying to lose weight do.
Then one day, the voices started whispering.
I got on the scale.
I saw a number there I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. A non-ed number, but the number that I had seen on the scale after a couple of weeks of being vegan that started me thinking maybe I liked this whole "structured eating lifestyle". It's my gateway number. This is the number that I see that makes my brain think..."Well shit, just start counting calories again and you could lose that extra ten pounds and look like a super model. It's not that hard. You've done it before."
Except I haven't heard those voices in a long ass time.
I swandove from restricting into BED really quickly. I was 20 years old at my lowest weight, the one at which I stopped menstruating for a year, tried this new fun activity called "passing out frequently", and had a large black scab on my spine from where I spent two hours every morning doing 1800 sit ups and crunches on a towel on my dorm room floor.
Then I fell off the wagon.
In the space of a year, I went from there to eating entire jars of peanut butter at 3am using frosted animal crackers as spoons. I went through a truly low phase where I stole food to binge on because I wouldn't buy it. I rationalized in the daytime that if I didn't buy the "trigger foods" then I wouldn't have them to binge on, but then I would see my friends with their care packages from loving parents full of sugar cookies and fudge, stuff I hadn't allowed myself to touch for ages, and those lovely friends would say, "oh sure, if you want some oreos just come by and grab a couple." In their minds they thought I'd stop in and chat to them in the afternoon and eat a couple of cookies (like a normal person). Instead I'd wait until my stomach, hollow and creaking from restricting all day, was so loud and insistent that I went into psychotic survival mode. With nothing to eat of my own, I would creep into these friends' rooms and steal first one handful then two, then the whole package came out into the hall with me, sometimes a bathroom stall, where I would stuff, tears running down my face, hatred coursing through my veins, the voices screaming in my ears, until there was nothing left.
It was such a slippery slope.
I could recuperate for months. I went on trips, lost ten, twenty pounds, then rapidly gained it back. I stole bulk packages of almonds and cashews from a family I stayed with in Australia. They were so kind as to let me sleep in their daughter's room while she was abroad, and I repaid them by binging in their kitchen until they actually started asking me where things were disappearing to. The shame I felt during that time period was unlike anything I've ever been able to describe.
I moved to this city and to that one, and then I got into a loving relationship, and the happiness I experienced spurred the longest period of restricting (because I thought restriction=happiness) I had since I was in college. At 25 I weighed my gateway weight, and then I lost ten more pounds without even trying. Instead of binging at night to make up for my restricting, I was having sex, which was so much better.
Then the newness of the relationship wore off. Life crept in around the edges, and before I knew it, we were living together in a new town, worried about money and jobs and saving up enough to get married. I was experiencing that mid-twenties let down that all liberal arts grads have.
(Wait, you mean nobody's just going to HAND me a book deal?)
And soon the voices were back.
I had a few blow up fights with my partner, when he discovered the empty peanut butter jars I hid under the bed.
He'd buy ice cream, which I'd finish and then scrambled to replace before he noticed it was gone. It was impossible. I was a bad liar. He was shocked, then concerned, then when I refused to talk to him about it, he was angry.
Then I started working at a bakery again, and it was easy to hide my disorder.
See, you don't have time to eat when you're working. You run run run and work work work, and the coffee is free and the camaraderie is satisfying so you don't even think about food for eight hours.
Then it's time to go home, and you've got a bag of day old pastry and bread that "you couldn't stand to see go to waste" or "will totally send to work with my fiancee", and you sit down at midnight, and you eat eat eat until you realize you can't breathe.
It took eight years for me to get to a place where I sort of ate normally.
I still fell into restrictive eating habits during the day and binge habits at night, but the big binges, the really bad ones, got fewer and further between, and I stopped cycling at badly as before.
Still, i had almost no self control around pastry and bread that I brought home from work because it was free, and being a poor kid, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste.
And if there were brownies in the house, I couldn't just eat one. I had to eat them all.
I gained weight.
I tried to be okay with it.
I called it giving up and giving in.
Then I got pregnant.
So here we are.
The gate-weight staring up at me from the scale, and I feel all the voices rushing at me.
Cheering me to lose more, to restrict more, to hide and shrink and wither.
And alongside them the others telling me to pig out blindly, eat until I can't breathe, nobody will judge me, I just had a baby, I've got wiggle room, I deserve to because I'm exhausted and I feel like shit all the time anyway...
Only, I've worked so hard to get here.
Not the weight here.
The brain here.
The health here.
I've worked so hard to make a healthy baby, to make a child who I want to grow up with absolutely no self consciousness about his body.
Already he's growing faster than lots of kids his age. He's 20lbs at 7 months and people remark about his rolls and his size. It's all positive, but it frightens me. I don't like that they're already saying this sort of thing.
What if I have a fat kid?
Do I want him to hate himself? Do I want him to judge his worth based solely on his waist size?
When I picture my baby hating any part of himself I want to burn cities to the ground.
I worked so hard to make him, and he's perfect. Nobody is allowed to make him feel anything less than perfect.
And there it is folks.
There's the voice that's louder than anything else in my head right now.
The voice I am clinging to for dear life.
Love.
The love voice.
The no nonsense, don't bullshit me, I know you voice that I couldn't tap into for fifteen years has finally set up a bullhorn and she is here to stay.
Get the fuck off the scale, she says.
Who gives a shit if your pants are too big this week, they're gonna be too small again and then too big again, just be glad they don't have spit up on them, she says.
Eat the fucking pudding, she says.
Eat the fucking fruit salad, she says.
Are you drinking enough water? she says.
Did you get enough sleep? she says.
Are you doing what's best for the baby? she says.
And I can answer her yes. Yes I am. Yes I will. Yes I know what's important now. Both of us. Yes him, but both of us. All of us.
Instead of shoo-ing the voices back into the shadows, I put them in a cage, out in the daylight, and we look at them, this love voice and I. We refuse to blink. We stare them down. We don't let them speak, but we refuse to pretend they don't exist, and then we eat anyway. We love anyway.
We put one foot in front of the other on this journey, and we keep talking about it, because that's how we keep them locked in place, and how we don't let them think they know me anymore.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Prescription Time Killer
Hello,
My name is Jess Mann, and I have a problem with things being beyond my control.
I don't know when it started...perhaps when I was eight and we moved away from everything that was familiar and normal to the other side of the entire world and never went back...
Not to knock my parents or anything. They did what they thought was right at the time. They did the best that they knew how to do. I often think they attribute every bad thing that's ever happened to our family to the "big move" but I wouldn't be who I am if I wasn't where I am, and there would be no Beard, no Bastian, nope. I'm very glad we left Australia exactly when and how we did.
That doesn't change the fact that it was devastating at the time, and I had absolutely no control over what was happening to me, my family, or my life.
So I guess I save a few bucks on therapy or something?
I know for a fact that it doesn't take an earth shattering event to give people control issues. I know tons of people with relatively delightful, mundane lives, who are constantly anxious and controlling to the point where it has interfered with their everyday business. It's all about perspective and inclination. We all have coping mechanisms. Some of us like to be in charge, okay?
Right now my house is under quarantine.
Sometime last week, the dreaded summer cold made an entrance into my house, and both my boys are in the thick of it right now.
It's a doozy, so just skip it if you can.
The Beard first started feeling lousy on Tuesday morning. He complained of a headache, and over the course of the day, he kept saying he was super tired and achy.
Welcome to Sick City. Population: Us.
Since, through some psychotic miracle (I might have to chalk this one up to breastfeeding or some old pact with the devil I forgot about) I am the lone non-effluvia spewing family member. Of course this means, I have taken on the essential duties of nurse thing.
I cancelled my Saturday writing class and had to renegotiate when my current project is due for my contracting job. Let it never be said I don't have my priorities in order.
This means every day, since Wednesday has been a weird haze of activities with only echoes of the usual routines.
I make coffee (this is standard) and then I make soup and tea.
I walk the baby to sleep, feed the baby, dance/play/exhaust the baby because somehow, even while snotty and coughy and sneezy, he is also active as fuck.
I walk to the store and buy tissues and snacks because when we are sick we like treats. I say we, because even though I have yet to come down with this, I like any excuse to buy peanut m&ms.
I make the dinner and I do the dishes.
I cut lemons and grate ginger into hot water with gobs of honey.
I walk the dog, take the baby's temperature, hoover all the fluids out of the baby's nose, and then stay up with the baby when he's coughing and congested and can't nurse properly because his little nose is blocked, so we hoover it out again, and he screams and cries, and then we sleep a little more, before getting up and making the coffee again.
These are jobs i do gladly. I list them in my head and I shuffle and reorganize and prioritize them each day to make it feel as though I am contributing.
I pump breastmilk and count seconds in my head on each side. 600 seconds is ten minutes which means I can switch.
I started doing this when Bastian and I were first learning how to breastfeed, because staring into the unblinking eye of the television for hours was making me feel crazy but not as crazy as staring into the darkness did.
Here's the thing.
Counting seconds, making pancakes, juicing ginger, running the shower for steam, and greasing up noses with vaseline does nothing for the cold.
Walking 4 miles so Bastian sleeps for an hour and serving shots of nyquil so Beard sleeps at night does nothing for the cold.
Reading Helen Oyeyemi aloud at three in the morning to my son while he nurses and stopping ever paragraph to make sure he's breathing does nothing for the cold.
The only thing that makes the cold go away is time.
And according to my mother, who is about three days ahead of us with this bug, we have another 24 hours before we see an improvement.
This is a ten day bitch y'all, so if you can dodge it, I highly recommend that you do.
I remain ineffectively active.
Measuring my days in increments of 600 seconds the way when I had an eating disorder I used to measure my day's worth of calories into 600 of them too.
Sure, they're old demons, but they're the friendly kind, the kind that won't mean I shed thirty pounds in two months and scare my family come Christmas.
I have always liked counting things.
I liked counting the steps from the school bus stop to my front door. I liked counting the number of times I brushed one side's worth of teeth and then doing the other side the same number of times so they'd be even.
It gives the world order and makes me feel that even though I have absolutely no control over what is happening, I am the master of managing my time.
As an adult, I can recognize when this stuff gets unhealthy. Like when I start totting up calories unconsciously, and I need to step back from the blender or the sink or the fridge and take a couple of deep breaths, and shake my head like it's an etch-a-sketch that can be reset.
There really is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can't help, especially when it's that i can't help people I love. I almost wish I was sick too because then I'd have the excuse of not being up to it, but somehow, I am not, and I am not helping either. I am merely shepherding the two physical bodies that are acting as hosts to this plague.
I use the term plague because I'm running out of synonyms for "sick" not because anyone is actually bleeding from their eyeballs.
Even writing this blog is part of the equation.
Bastian is taking his midmorning nurse. He seems to feel better today. The fluid is moving more easily out of his nasal passages. His activity levels are high. He's laughing and snuggling and remembering that he's also teething right now and attempting to shove handfuls of my hair in his mouth.
I should be working on my contracting project, catching up on emails and researching.
But I just need a minute more to gaze ahead at the activities that make up the day.
I've already made the coffee, the breakfast, the batch of vegan, wheat free, chocolate, zucchini muffins. I've walked the dog, done the dishes, fed the Beard his pancakes, played with the baby, and then settled him down on the boppy cushion and counted 600 seconds on one side.
Now I need a minute to refocus, to remind myself that there are ten and a half hours before I put Bastian down for bed tonight, and in those ten and a half hours, there are 63 increments of 600 seconds, and I will need to be doing something for each one or I will start to feel crazy and awful that everyone I love in this house is miserable, and there really is nothing I can do but kill time.
My name is Jess Mann, and I have a problem with things being beyond my control.
I don't know when it started...perhaps when I was eight and we moved away from everything that was familiar and normal to the other side of the entire world and never went back...
Not to knock my parents or anything. They did what they thought was right at the time. They did the best that they knew how to do. I often think they attribute every bad thing that's ever happened to our family to the "big move" but I wouldn't be who I am if I wasn't where I am, and there would be no Beard, no Bastian, nope. I'm very glad we left Australia exactly when and how we did.
That doesn't change the fact that it was devastating at the time, and I had absolutely no control over what was happening to me, my family, or my life.
So I guess I save a few bucks on therapy or something?
I know for a fact that it doesn't take an earth shattering event to give people control issues. I know tons of people with relatively delightful, mundane lives, who are constantly anxious and controlling to the point where it has interfered with their everyday business. It's all about perspective and inclination. We all have coping mechanisms. Some of us like to be in charge, okay?
Right now my house is under quarantine.
Sometime last week, the dreaded summer cold made an entrance into my house, and both my boys are in the thick of it right now.
It's a doozy, so just skip it if you can.
The Beard first started feeling lousy on Tuesday morning. He complained of a headache, and over the course of the day, he kept saying he was super tired and achy.
Welcome to Sick City. Population: Us.
Since, through some psychotic miracle (I might have to chalk this one up to breastfeeding or some old pact with the devil I forgot about) I am the lone non-effluvia spewing family member. Of course this means, I have taken on the essential duties of nurse thing.
I cancelled my Saturday writing class and had to renegotiate when my current project is due for my contracting job. Let it never be said I don't have my priorities in order.
This means every day, since Wednesday has been a weird haze of activities with only echoes of the usual routines.
I make coffee (this is standard) and then I make soup and tea.
I walk the baby to sleep, feed the baby, dance/play/exhaust the baby because somehow, even while snotty and coughy and sneezy, he is also active as fuck.
I walk to the store and buy tissues and snacks because when we are sick we like treats. I say we, because even though I have yet to come down with this, I like any excuse to buy peanut m&ms.
I make the dinner and I do the dishes.
I cut lemons and grate ginger into hot water with gobs of honey.
I walk the dog, take the baby's temperature, hoover all the fluids out of the baby's nose, and then stay up with the baby when he's coughing and congested and can't nurse properly because his little nose is blocked, so we hoover it out again, and he screams and cries, and then we sleep a little more, before getting up and making the coffee again.
These are jobs i do gladly. I list them in my head and I shuffle and reorganize and prioritize them each day to make it feel as though I am contributing.
I pump breastmilk and count seconds in my head on each side. 600 seconds is ten minutes which means I can switch.
I started doing this when Bastian and I were first learning how to breastfeed, because staring into the unblinking eye of the television for hours was making me feel crazy but not as crazy as staring into the darkness did.
Here's the thing.
Counting seconds, making pancakes, juicing ginger, running the shower for steam, and greasing up noses with vaseline does nothing for the cold.
Walking 4 miles so Bastian sleeps for an hour and serving shots of nyquil so Beard sleeps at night does nothing for the cold.
Reading Helen Oyeyemi aloud at three in the morning to my son while he nurses and stopping ever paragraph to make sure he's breathing does nothing for the cold.
The only thing that makes the cold go away is time.
And according to my mother, who is about three days ahead of us with this bug, we have another 24 hours before we see an improvement.
This is a ten day bitch y'all, so if you can dodge it, I highly recommend that you do.
I remain ineffectively active.
Measuring my days in increments of 600 seconds the way when I had an eating disorder I used to measure my day's worth of calories into 600 of them too.
Sure, they're old demons, but they're the friendly kind, the kind that won't mean I shed thirty pounds in two months and scare my family come Christmas.
I have always liked counting things.
I liked counting the steps from the school bus stop to my front door. I liked counting the number of times I brushed one side's worth of teeth and then doing the other side the same number of times so they'd be even.
It gives the world order and makes me feel that even though I have absolutely no control over what is happening, I am the master of managing my time.
As an adult, I can recognize when this stuff gets unhealthy. Like when I start totting up calories unconsciously, and I need to step back from the blender or the sink or the fridge and take a couple of deep breaths, and shake my head like it's an etch-a-sketch that can be reset.
There really is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can't help, especially when it's that i can't help people I love. I almost wish I was sick too because then I'd have the excuse of not being up to it, but somehow, I am not, and I am not helping either. I am merely shepherding the two physical bodies that are acting as hosts to this plague.
I use the term plague because I'm running out of synonyms for "sick" not because anyone is actually bleeding from their eyeballs.
Even writing this blog is part of the equation.
Bastian is taking his midmorning nurse. He seems to feel better today. The fluid is moving more easily out of his nasal passages. His activity levels are high. He's laughing and snuggling and remembering that he's also teething right now and attempting to shove handfuls of my hair in his mouth.
I should be working on my contracting project, catching up on emails and researching.
But I just need a minute more to gaze ahead at the activities that make up the day.
I've already made the coffee, the breakfast, the batch of vegan, wheat free, chocolate, zucchini muffins. I've walked the dog, done the dishes, fed the Beard his pancakes, played with the baby, and then settled him down on the boppy cushion and counted 600 seconds on one side.
Now I need a minute to refocus, to remind myself that there are ten and a half hours before I put Bastian down for bed tonight, and in those ten and a half hours, there are 63 increments of 600 seconds, and I will need to be doing something for each one or I will start to feel crazy and awful that everyone I love in this house is miserable, and there really is nothing I can do but kill time.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
The Motherload of Guilt
Last night...around 2am when I was getting an extra feed and pump into the babesauce, I read an article on facebook a good friend brought to my attention.
The article was titled Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid. And the link to it is here:
http://velamag.com/mother-writer-monster-maid/
It's important.
Any woman who is planning on having a baby, or recently had a baby, or had a baby a while ago (like twenty years ago) needs to read this.
I don't agree with everything Rufi Thorpe says about her struggle to find balance and temperance between being a mother and a writer (and when I reference writer in my posts anywhere I always think of subbing in the term "artist" or "creative individual" because to me, while very different, the struggle applies to all three), however, I still think it's really important that she says it, and that it is seen.
Hey guys...is that feminism? I think I'm getting the hang of it!
The thing about motherhood is that it no longer has any defined borders. It used to be (a few generations ago), that the mother was the Lady of the House. She took care of all things domestic, cooking, cleaning, laundry, by default because she was at home with the baby(ies). The Gentleman of the House was doing his 40 hours a week to provide and so she did hers. At least that was the theory.
Of course by now, we all know that most of the housewives who had sparkling homes, Good Housekeeping meals on the table seven nights a week, and bouncing children, were also nursing serious depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. They didn't work 40 hours a week, they worked 140, and they were told over and over how good they had it.
Then the 1960's second wave feminism movement shook things up a little. There was a wee backlash, but there was a lot of hippie mothering, a return to intuition so to speak, and a reclamation of rights (some of which have yet to be won a solid fifty odd years later wtf).
But in general a lot of women shed their restrictive undergarments and mindsets and started trusting each other more than the menfolk who were oppressing them (sorry dudes, I know a lot of you are cool now, but some of you aren't, and the majority of you back then weren't). They dared to ask the question: "Why don't I want what I've been told to want?"
Then the 80's gave us the Career Woman/Mother. She and her shoulder pads could have it all!
I recall in my early childhood watching the film Baby Boom with powerhouse Diane Keaton do corporate battle against the super slimy, ultra sexy James Spader. She was booted from her fancy job because she got pregnant. She lost everything, and had a baby out of wedlock (SHOCK! AWE!). She went to the country and began making organic baby food and used her business wits to turn her bitty backwoods project into a major business!
I thought she was just the coolest.
Of course she was a fictional character who could montage her way through the hard parts (woodchopping, failed recipes, baby puke on everything), which didn't help base her experience in reality very well, but just the same, women in the 80's were supposed to be finally liberated enough to do the mothering and the careering and dammit why weren't they happy yet?
The early 21st century has seen a kind of weird split in motherhood.
There's the super mindful twenty and thirty something women who are consciously deciding not to have children for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons.
There's the goopy yoga moms who are some weird meta housewife, pseudo career mother hybrids who have introduced the *shudder* Lifestyle Blog as means of income which is basically profiting from competitive motherhood.
And finally there are the Creative Individual mothers who have always been feminist and fairly independent, but who answered the maternal calling, had a baby, and now are struggling with the borderless, amorphous, never ending role of mother that seeps into all the carefully separate and managed visions of self we had always had before.
Thorpe laments her loss of time for self, but follows it immediately with rushes of maternal guilt for not being satisfied with her role as mother. She simultaneously resents her husband for not intuiting that if he doesn't pick his dirty undies off the floor of the bathroom that the foul retrieval falls to her, and loves him for helping support her and their family. She mourns the loss of her ability to travel alone, or write uninterrupted for hours, but then self flagellates because she's the one who chose to breastfeed her child, and she's the one who decided to be a writer, a vocation which she reasonably (read: pre-baby) assumed she could do from home while bringing up a child or two.
Man...
The shit I thought I would be able to get done while at home with my child. What the fuck happened to all that I wonder?
Here is the crux of the problem I have with Thorpe's article.
She never forgives herself for her presumptions. She never lets herself off the hook for her choices.
I am very anti-competitive motherhood. We, as women, have been programmed by the media to compare ourselves, our lives, and our journeys with each other every step of the way, and that is pure poison.
Thorpe has never done this before!
I've never done this before!
Just as every baby is different (which is a mantra I repeat to myself almost hourly), every motherhood is different.
My mother, for instance, moved to Australia with my Dad after knowing him for 6 months in 1979. When she had their first child (me), she quit her job at a magazine, and stayed home. My Dad expanded his journalistic career and traveled around the world. Sometimes he was gone for months, leaving my mother with me and later, my sisters, to take care of house and home with no family for thousands of miles to help her. My mother held two degrees, one in English and one in Education.
My father had quit school at 16.
Later, after we had moved to the states to avoid financial difficulties, which didn't work, my father was the writer staying home to take care of the children and my mother taught and brought home at least 50% of the household's income, often more.
This was in the mid 90's, when single motherhood and the plight of the divorcee was in vogue.
The house was volatile to say the least. My parents tried to split things evenly, tried to treat each other as partners, each with an equal stake in the future of the family, but there were still super shit times. Times when my sisters and I would come home from school and be forced to walk on tiptoe so as not to disturb my father, plugging away at his novel in the office. On weekends, we did all the housework together, and after, my mother would have to grade papers, and often Dad caught up on more writing so we were ordered to occupy ourselves, and keep quiet. Rarely did we have the luxury of inviting friends over due to the imposition it would be on "the work".
So I ask you this, creative mothers:
Are you as miserable as you think you are?
There's no question about parenthood being difficult.
It's one of the hardest things we can do in life. There's no lack of preparation for it, and yet it still knocks the wind right out of us, out of our sails, out of our plans, out of our perfectly perfected chaotic little worlds.
But does compromising our creativity so that we can be good parents and then compromising our maternal ideals make us bad people?
Fuck no.
I think the biggest thing that Thorpe ignored in her article was the guilt.
She talked about feeling it.
She talked about why she felt it.
But she never talked about how it's okay to let it go.
There are some fundamental things we should avoid...
Like hitting our kids, forgetting to feed them, ignoring them constantly.
You know, big shit.
But everything else?
You've got to have a little bit of a sliding scale.
If you don't take care of your creative outlets, you will be a poorer parent for it.
Believe me, I know.
From my own struggles to finish my degree while breastfeeding at all hours of the night to my memories of my Dad, who could be sour and cranky and hard to deal with demanding silence and isolation for his process for a month or so, but then exploding with energy and excitement after that month. Between novels and school years my parents took us on road trips up and down the east coast. They taught us how to plant and tend to an enormous vegetable garden every summer, and they fostered in each of us a deeply important love of books and reading.
So mothers of all walks of life, you have to accept it.
This is a marathon.
We are not sprinting a cute little 5 k where people throw colorful dust on us or hand us glowsticks to make it more fun and feel more accomplished.
This is an ugly, all weather, some injuries acquired 26.2 mile slog, and there are going to be dark moments when we want to give up, when we crawl on our hands and knees and taste blood, but there are also going to be miles that are so beautiful we forget we're even running. We forget that this is a really hard thing we're doing.
The point is, it will end someday.
The children inevitably grow up.
They move out.
You are left with a long stretch of time ahead of you to fill with creativity. If you have a relatively healthy constitution, you will probably have a good thirty to forty years after your children have left home to do your art.
So forgive yourself for not being able to juggle it gracefully right now.
Forgive yourself for plunking your kid in the playpen for an hour with a toy you despise, a snack not recommended by the almighty Gwenyth Paltrow, or (gasp) a screen to keep them occupied while you shower, do laundry, make your art, or just sit in your kitchen floor and deep throat a sleeve of ritz crackers and a wedge of brie.
It's okay.
You're doing a great job.
I really really mean it.
And you will make room for your art as best you can, and your kids won't be fucked up for the solitude. If anything they will learn how to entertain themselves by themselves, a skill that I don't see in a lot of adults these days.
We're all gonna be okay.
The article was titled Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid. And the link to it is here:
http://velamag.com/mother-writer-monster-maid/
It's important.
Any woman who is planning on having a baby, or recently had a baby, or had a baby a while ago (like twenty years ago) needs to read this.
I don't agree with everything Rufi Thorpe says about her struggle to find balance and temperance between being a mother and a writer (and when I reference writer in my posts anywhere I always think of subbing in the term "artist" or "creative individual" because to me, while very different, the struggle applies to all three), however, I still think it's really important that she says it, and that it is seen.
Hey guys...is that feminism? I think I'm getting the hang of it!
The thing about motherhood is that it no longer has any defined borders. It used to be (a few generations ago), that the mother was the Lady of the House. She took care of all things domestic, cooking, cleaning, laundry, by default because she was at home with the baby(ies). The Gentleman of the House was doing his 40 hours a week to provide and so she did hers. At least that was the theory.
Of course by now, we all know that most of the housewives who had sparkling homes, Good Housekeeping meals on the table seven nights a week, and bouncing children, were also nursing serious depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. They didn't work 40 hours a week, they worked 140, and they were told over and over how good they had it.
Then the 1960's second wave feminism movement shook things up a little. There was a wee backlash, but there was a lot of hippie mothering, a return to intuition so to speak, and a reclamation of rights (some of which have yet to be won a solid fifty odd years later wtf).
But in general a lot of women shed their restrictive undergarments and mindsets and started trusting each other more than the menfolk who were oppressing them (sorry dudes, I know a lot of you are cool now, but some of you aren't, and the majority of you back then weren't). They dared to ask the question: "Why don't I want what I've been told to want?"
Then the 80's gave us the Career Woman/Mother. She and her shoulder pads could have it all!
I recall in my early childhood watching the film Baby Boom with powerhouse Diane Keaton do corporate battle against the super slimy, ultra sexy James Spader. She was booted from her fancy job because she got pregnant. She lost everything, and had a baby out of wedlock (SHOCK! AWE!). She went to the country and began making organic baby food and used her business wits to turn her bitty backwoods project into a major business!
I thought she was just the coolest.
Of course she was a fictional character who could montage her way through the hard parts (woodchopping, failed recipes, baby puke on everything), which didn't help base her experience in reality very well, but just the same, women in the 80's were supposed to be finally liberated enough to do the mothering and the careering and dammit why weren't they happy yet?
The early 21st century has seen a kind of weird split in motherhood.
There's the super mindful twenty and thirty something women who are consciously deciding not to have children for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons.
There's the goopy yoga moms who are some weird meta housewife, pseudo career mother hybrids who have introduced the *shudder* Lifestyle Blog as means of income which is basically profiting from competitive motherhood.
And finally there are the Creative Individual mothers who have always been feminist and fairly independent, but who answered the maternal calling, had a baby, and now are struggling with the borderless, amorphous, never ending role of mother that seeps into all the carefully separate and managed visions of self we had always had before.
Thorpe laments her loss of time for self, but follows it immediately with rushes of maternal guilt for not being satisfied with her role as mother. She simultaneously resents her husband for not intuiting that if he doesn't pick his dirty undies off the floor of the bathroom that the foul retrieval falls to her, and loves him for helping support her and their family. She mourns the loss of her ability to travel alone, or write uninterrupted for hours, but then self flagellates because she's the one who chose to breastfeed her child, and she's the one who decided to be a writer, a vocation which she reasonably (read: pre-baby) assumed she could do from home while bringing up a child or two.
Man...
The shit I thought I would be able to get done while at home with my child. What the fuck happened to all that I wonder?
Here is the crux of the problem I have with Thorpe's article.
She never forgives herself for her presumptions. She never lets herself off the hook for her choices.
I am very anti-competitive motherhood. We, as women, have been programmed by the media to compare ourselves, our lives, and our journeys with each other every step of the way, and that is pure poison.
Thorpe has never done this before!
I've never done this before!
Just as every baby is different (which is a mantra I repeat to myself almost hourly), every motherhood is different.
My mother, for instance, moved to Australia with my Dad after knowing him for 6 months in 1979. When she had their first child (me), she quit her job at a magazine, and stayed home. My Dad expanded his journalistic career and traveled around the world. Sometimes he was gone for months, leaving my mother with me and later, my sisters, to take care of house and home with no family for thousands of miles to help her. My mother held two degrees, one in English and one in Education.
My father had quit school at 16.
Later, after we had moved to the states to avoid financial difficulties, which didn't work, my father was the writer staying home to take care of the children and my mother taught and brought home at least 50% of the household's income, often more.
This was in the mid 90's, when single motherhood and the plight of the divorcee was in vogue.
The house was volatile to say the least. My parents tried to split things evenly, tried to treat each other as partners, each with an equal stake in the future of the family, but there were still super shit times. Times when my sisters and I would come home from school and be forced to walk on tiptoe so as not to disturb my father, plugging away at his novel in the office. On weekends, we did all the housework together, and after, my mother would have to grade papers, and often Dad caught up on more writing so we were ordered to occupy ourselves, and keep quiet. Rarely did we have the luxury of inviting friends over due to the imposition it would be on "the work".
So I ask you this, creative mothers:
Are you as miserable as you think you are?
There's no question about parenthood being difficult.
It's one of the hardest things we can do in life. There's no lack of preparation for it, and yet it still knocks the wind right out of us, out of our sails, out of our plans, out of our perfectly perfected chaotic little worlds.
But does compromising our creativity so that we can be good parents and then compromising our maternal ideals make us bad people?
Fuck no.
I think the biggest thing that Thorpe ignored in her article was the guilt.
She talked about feeling it.
She talked about why she felt it.
But she never talked about how it's okay to let it go.
There are some fundamental things we should avoid...
Like hitting our kids, forgetting to feed them, ignoring them constantly.
You know, big shit.
But everything else?
You've got to have a little bit of a sliding scale.
If you don't take care of your creative outlets, you will be a poorer parent for it.
Believe me, I know.
From my own struggles to finish my degree while breastfeeding at all hours of the night to my memories of my Dad, who could be sour and cranky and hard to deal with demanding silence and isolation for his process for a month or so, but then exploding with energy and excitement after that month. Between novels and school years my parents took us on road trips up and down the east coast. They taught us how to plant and tend to an enormous vegetable garden every summer, and they fostered in each of us a deeply important love of books and reading.
So mothers of all walks of life, you have to accept it.
This is a marathon.
We are not sprinting a cute little 5 k where people throw colorful dust on us or hand us glowsticks to make it more fun and feel more accomplished.
This is an ugly, all weather, some injuries acquired 26.2 mile slog, and there are going to be dark moments when we want to give up, when we crawl on our hands and knees and taste blood, but there are also going to be miles that are so beautiful we forget we're even running. We forget that this is a really hard thing we're doing.
The point is, it will end someday.
The children inevitably grow up.
They move out.
You are left with a long stretch of time ahead of you to fill with creativity. If you have a relatively healthy constitution, you will probably have a good thirty to forty years after your children have left home to do your art.
So forgive yourself for not being able to juggle it gracefully right now.
Forgive yourself for plunking your kid in the playpen for an hour with a toy you despise, a snack not recommended by the almighty Gwenyth Paltrow, or (gasp) a screen to keep them occupied while you shower, do laundry, make your art, or just sit in your kitchen floor and deep throat a sleeve of ritz crackers and a wedge of brie.
It's okay.
You're doing a great job.
I really really mean it.
And you will make room for your art as best you can, and your kids won't be fucked up for the solitude. If anything they will learn how to entertain themselves by themselves, a skill that I don't see in a lot of adults these days.
We're all gonna be okay.
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