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.
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