Which is not to say that I'm entirely over the old fat, though that would be terrific. It's just that now, the yardstick by which I measure myself and am found simultaneously inadequate and excessive is a newer, lonelier one.
Before I had my son, I was so afraid of losing my pregnancy that I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how I would be as a mom, about how one goes about being a mom. This is a reflection of my incredible good luck: among the crop of women who don't get pregnant at twenty, there are a lot of us who have more time than they like planning for motherhood as we wait for our bodies or our bank accounts or our monthly income to get with the program.
In my case, though, I lost one pregnancy, did a lot of stuff to avoid thinking about motherhood, found I was pregnant again, and was lucky and/or blessed the second time around. The list of things I did not do when preparing for my baby includes: decorating a nursery; reading a single parenting book; making friends with any other moms, let alone moms of infants. While, so far, these shortcomings don't seem to have seriously compromised my son's well-being, they have all made my life more difficult, to varying degrees.
Hands down, though, the thing I was least prepared for as a mom was this: you just don't matter anymore. The idea of you matters: Moms matter, at least, when they are screwing up. Moms of all types -- moms who don't read to their kids, moms who breastfeed too long or on demand or not at all, moms who feed their kids McDonald's -- are to adult culture what "fat" girls and "ugly" girls and "slutty" girls were to the seventh grade. But individual women who are mothers are, in and of themselves, totally irrelevant, until and unless it becomes apparent that they are back on the market: a MILF, maybe, or a cougar.
That sounds like I am complaining, which isn't my intention. It's as it should be that my son obscures what was my life, once -- my opinions and ambitions and passions -- because he is more important than they are to me. Given the choice between reading to the children of incarcerated parents or coordinating fundraisers for fistula repair, on the one hand, and dinner-bathtime-story-bed, on the other, I will choose the latter because my life without my child is no life for me, now.
But the first two activities are a positive source of identity and the latter one is not. When I was a tutor, a manager, a program specialist, my identity was comprised in some part by the things I did. But when you are a parent, unless, maybe, you are a stay at home mom, being a mom is, officially, only a small part of who you are, an optional add-on to an identity that is expected to be complete without it.
This is inconvenient on those days -- and there are many -- when you feel like parenting is all you do. You wonder: other parents are parents and also doctors, lawyers, recording engineers. What's wrong with me? Why can't I manage that?
You wonder: my single friends have been over five minutes and, in that time, have identified three needs my child is having that I hadn't managed to meet. What is it I'm doing with my time?
You start to feel a little bit like one of those stay-at-home moms who employs a full time nanny: what is it, exactly, that you do?
I think that that's part of why we have this huge crop of women who are vehemently defensive of the notion of "complementarianism" -- which is, as far as I can see, the twenty-first century reprise of "separate spheres". Because even if someone is telling you that God made men to need respect and validation and made you, as a woman, to give them those things (but not, apparently, vice versa, because men and women are different!) -- if that person is also telling you that the things that have come to dominate your life, the diapers and sleep training and trips to museums your kids don't yet care about, are uniquely valuable, are legitimate life's works, you will listen.
Honestly, it's okay with me that my opinions, goals, and all the things I thought I'd contribute to the world are no longer The Point. It's hard, yes: When my husband comes home and talks about his job and I see that he is good at it and that that matters to other people, that is what the kids call "a growing experience". But I think it's a growing experience to which I am particularly suited, since, paradoxically, I think I may be likely to do more good in the world if I am less focused on Who I am and What I Want and What it Means.
However, I would like for motherhood to become as aspect of one's identity that exists less entirely in the negative. I'd like to be able to think of myself as a mom and not preface the word with adjectives like "shitty" or "lousy" -- and while it's true that I struggle to feel good about myself regardless of context, the vocabulary for recognizing the ways in which moms are being good moms, are doing an important job well, is pretty impoverished. I'd like to believe it matters whether or not I read to my son, not just when I fail to do it, but also when I am doing that instead of being out changing the world. I'd like a frame of reference in which mothering is a constructive activity, one worthy of my time and attention -- in which it is as legitimate to do art projects and field trips with my son as it is to do these things with other people's children.
I believe there are spaces for those things to happen, and that a step in balancing the things I cared about before I was a mom with the things I care about now is to find them, so I can rework my own sense of who I am now that I'm not volunteering and working seven days a week. But I feel like we should probably also have more of those spaces for all moms and dads; like creating those spaces might be a more productive use of time that publishing additional lists of Top Parenting Mistakes and If You Did This, Your Kid Would Be Sleep Trained by Now.
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