Variation on the Word Motherhood

My very best friend introduced me to a wonderful poem by Margaret Atwood titled "Variation on the Word Sleep." I loved it so much I asked her to read it at my wedding, but my favorite line goes something like this:

"I would like to give the the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."

Motherhood reminds me of something like this dichotomy. I want to protect my child from the world, yet I realize in time I must simply be the foundation upon which his independence took root--that unnoticed and yet that necessary. To do anything else is to disrupt what I fear is the delicate balance of life.

Another friend of mine recommended a book to help me struggle through the first few weeks of motherhood. I had what the modern day medical institution likes to term "baby blues" but what I would deem to be full on post partum depression mixed with "I have no idea what the hell I'm doing or what's going on" syndrome. The book is called A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk and it was momentous in helping me understand what I was going through was normal even though it felt about as far from normal as anything I've ever experienced. Motherhood in its infancy is messy and terrible, and this book does a pretty good job of highlighting some things you've thought about but never wanted to discuss: http://www.amazon.com/Lifes-Work-On-Becoming-Mother/dp/0312311303/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1384194412&sr=8-2&keywords=a+lifes+work

I've taken the liberty of highlighting some of the most powerful quotes that for me summed up everything in how I was feeling. I still can't say I'm over everything and running on all cylinders. I can however say I'm taking it day by day. I am better than I was and I continue to find balance in this new life. Some of the things she says in her book are horrible. They may even border on taboo in so much that she holds nothing back in her transition into parenthood and what it cost her. I can't say I haven't shared some of her thoughts...but these are the inner struggles of a very personal nature. I still wouldn't change anything.

"If parental love is the blueprint for all loves, it is also a re-enactment, a revision, an investigation of self-love. When I care for my child I revisit my own vulnerability, my primordial helplessness....Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy."

--I am constantly shocked at the capacity of the human heart to love. Just when I feel like I can't possibly love my husband any more than I do I see him interact with our son and I love him all the more for being a wonderful father. The day my son came into this world my heart and the center of gravity of my world suddenly shifted to this tiny creature. It is exciting and frightening to think how much of me is wrapped into this cosmos of my family, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

"There is in truth no utterance that could express the magnitude of the change from woman or man to mother or father, and in the absence of definitive statement the subject becomes peopled with delusions and ghosts, with mis-apprehensions and exaggerations and underestimations, becomes separated from the general drift of human conversation, so that parenthood is not a transition but a defection, a political act."

--I constantly reflect on the change that happens when you become a parent. Suddenly the things that mattered so much before really have no bearing. You also become one of "them"--those individuals who seem obsessed with their children and that's all they can talk about. It isn't all of me, but it has become so much of me that to not talk about it is to not acknowledge the single most important shift in my life.

"Caring for him is like being responsible for the weather, for the grass growing: my privileged relationship with tie has changed, and though these tasks are not yet arduous they already constitute a sort of serfdom, a slavery, in that I am not free to go. It is a humbling change. It represents too a reckoning of my former freedom, my distance from duty. The harness of motherhood chafes my skin, and yet occasionally I find predictable integrity in it too, a freedom of a different sort: from complexity and choice and from reams of unscripted time upon which I used to write my days, bearing the burden of their authorship. It does not escape me that in this last sentiment I am walking over the grave of my sex. The state of motherhood speaks to my native fear of achievement."

"I couldn't spend a Saturday morning reading, that I couldn't stroll unfettered in the warmth of a summer's evening or go swimming or wander down to the pub for a drink. The loss of these things seemed a high, an exorbitant price to pay for the privilege of motherhood; and though much was given back to me in the form of my daughter it was not payment in kind nor even in a different coin, was not in fact recompense of any sort."

--I can't say this prison of my own making isn't uncomfortable. It's like trying on a new skin and realizing nothing about you is the same. The ups are new types of up while the downs are the deepest darkest recesses of hell. Labor and delivery constitute a test of which when passed only charges you head on into a new and complex existence that you aren't prepared for. Nothing prepares you for this.

"I know it is the hardest work I have ever done I worry that my execution of it has been somehow flawed and unauthentic, a burned offering, a botched canvas. Perhaps it is only children who confer upon their parents this meaning I feel myself to lack...I vow to own my feelings of inadequacy and in authenticity. I vow to end this succession, this history of ruler and ruled, here with me."

--The intense primal desire to do well, to have an impact on this precious life and so to give your life meaning is the reason for continuing. These variations on motherhood are the paint that fleshes out the canvas of our existence. Without these depths we are nothing. But they are terrifying in the light of one's internal reflection. I have only begun the great work of shaping not only my son's life, but striving to understand my own.

Denora