Raising Myself
by AngelaI’ve gone back and forth between entertaining the idea of having children and shunning it completely ever since it first occurred to me that I might someday be a mother. Being the youngest of three whose ages span three separate decades, I’ve got next to zero experience handling kids. If I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t dive in. So raising children has never been too serious a consideration.
There are two sides to the coin, as I see it. On one, you’ve got an adorable, inquisitive, toddling creature who absorbs knowledge like a sponge and has all the potential in the world inside of them. A delicate treasure toting stuffed hippos. Cuddly. On the other side, you’ve got a screaming, stubborn, volatile creature who has a megaphone built into its throat and a propensity to make its mother and father gray-haired, exhausted, and sexless. Red-faced, fists clenched. Not cuddly.
But when I spend enough time admiring well-behaved and glowy-cheeked children in the supermarket as I shop for whichever variations on pasta I will make for that week, I start to say things like, “aw.” Or, “what a cute baby. Look at the baby!” Or, if it’s serious, “I want a son first.”
Now, this last one is a sentiment I’ve held for years. If, in fact, I can get over the idea of labor, epidurals, my maternal family’s multiple brushes with death during childbirth, and the very scarring things I will probably say to my future husband in that window of time between water breaking and infant wailing, not to mention the whole experience of having an alien life in your belly (okay, I know, not belly) for almost a whole year and all the special experiences I’ll have as a super-duper hormonal pregnant lady, and if my future husband can get over those things too…well, if all of those things align, the idea of carrying new life is miraculous. A journey I’ll be blessed to take in the distant future. And I do, in fact, want a son first. Why is that?
I realized it Sunday night while driving home from a friend’s house. We’d had a long discussion about our experiences as artists, our hopes and purposes. Earlier that day, I’d eaten grilled hamburgers with other friends from my church and went swimming. Earlier than that, I’d played djembe for a couple of hours at church, pounding into the congregational music. From the beginning, it was a good day.
But in between each event, I felt like a soda can shaken to the point of explosion. My boyfriend was busy with his own activities, and less communication than usual led to me filling in the blanks with all kinds of misconceptions that were not in my favor. The storm was brewing in my chest. Apparently you don’t need to be pregnant to be super hormonal.
Maybe it was because of this, or maybe my mind just wandered and the dots really aren’t connected. But I realized for the first time, indirectly, why I want a son.
I don’t know how to be a good woman.
I had the idea that I could shape a son into a good man. That I could explain life from a woman’s perspective, and that he would grow to be a defender of the more often marginalized and objectified gender. Or maybe, if I’m honest, that I want to fix everything about men that hurts and agitates me. Zing.
But what on earth would I teach a daughter? I thought through the many ways I feel inadequate, the negative ways that I perceive my body and my soul. The ways I react out of those skewed perceptions. I thought about the way women are told that their power lies in sexuality while advertising mocks us for unending insufficiencies; how those who no longer allure per our culture’s very narrow definitions are discarded. Do I really want to bring another woman into such a raw deal? I wondered about my daughter’s ability to believe in herself when I don’t believe in myself. Could she learn to reflexively fight for her dreams when I decided mine were unrealistic? Could I teach her to be whole and independent when I feel like shards of glass searching for someone or something to glue me back together? And now, on the familiar verge of reacting to imaginary threats and spreading misery, do I really think I can teach someone what love is?
I used to think the fear of a daughter came from my relationship with my own mother, the ways I resented her unfairly, and knowing that my daughter will resent me, too, whether fairly or not. It’s a defeating thought, but even more defeating is the idea that I don’t even know how to be my own person, or one in which I take pride. I’m twenty-four years old. I know there’s no time limit on these things, and life comes in stages, but it’s frustrating to look back and realize I had a better sense of self four years ago than I do now. Life’s parameters were different, sure, and I was in that hopeful and free-spirited period of assembling my future. I chose detours and deconstruction, gradually relinquishing my joy in exchange for empty promises. I still fixate on the idea of retrieving my old self, but besides the fact that my naïveté is overly romanticized, it is an impossibility. I have to rebuild the structure. With energy I don’t fully possess.
A couple of things propel me. First, the memory of how happy I felt one sunny afternoon in college after a dance class. Walking over to my bike, I felt strong and very present. I knew myself and I liked myself. Though I was already in the process of traveling a path I now recognize as a long detour, for one moment, away from addiction, I felt good in my skin.
The second motivation is my relationships. I cannot love people when I do not love myself. I’ve tried, only to watch myself burn bridges in frantic self-protection.
Perhaps someday I’ll be a good mother. Before that, the life I mold is my own. And when the time comes, I hope that my first months of expectancy are filled with the calm of solidly knowing I am a good, steady, and whole woman, even in my imperfection.
September 6th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
You have such a great ability to self-scrutinize, to label and almost defeat yourself by this process when self-awareness begets self-judgment.
Remember that every shard of glass not only reflects but _refracts_ light in its own way. You seek a vessel, a sort of containment for your pieces— some swear they find it in God, others swear they find God when they are able to understand that they, their own container, are that vessel of forgiveness.
Look to your past and acknowledge that you have been fragmented by all these forces you describe— social, familial and artistic hypocrisies. They are not yours to own; they are yours to bless as the sage who is already, intrinsically beyond them. Know that Free Will is a Blessing, a power not only of action but elucidation. Know that you will not repeat the past, know that you can no longer afford to inherit the burdens and the slings and arrows, know that there is unconditional love and support from those and that whence you run. Know that they, too, live with your pain, your self-condemnation, but stand by as you continue to soar far above the seething, the fulminating, the tormenting, into the realm of an angel upon this earth, a mother of children, a joyful noise, a graceful sprite on the dance-floor of eternity.