"No Dance Moms," I told her. "No Toddlers in Tiaras!"
"It's about people with no arms,"she replied.
"Is that the new thing?" I asked."Is that the cutting edge? Should I have made sure you were born with no arms?"
She smiled. "Yeah, Mom, what the fluff*, why did I have to have arms?"
"I've failed you. We could have had a reality TV show!"
I'm rarely that irreverent. I don't know if she caught that I was funning on reality TV at the expense of people with no arms, but she's a sharp kid, and she knows me well.
She said, "Next is Four Weddings. I love this show--they go to each other's weddings and rate them, and who ever wins gets to have their husband drive up in a limo and they go on a honeymoon somewhere amazing."
"Weddings are overblown enough, now there is a competition about it? Starting their married lives obsessed with this one big stupid party? Who agrees to this foolishness?" (Yes, I really talk like that.)
She pulled the sleeping bag she had dragged out of the closet under her chin, eyes fixed on the TV. She's heard my soapboxing before.
I don't write about my kids much. Raising them is the most important thing I do each day and has changed me profoundly as a person, but I also feel a protectiveness that makes me want to keep them off the page, keep them in their lives and out of my public musings and stories. They are themselves, they are not my vehicles for anything, first and foremost.
Recently there's been media chatter about women "not having it all", and yesterday I read a blurb on Slate about a new book called Why Have Kids? which got me thinking about how fraught the whole having-kids experience can be. Is it the modern-day dilemma of too many choices? Having babies and raising them used to be rote, now we think about it from more angles than our psyches can handle, and the questions pile up.
I never thought much about having kids until I turned thirty. My twenties were without compass and without plans (other than to be a writer someday), and I am still a pleasantly-tossed-by-the-wind type of person who goes where life takes her. It was unlike me to plan to have a child, but plan I did, even with all those questions swirling around. I thought them over long and hard, and came up on the side of "yes, let's have a kid." I got pregnant the first time my husband and I tried to make a baby, and I got pregnant a second time three years later, when my daughter was two and my marriage was doing poorly, and had my son. We divorced when they were four and one. A good partnership with a man (meaning, how to do it) has evaded me, but good mothering has not.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I had kids, and I am also grateful every day that I did. It's not a good choice for every woman, but it was for me. They are twelve and nine now. I don't overthink it. I brought two people into the world deliberately, and I try to do my share to ensure that it was a good thing that I did.
(Although who can ever know for sure what the right thing is? Those are such big, dizzying questions, only my gut feelings can get me through them. That and knowing someday, somehow, the Bruins will play again. Damn the NHL lockout!)
As a kid and a teenager and a young adult, kids and babies were foreign creatures, requiring care I had no knowledge of. I changed my first infant diaper in nursing school. My daughter was to be the first baby in my generation. I bought the books and magazines and combed the websites while I was pregnant, and was irritated by most of what I read--irritated and overwhelmed. It was fortunate that at the end of my pregnancy I was finishing up RN school (after working as an LPN for eleven years) and had no time to obsess about the baby to come. She was born five days before my final exam.
My first experience as a mother, hours after she was born, has set the tone for all the years that have followed (over twelve, so far), and I will finish here with that story.
My daughter was born at seven-thirty in the evening, after a smooth (but not short) labor and delivery. My husband went home about nine, and my daughter and I were wheeled into my room to nap. I woke after a while to a totally dark room, my daughter making little sounds of wakefulness, and I felt for the pull cord for the light but couldn't find it. I couldn't find the call bell either. The door to the room was closed, and I didn't want to cause an alarm by calling out, so I decided to wait. My daughter's noises grew louder, and she started to cry.
The siderails of my bed were up, and her bassinet was parked at the foot of my bed and I couldn"t reach it. I didn't want to move. I didn't dare to, my body was beat to shit and I had been stitched up after delivery and the slightest shift of my butt on the bed felt like I was going to bust open. Her cries became more insistent. "Hello?" I called out, but no nurse came.
I couldn't go to her, so I talked to her. "Hey, sweetie, it's Mommy! Don't worry, it's okay, somebody will be here soon and we'll take care of you..."
I expected my voice to make no difference, but to my surprise, she quieted. I kept talking.
"You did such a great job today, and I'm so happy to finally see you. I hope it's working out for you so far, I know it's a big change...that nurse had better come soon, sweetie, because I really, really, really need to pee..."
And called out, "Hello? HELLO?" but nobody came.
The nurse finally opened the door as my daughter was starting to wind up again and I was sing-songing, "Sweetie! It's okay!"over and over, having run out of anything else to say. The nurse apologized when she saw that my call bell and the pull cord were hanging against the wall far from my reach, and helped me with that first woozy and aching trip to the bathroom (reassuring me that I would not, indeed, bust open like dropped watermelon if I contracted my bladder muscles, although I was completely convinced that I would), and after getting me properly arranged back in the bed, handed me my daughter, who had been tided up while I was in the bathroom and was ready for the next round of breastfeeding.
It was midnight. I slept very little that night, and very little for the next four months, but I was a mother. That's what I did.
It still amazes me, my utter lack of panic or despair only four hours into motherhood, when my daughter was crying and there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it. It still amazes me that I winged it, and it worked.
Does anybody know where that comes from? And why didn't I know for sure that mothering would be that comfortable for me, and that finding myself soothing my newborn with nothing but the sound of my voice would be delightful, until I was doing it? Parenthood is a huge thing to fall so ass-backwards into, even if the pregnancy was planned and you have some idea of what you are getting into. I'm glad women can ask "why have kids?" these days, like I did, as best as I could manage...
...and see why I don't blog about my kids? I just start gushing about them and boring you to death. I'm more interesting when my issues are fraught. So on to the next thing...
* She swears like a trucker when I'm not around, but amuses me with watered-down versions like "what the fluff?" when we are conversing. Most of the time, anyway.
