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| I finally got a shot of the after school glee running! |
Note: I started this before Mother's Day.
“There is no love of life without despair of life.” Albert Camus
The Wasp
Right before bedtime, I saw a wasp crawling on the kitchen floor. I thought it odd because the temperatures were still quite cold and winter had not yet turned to spring. Had he thawed from hibernation too soon? Where did he come from?
I left him alone despite my son’s urgent screams to “kill it!” I didn’t think the winged thing would make it too much longer, so why crush it. Perhaps leaving him to crawl was the crueler decision. The next time I went into the kitchen, he had disappeared into some corner crevice or behind the baseboard, and I thought that was that.
Around noon the next day, the wasp surprised me. At least, I believe it was the same wasp. He dipped dramatically from the living room ceiling. Initially I panicked, thinking he was on the attack, but he didn’t seem to notice me as he bobbed up and down. The sun beamed through the picture window, spotlighting his funereal dance. Each sharp dive was followed by a frantic burst upwards. Moving like he was at the end of an impatient fisherman’s hook, the wasp beat itself against the ceiling.
I was still a little afraid he would dip down to me as I watched from across the room, seated on the couch, attempting to match a thousand socks. I wanted him to stop the chaotic bobbing. I wanted him to give up. But he continued bashing himself against the limits, making a sound like a rubber band snap.
Eventually he hovered around a vase of dried flowers and then, like a maple seed, he whirled down behind the curio cabinet. He rests there now, awaiting his Dyson burial.
The Cow
I sat down to write about the cow that had gone mad because she lost her calf. I had been listening to her moo and grunt for at least 12 hours. When I looked out the window, I saw her pacing like a caged lion in a small pen. It was pure heartbreak. The thought of such primal anguish was made even worse by the knowledge that she would likely be slaughtered for her madness. She was too dangerous to keep around and she had lost her market value---the calf she bore was deformed; he had one tiny, misshapen leg. It was just too much. So I sat down to sort it out and write something poignant about this cow when my child burst into the room stomping and kid-cussing under his breath. He yelled,“I’m lagging! Get off the Wi-Fi!”and just like that, all eloquent cow thoughts flew out the window.
The Mother
Every day after school, my son runs to the car with that wonderful childlike enthusiasm, and I smile. I often try to capture a photo so I can hold on to the moment, but I usually fumble my phone, and he’s much too fast. After he jumps in, he scans the vehicle for snacks (occasionally I’m on the ball and have something ready). I lean to the left to avoid getting ten pounds of nylon-wrapped textbooks to the face as he tosses his backpack into the backseat. Sometimes he says “Hi.” Most of the time I say something like “Hi, chicken nugget,” and the daily ritual of me asking him how school was and him saying “fine” or “it was boring” begins. Depending on the day, his responses can be slightly more nuanced or abruptly staccato, but they usually follow the same disinterested pre-teen script. One day I made the mistake of pushing him for detailed information. I pressed him with questions like: “How was the Veteran’s Day presentation?”; “Did anything fun happen?”; “How was recess?” I do not remember the exact words he used, but he made his displeasure known. In fact, his reaction was such that one might think I was pulling a water boarding apparatus out from under my car seat while I was asking “what did you have for lunch?” He was cranky. And because I was having my own bad day, my parenting skills were flooded out by tears welling up in my eyes. By the time we made it to the gas station for a Gatorade and beef jerky, my cheeks were streaked. Because our bad days intersected at a bad time, things escalated. We both said things we probably shouldn’t have until the fight crested with the loss of tech privileges for the evening (punishment enough for the both of us). Aside from some slurps and sighs, the long ride home was silent.
For the past nine years, the two of us have completed the same 25-mile route to and from town almost everyday. We’ve logged a lot of travel time, and it’s been a journey of more than miles. In the beginning, the little chubby-cheeked towhead would hold my hand all the way to town and cry when I dropped him off at the daycare center. Always a traumatic experience, the drop off left me rattled, and I struggled to switch gears as I drove towards the university where I’d assume the roles of graduate student and instructor. In that space, I was to exude confidence, intellect, creativity, and brilliance. Ha! Most days my mommy brain made forming complete sentences challenging. As he grew and got to know his daycare buddies, things improved and the tears subsided. But he continued to hold my hand on the way to school for quite some time, and even though my arm cramped and my sloppy shoulder joint resisted, I treasured having his tiny hand in mine.
One day, on a rare solo drive, I listened to a radio interview with Amy Westervelt the author of Forget "Having It All:" How America Messed Up Motherhood---and How to Fix It. She discussed how mothers in America are scrutinized because of their inability to achieve work and home-life success; women are expected to aggressively pursue careers and also act as exceptional caregivers. Simultaneously, our social dogma pushes against the choice to be one or the other. If you are a successful career woman, you are scrutinized because you do not have children or you do not sacrifice enough for your children. If you focus on being a mother, you are inevitably scrutinized for not making it further in a career. Women are placed in an impossible position. Because our American mythology centers on the idea of doing whatever it takes and showing no weakness, successful careers depend on being extremely productive and driven in the workplace. This leaves little space for home life and directly opposes the concept of “selfless” mothering. It seems today’s career success requires working at least 50+ hours a week, practicing self care in order to perform at optimal productivity, being able to focus on work items away from the office, and hobnobbing at social events to nurture professional contacts. The amount of presence it takes to parent does not allow for that kind of existence, at least not for me. Mothering is tough, for every mother---it’s a whirling dervish dance between selflessness and self fulfillment. Unless one makes significant career advances before having children or has a spouse who is willing to share equal responsibility in the child rearing, the chances of achieving career success and parenting success at the same time are null.
When I had my son, some part of me realized this, and I tried to plan a way to work enough and be an effective parent. My priority was to be with my son during his younger years as much as possible. I felt I needed to be as involved as I could during critical developmental years. My own paranoia also made me want to avoid any type of daycare until he was able to talk. I decided the solution would be to go back to school. By attending graduate school, I could advance my education and receive a stipend for working as a teaching assistant. Most importantly, I could manipulate my schedule in a way that would allow me to limit my time away from home. So I applied, and thus began the hand-holding travels.
During graduate school, I did enough to earn a 3.9 GPA (one damn B!). I admit I wasn’t at all exceptional. I was so stretched by studying, teaching, and caring for my son that I didn’t have time to pursue the “above and beyond.” I couldn’t attend many of the functions, socialize with other academics, or travel to conferences. I had to do things like figure out where to pump breast milk in between classes—no one in student services or administration could help me, so I problem solved by reserving a study room in the library when I needed it. I made it work as best I could. (Thankfully, I also had the foresight to pack paper and Scotch tape in my school bag, so I could cover the study room door windows and avoid giving some poor college kid an education he or she didn’t really need.)
Often times I would stay up all night working on writing or grading essays, so I could be an attentive parent during the day. My son was frequently sick with allergic reactions, ear infections, and respiratory illnesses, so that also affected my time, stress, and academic output. It wasn't easy to maintain philosophical thought or translate Old English while attempting to master the Supernanny time-out technique of placing the naughty child on the naughty step as many times as necessary until the naughty child remained on naughty step---for us this was about 100 times. Trying to make sense of the nonsensical 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy while trying to figure out why the heck my kid would poop on top of a closed toilet seat or why he felt it necessary to throw approximately 20 wet toilet paper wads on the bathroom mirror (luckily made wet by sink water) was not really conducive to optimal intellectual pursuit. It was exhausting. I made it through, but alas, I was not brilliant.
I realize now that during that time I was also working my way through some kind of post traumatic stress and other mental wreckage. My son’s father was incredibly psychologically and emotionally abusive; I left him when I was five months pregnant. After I left, I stopped speaking for nearly 4 days. I was devastated because I knew I would be unable to establish a traditional family for my child---I would be a single parent. In my mind, I had failed. Prior to my son’s birth and for a few years after, all of the happy firsts like heartbeat sounds, kicks, coos, smiles, baths, and crawls were intermingled with first restraining orders, lawyers, court appearances, and trips to the visitation center for supervised visits. Stomach acid rises into my throat even now as I remember leaving my tiny baby boy with a man who said he’d hurt him if I wasn’t acting nice enough (one of his less obscene statements). Everything during that time, even the happy, amazing things were tinged with a grimy film of fear and failure. I compare any hardships I face today to that time, and I find comfort because none of them are as bad. That in itself is kind of a sad revelation.
Even so, I was incredibly privileged to have a home and family help; otherwise, things would have been drastically different. I didn’t have to work outside of the home full time right away, and I didn’t have to worry about a safe place to live. I could try to heal and focus on mothering my child---honestly, that took all I had. I do recognize my great privilege and realize how others with much less face insurmountable challenges. I wasn’t a refugee fleeing genocidal violence. I wasn’t poverty stricken or drug addicted. I wasn’t forced to rely on my abuser because there was no other choice. However, even with that privilege, I was unable to achieve what others or myself might view as success and this has been troubling me a great deal lately. I’ve been thinking about the judgment of others, or my perception of their judgment. Someone once told me I hadn’t eaten enough of a shit sandwich in life, so I didn’t have a right to speak about living through hard times---I couldn’t possibly understand real hardship. I replay that comment over and over in my mind, and it feels awful. It hit the broken part in me like lightning to a lightning rod. Perhaps another person would have dealt with what I encountered better and would’ve been more successful, but I do feel like I did everything I could to make it work.
Perhaps this line of thinking is just a symptom of middle life mixed in with the ever corrosive echoes of some rejection or loss. I’m not even sure what my exact point is here. I know that part of it is working through the anger of feeling judged and misunderstood for not being “more,” and it could be a retaliation against that judgment (from others and self). I’m grappling with those ideas and find myself questioning how we all function in this crazy world. Why do we pretend that everyone is equal in life? Life is not at all an equal playing field. One can't pull herself up by her bootstraps if she has no boots. We simultaneously push the trope that anyone can achieve anything while at the same time quickly announce that “life isn’t fair” when things go wrong. We make comparisons of people that cannot be justified in reality. Genetic makeup, experience, luck of birth circumstances: all of these things and more guide the trajectory of one’s life. One person’s terrifying shit sandwich might be another person’s slightly inconvenient dung speed bump. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case
My purpose certainly isn’t pity centered, quite the opposite. Sharing a little bit about my own experience releases it from within me, but it might also inspire a sense of understanding, hopefully. Maybe that understanding is my purpose---understanding myself and extending a bridge of understanding to others. That’s all everyone really wants, isn’t it? To be seen and understood and valued nonetheless. We expend so much energy pretending to be perfect know-it-alls. As Milan Kundera noted in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we trick ourselves into believing the ideal “is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist.” We either deny the existence of imperfection or we convince ourselves that our problems must be far worse than everyone else’s problems. It’s all ridiculous.
Maybe I am just like the wasp repeatedly hitting my head against the ceiling, destined for the Dyson. Maybe I am like the cow consumed with the madness of sorrow. Maybe I am the mother afraid nothing will ever be enough. I don’t know. I do know that watching the tiny hand that used to fit so securely in my grasp grow beyond it inspires things within me: joy, fear, curiosity, sadness, and amazement. Somewhere along the way those tiny hands have helped me realize that this journey is messy, and complicated, and painful, and incredibly beautiful---and that our concepts of success are merely abstractions.
***
One night as he falls asleep, the six year old says “I’m sorry for all the mean things I’ve ever done to you, Mom. Please tell Albie [our dog] that I’m sorry for any mean things I’ve done to him too.” He smiles and says “I will smile when I sleep.” And I see his eyes close and that smile---he holds it as long as he can until his mouth muscles succumb to slumber.
Later, in the middle of the night, he appears in the kitchen doorway. He shows me his hands—two little white hands stretched flat, extended in the darkness. “What’s wrong?” I say, and he can only cry and hold out his hands. He is confused and distressed and runs back upstairs into my room—still crying and asleep. I follow. He can’t tell me what’s wrong. He stumbles to his room and says “I need to go,” so we turn and descend the stairs and go into the bathroom. He cries. He finishes and runs back up the stairs and into his room and into his bed. When his head hits the pillow, he laughs.
