The voices in me are having a field day this week, praying on that elusive fluid idea: being a good mother. I’m not a person driven by guilt, unless I’ve blindly let someone down. Then I can swim in the soupy stuff with the best of them. I’m all about trying to get it “right” and usually accepting that when I don’t, I did the best I could with my understanding of myself and the situation. It’s not a perfect approach, but works well for me.
My son and I spent months in a stalemate. I wanted nights of continuous sleep and he wanted me when he woke every night. As far as I could tell these were fundamentally incongruous objectives.
I’ve always held as my philosophical signature the idea that “life is full of choices”. Behind those words are a raised eye-brow and a half-smile which suggest that one should carefully consider the options life presents because our choices make us who we are. Now while I “become the mother I am meant to be” I see glimpses of the mother I am with the fingerprints of my decisions I leave behind.
Etched in my memory are the feelings — trepidation, excitement, FEAR and quiet contentment — which jerked my body around in the final weeks before my first child was born.
When I began to wonder who was in charge of my state of being, I was 7 months pregnant. I had expected to feel the presence of my baby by that point, but the eye-wandering distraction which came to envelop me, caught me off-guard. One day it was upon me and I could not get back to “myself”. My laser sharp focus, intuitive observations and crisp synthesization slipped through my grasp, seemingly gone forever.
As the angry words flowed from my mouth with volcanic intensity, simultaneously I could feel the lava gushing forth and objectively observe myself, as if from above. I knew that the pissy 3 year old in me had broken loose and was shattering a dream for my little girl. But I could not — I did not arrest myself.
My prayer remains unanswered. I am having one of those days where I despair that I will ever have a proper night of sleep again.
After 4 years of fairly regular nocturnal interruptions, I know I am not a good mother when I am sleep deprived. I have no patience, but recently it’s more than that. There is a dark voice, a petty childish voice that if left uncensored, can jab back sarcastically at the real needs of my little kids. I sound like I’m about 3 years old and want the kids to go home from this playdate. But this playdate is my reality and the dark voice in me is getting a bit pissy about it.
I hung up the phone and the sound of Kate crying a lonely heartbroken cry hung in the air. My heart ached but I knew that her bedtime routine and a good night’s sleep would give her the comfort she craved from my arms. I didn’t feel guilty, but I’ve come a long way since our first trip away from the kids.
As my son lies crying at the bottom of the stairs to our bedroom, I lie immobilized with my heart racing. He has gottten up again in the middle of the night calling for milk. There will be no milk — just like last night and the night before that.
Even from my sterile corporate outpost during my pregnancy, cloth diapers were an easy decision, it seemed to me.