Gratuitous Cute Baby Pictures and an Identity Crisis
May 14th, 2003
identity than going from being, you know, just a person, taking care of
yourself, to being, wow, a mom. But even after doing it for six and a half
years, I don’t have it all sorted out.
third child was that I was plunged once again into a struggle to make my own
identity clear to myself. This is nothing new — there is nothing like gazing
with love and adoration into a newborn’s face to make my quirky little brain say
“hey, there, how about graduate school now?” But it makes absolutely no sense.
I love being at home with my kids, I’ve chosen this, I believe in this, I
believe it is the most important work I can be doing. We’ve been really
fortunate that our circumstances have allowed me to stay home with our children,
and I think that because it’s been my choice it has been very much right for our
family. But… ok, here’s my theory. See this
face?
It’s not just that I go out with him and
magically become invisible (and there is something oddly disconcerting about
walking into a grocery store and having the cashier use a baby voice “Oh how are
we today, Mr. Sausage Legs? Don’t we have the sweetest smile? Aren’t we just
the happiest baby? Oh, you are just the most adorable… ” Switch voices, to
one considerable more surly “That’ll be $21.97, ma’am.”) It’s that I get a
little lost, myself looking into those eyes.
And being consumed by this overwhelming love
is a little scary, not to mention the fact that taking care of this entirely
dependent all the time little person is exhausting, and I only ever feel
slightly better than adequate. And I start second-guessing lots of decisions –
would my sons benefit more in the long run living with a mother who had some
fulfilling work outside of the home? What do I like well enough to want to
leave my children, anyway? I don’t imagine work will ever be important to me
again the way it was before I had children. And I forget what it was I was good
at, what interested me, wonder if I’ll ever have the confidence I need in my
rusty abilities. It’s weird to think I’ve been at home now almost seven years,
and by the time Søren enters elementary school it will have been twelve
years since I graduated from college, I’ll be thirty-five… I just turned
thirty! What am I doing? Panic!
I
know a lot of these feelings are nearly universal, at least among the women in
the culture I’m living in. Sometimes that almost saves me, that and having a
few thoughtful friends struggling the similar struggle to talk to. But after a
while, it’s enough talking, I want to do something, to be sure that the person I
was before isn’t completely lost.
The
image that kept coming to me trying to find myself in our new family of five was
that of a mobile, like the mobile hanging over my bed, the top wire has a weight
on one end and the thread holding the rest of the mobile at the other end of the
wire; similarly the second wire suspended from the first has a weight at one end
and the rest of the mobile hanging on the other end… the whole thing, the
balance is just a little unlikely and counterintuitive looking. And I feel,
sometimes, like the weight on the top wire counterbalancing the suspended
weights of the rest of my family. One of those pieces advice handed to me again
and again was that of the “oxygen mask principle” that, just as on an airplane
I’m instructed to put on my own oxygen mask before helping my children, I have
to take care of myself so I can take care of everyone else. The thing that
bothers me about this is it seems not to recognize me as a person who needs to
be cared for or care for myself in my own right.
In Carol Lee Flinders’ book, At the
Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst,
she discusses the rather subversive myth of the selkie, a seal woman, who can
take off her seal skin and walk on land. The story is that a man fell in love
with this selkie and stole her seal skin when she was in her woman form and hid
it from her, married her, had children with her and she forgot who she was.
Only she found it one day and without even knowing what she was doing put it on
and returned to the sea.
This becomes
so vivid for me… I imagine opening an old chest, and curious, shaking the dust
off of a ragged piece of fur, and then shaking myself out of a trance,
frightened, putting it back away, only to be overpowered at night by dreams of
flying, except I’m under water, free. During the day as I try to protect myself
by burying myself in the tasks of running a house, the sound of surf in my ears
starts drowning out my beloved children’s voices… Finally, the draw becomes
so intense that I seek release, diving into the ocean, and swimming
away.
I started writing for myself
again this spring, getting up and writing three pages every morning, giving
myself permission to write absolute drivel, just so long as it was written. I
will admit, however, that a small part of me was scared that this would be
opening the forbidden chest, that what I might find might be dangerous. But I
suppose the danger is in the suppression, the forgetting. By knowing myself I
know that I am doing what I am doing by conscious choice, and this gives me the
strength to keep doing it, to work always to do it better.
