subject verb object
April 17th, 2009
The dreams I most hate waking up from are the ones where I am being ardently pursued, romantically pursued, not chased-by-a-bear pursued, and am being told of how fabulously desirable and so on I am. The dreams bear no guilt, are not about wanting a romantic relationship with anyone not my husband, don’t feel like a betrayal, or even a reflection on my husband busy doing those husbandly things like earning a living and so forth. They have no bearing on the actual and unbloggable work of relationship, and in all of my waking moments, the mature trading-in of the unsustainable pursuit of being pursued for the stability, the security, the sometimes even harmony of being in a family feels like I got the better half of the deal.
Still, some mornings I hate waking up.
And of course feeling middle-aged and staid and domestic, the weird invisibility of motherhood in the Charlie Brown imagery of faceless legs and muted trumpet voices, which seems to have as its questionable alternative a new cultural paradigm of MILFs and this image of the destructive, selfish egocentric mother who keeps thrusting herself in as the center of the story of her children’s lives. I wonder vaguely if I should go find examples of either of these mother images, or non-images, to illustrate what I mean, but they seem universal enough I’ll trust you to find them. The point more is that while I question the sweetness of dreaming of courtship when I am happily married, (have I internalized some objectification, that I don’t want to pursue, mind you, only to be pursued, and this makes me question my own feminism) I also question what the story is of being a mother, how it can be appropriately told because it is neither about me, however much it has changed me, nor have I become invisible, even though sometimes I feel like what my children most need is for my presence to gently recede.
Also I observe: we now use “mother” and “parent” quite happily as verbs. But what is the verb for actively working at the partnership of marriage, of trying to grow and nurture, create that “fortress of well-being”? I married him once, but have found that the being married is so much more actively regularly re-committing and examining, is coming up a little short and apologizing and trying harder, and getting scarily vulnerable and trusting, and maybe no verb could capture all of that. But then does mothering actually capture the tenderness and the frustration, the humor, the pride, the fear, the realizing what you have been doing isn’t working and it’s time to humbly ask for help, try a new way of doing things?
And then I am thinking about Martin Buber’s whole I-Thou thing and the fading into the background of my self as I address myself to parenting and that’s not exactly how it is, and there’s also the helplessness of everything I cannot do for my children, and it occurs to me that when we use parent as a verb, in that sentence the parents are subjects and the kids somehow the objects. And the relationship I have with my kids, while asymmetrical, isn’t like that. Anymore than being married is like being pursued.
I have been preoccupied by this NPR story I heard on how in languages with grammatical gender, the gender of the words affects perception of objects. Which kind of bolsters what I already knew, that the words we use matter. And if I were ever to have an institute it would be the Institute for the Responsible Use of Metaphors. So people like that parenting ‘expert’ who talked at our co-op meeting last night wouldn’t describe one child in conflict with a sibling as a “victim” (it’s my ambition that in my house, there are no victims, because that story seems harmful to both parties). And so it matters to me that I find a way both truthful and loving to talk about motherhood and marriage, about daughterhood and sisterhood and friendship. And when I get all disgusted with how seriously my blog seems to take itself, how dreadfully earnest the tone can be, I have to remember that this pursuit does matter. It’s easy to veer, in talking about these things into something soft-focussed and pastel and sentimental or just go straight for the diaper humor, and yet the truth is somewhere between those, or encompasses both and goes beyond them.
