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Learning to Accept the Mother that I Am

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Recently, we were at the home of some friends of ours who have a seven-month-old baby. I sat with a glass of red wine in my hand, watching the mother, my friend, spoon-feed the baby from a jar. The baby sat upright in a rubber seat, good-natured, opening her mouth on cue. When the food was gone, my friend got up to change the baby’s diaper and to draw her bath and to gather the small, potentially hazardous objects off the floor, and somewhere in the midst of this, to eat a sandwich.

I watched my friend with a sense of guilt and disbelief; guilt that I was sitting there enjoying my wine while she ricocheted from one task to another, and disbelief that what she was doing now, this living her life in perpetual motion, was once what I had done. It seemed impossible, and yet I had done it. I had waded knee-deep through that same river. Three times.

I stumbled my way through the early months – years – of motherhood. People said it would be different, easier, with my second child, and then my third, but I never found this to be true. I remember that time as a place of constant lack, physically demanding – a steady stream of energy one is required to harness out of thin air.

But perhaps it was more challenging for me than it is for most because I am not, nor have I ever been, a laborer.

A true laborer, which I am not, is one who wears her pain lightly, who tosses it over her shoulder like a summer scarf. She possesses — I am convinced — some sort of intrinsic numbing agent for it, of which I am not blessed to have. Not like, say, my mother-in-law, a woman who, at sixty-five, wakes up each morning, says her prayers, and hurls herself straight into action — folding laundry, baking bread, canning jam, knitting socks, never tiring, never missing a beat. Pain, for her, is nothing more than a nuisance, a pesky fruit fly that she has no problem shooing out of her way.

I, on the other hand, often seem to myself a creature who was born without a skin. I feel everything. Also, that there is no self to me at all; I am a merely vessel waiting to be filled, entirely at the mercy of who and what is surrounding me. This is how sensitive and impressionable I can be. When I work, it is with intensity and an eye for detail, but the work is slow and mostly doesn’t follow a linear pattern. I am self-disciplined, sometimes to a fault, but quality trumps quantity in everything I do. I am meticulous, certainly not efficient.

I suppose these traits would have been fine for the early stages of motherhood, could have assisted me even, had I possessed a carefree temperament to go along with them, and in fact it only seems fair that the two would go hand in hand. I have always wanted to be one of those mothers who can sit for hours finger-painting with her children, breakfast dishes unwashed and still piled on the counter at noon. The mother who can let her children climb her body like it’s a jungle gym, even when she has a head cold.

This is not me. I require visual order, personal space that must be measured by the square-foot, and heaping portions of solitude. When there is too much going on around me for extended lengths of time — and depending on the day, and the time of day, this can be anything more than a few minutes — my wiring shorts out. The structure gives way. And yet amazingly, here I am, a mother of three.

As my children have gotten older it’s been easier for me to mother them as I am, though for years I tried hard to change who this was. I remember ripping through parenting books like they were self-help manuals and the stakes were high. If I could only change this technique, that approach, I thought the pieces would perhaps fit together with some coherency. Perhaps, for once, mothering wouldn’t feel like I was walking to an unknown destination, blindfolded, with the nose of a rifle pointed at my back.

But the answer for me was never found in the books. I still don’t have any answers. What I do have is the slightest bit more comfort with just showing up as I am on a given day, and crossing my fingers that this will suffice. That, for instance, my moodiness or antisocial tendencies won’t cause any irrevocable damage.

When I was a young, petulant teenager, my father used to tell me that if you can get out of bed in the morning and take a shower, you’re already seventy percent of the way to anything. I think there is some truth to this. That if I can put my feet on the floor each day, pack the lunches, straighten the beds, brush the hair, remember who requires what ritual, glass of water, stuffed animal before going to sleep, perform that millisecond scan that tells me whether or not everything is all right in my children’s world, then I’m basically doing okay. That all those other things I’ve either done or haven’t done, said or haven’t said, perhaps they don’t carry as much weight as I think they do. That regardless of how I botched the job yesterday, the important thing is that I’m here again today. That it’s my consistency that matters, not my highs and lows.

I can see, too, that my most valuable offering as a mother has nothing to do with either action or inaction, the little things that come and go. It is instead much broader and more permanent. I can see that what is beneath the surface is my greatest gift to them: the irreparable crack in my foundation. I am someone who walked away from childhood with an acute sense of loss. And when I can access the heart of this loss, what I am left with is the deepest form of empathy, the awareness that, It’s not so easy to be a child. I remember.

Jessica Halepis is a mother and a writer who lives in New Hampsire. You can find her at Nourished Mom, where she blogs about holistic nutrition, living mindfully, and her quest to savor life’s small, ordinary moments. She is also on Facebook and Twitter.

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