Parenthood

The other day I was looking around and found that two of the AV Club writers are married and have 2 kids. I was looking at the wife's blog and it struck me as extremely pretentious. I don't really like her very much anymore (I didn't really have an opinion before). Here is part of something she wrote on motherhood.

I don't want to say that because I'm a mother, I know something or have experienced something so profoundly linked to womanhood that no one who hasn't borne a child can possibly be a complete woman (or a complete person). I think a lot of discussion of motherhood is like that.

On the other hand, those experiences -- of pregnancy, and especially of nursing -- have changed me profoundly. They've given me something that I didn't have before. Did I lack before? Was I incomplete? No. But it's nonetheless true that I was then a person with a capacity to have those experiences, and now I am a person who's had them. Two different people, connected by potential-into-actuality.

The baby I'm carrying now will be my last. As I was out walking in the almost-hot sunshine of an Arkansas early May, I wished for a moment that I could carry her forever. I remember so well missing Archer inside me after he was born. Part of that is fear; as long as the baby is still in my womb, I can take perfect care of her. After she's a separate person, all kinds of things can go wrong. But now I know that even that change is a gradual process. She'll be intimately connected to me through nursing for a long time -- years, if she wants it -- and for several months, I'll be providing all her nourishment, and some large portion of her comfort and love. She'll grow away from me and into herself slowly. Too fast, but slowly.

Being a mother is about being connected in a way that sometimes is wonderful, sometimes is a burden, but all the time is unlike any other connection on earth. I wasn't incomplete without it. But I'm certainly different with it. We call it "mother love," but those words never helped me conceptualize or understand what that connection really is. 

But it seems that, as hard as we try to illustrate the connection, to give telling examples and construct a phenomenology of that love, you only get it if you get it. We all have mothers. But we don't all have children. And the connection doesn't work as reliably the other way, although some people, I know, feel it. All we can do is keep trying to communicate it, because the trivializing of that connection, and our alarming ability to extract other human beings from it, as if they don't have mothers and children of their own, is what leads to the crap we've been watching on the news all week -- the ease with which we act as if there is no such connection for others, let alone for ourselves. 

The Enlightenment gave us wonderful gifts, wonderful realizations, wonderful and indispensable tools for thinking through our world and ourselves. But it also gave us an individualism that routinely denies the sort of connection I, as a mother, feel in my bones every day. A mixed legacy, indeed.

I'm sorry, but this kind of thing just upsets me so much. I understand she says she's not thinking that she's better than everyone else who's not a mother, but really, I believe she is thinking that. It's so unbelievably superior. And even if she isn't thinking it, many people do.

What if someone can't have a child? What are those people supposed to do? I think these types of people would probably pity those people.

I am probably reacting way too strongly, and who knows what I'd think if I were to have children. I'd probably have similar feelings, but I sure as hell will never think I'm better than anyone else because I produce eggs that can be fertilized and grow into another person. It takes no skill whatsoever to have a baby, and I'd rather be valued and feel good about myself because I'm good at computer stuff.

Like I said, I know I'm overreacting and reading too far into what she's saying, but I know there's a vein of truth in all of this, and the whole having kids thing has been getting on my nerves a lot lately.

I was telling my therapist that I frequently feel like parenthood is this exclusive club, and when you're not in it, you basically shouldn't exist on earth. "You just don't know what it's like" and that kind of thing, such as what is in the paragraphs above. There are many subliminal messages in life that seem to give that kind of message, that if you don't have kids you're not a worthy person and shouldn't bother befriending people with kids (aka the better people). Then when you have kids, you can cross over into this wonderful, beautiful land where everything is gorgeous and you understand everything, and have this immense love for your kids that only a mother can understand.

I think a lot of my problem with it is that I DO feel like an inferior person. I believe all the stuff in my mind about it. I sobconsciously believe what AV Club moms write and when my stepmother says 20 times a day how she wants grandkids.

I wonder if I'm more sensitive to this because of my workplace. Almost everyone I work with has kids and that's really all I hear about there besides work stuff. I feel really left out pretty often. At least they don't talk about how great God is. Then you'd be reading about how annoyed I am with that.