I'm not a preschool teacher. The thought of all those kids looking to me for educational guidance for a full 6 hours or more makes my head ache. I'm not a nurse. I can never tell when my child is sick, unless she comes to me and says, "I'm sick" or vomits all over me. Even then, I'm more prone to tell her to suck it up than to recognize she may be legitimately ill. I'm not a camp counselor. I don't enjoy being outdoors unless I'm alone and it's quiet. I don't even really like the sun, with all its bright hotness making me uncomfortable. I'm not an artist, or a musician, or a dance instructor. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Not good enough, not thoughtful enough, not sensitive enough.
Since having kids, my life has been filled with thoughts of who I'm not instead of thoughts of who I am. I constantly feel the need to
be someone else -- a preschool teacher, a nurse, an activities coordinator. I feel the need to change who I am to fit what a mom
should be.Things that before gave me a sense of identity -- my love of pop
culture, my tendency to get so focused on a project that I can spend
hours seeing it through, my daydreaming -- are now glaring personality
flaws incompatible with a life where asking for time to do something I enjoy feels selfish and giving someone else responsibility for my children feels like shirking my duties as a mother.
You can say my expectations are too high. That no mom can be everything (except for the overachieving ones on Pinterest). But these expectations come from somewhere. They're all around me, in the television I watch and the magazines I read and the stories I hear from other mothers. Just flip through an issue of
Parenting to see why so many moms are anxious. There you'll see five-step, sure-fire solutions to every parenting problem, from tantrums to bedtime to healthy eating, and if you can't do it or don't want to, then it's your own fault. You can choose to succeed, or you can choose to fail.
Choices, choices, everywhere, and yet I feel forced into choosing the path of anxiety and self-doubt. Maybe that's because, as Judith Warner explains in her book,
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, the choices we're offered aren't really choices at all.
What kind of choice is it really, after all, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act -- not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood identities? What kind of life is it when you have to choose between becoming a mother and remaining yourself?
After my first child was born, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of loss. I grieved the person I used to be, and struggled to feel like a mother. The person I thought I was -- confident, logical, ambitious, good-humored, and deep-thinking -- was buried by the new person I became -- obsessed with and overwhelmed by the crushing responsibility of motherhood.
Each choice I made seemed Incredibly Important. To work or stay home, to buy jarred baby food or make it myself, to watch TV or read more books, to send my kids to preschool or hire a nanny. Instead of just being me, imperfect but generally happy, I worried that my imperfections would destroy my children. I became an expert on things in which I had no interest, because the general consensus is that there is no excuse for being uninformed. As Warner points out, if we make the right choices our children will be successful, but "if we choose badly, our
children will fall prey to countless dangers--from insecure attachment
to drugs to kidnapping to a third-rate college. And if this happens, if
our children stray from the path toward happiness and success, we will
have no one but ourselves to blame."
No pressure or anything.
Do fathers suffer from the same kind of identity crises after having children? Do they feel the constant need to enrich their children's lives at the expense of their own interests and sanity? I asked my husband, who stayed home with our daughter for a year starting when she was 18 months old, and he said at the time he thought she was too young to do any enrichment activities.
Yeah, I almost jumped out of my seat when he said that, too. I actually almost screamed, "How is it you get off not worrying ONE BIT about our child's future success or failure as a human being, and I spend hours, days, weeks, months of my life doing nothing but worrying?"
I would venture a guess that no mom reading this thinks that 18 months is too young to start enrichment. In fact, I stayed home with our daughter from her birth until she was 18 months old, and during that time I joined a moms play group, went to music programs, signed up for babytimes at the library, and bought a book of activities to do at home to improve her motor coordination and verbal skills. I agonized over bottle feeding her (would she ever bond with me?), and feeding her solid foods (would she end up obese because I didn't feed her enough vegetables?), and letting her cry it out versus soothing her to sleep (would she end up emotionally scarred, or too needy?)
Despite being home with dad for a year, my daughter turned out just fine. Well, she's crazy, but I don't think that's his fault. I think that's just because she's 3. She seems smart enough, and she's on target for all of her milestones. So really, shouldn't I consider my job done and call it a day? Shouldn't I stop worrying so much and just accept that they'll probably be fine despite my obvious shortcomings?
And yet... there is still always the list of "who I'm not" lingering in my mind. I'm not selfless enough. I'm not fun enough. I'm not patient enough. I'm not perfect.
To admit it seems like admitting an immense failure. I'm not perfect; I never was. I don't expect my kids to be perfect, and I hope you'll forgive them for talking a bit too loudly, eating too many snacks, and enjoying TV a little too much. Because one day they'll be parents, too, and my heart breaks thinking about them punishing themselves for being who they are, in all their crazy, imperfect, wonderful ways.
