I’ve always wanted to be the best mother I could possibly be. I’ve wanted to be selfless, inspiring, loving, and kind yet firm and all types of other descriptions that you could insert into a blanket statement such as this. The long and the short of it, however, is that I wanted to do a good job. Better than a good job—I wanted to do a great job.
It is hard to define the role of motherhood. I know what I want to do to be a good wife. I know what I need to do to be a good employee. I know how to separate myself from these roles—this is what I do for work, and this is what I do for myself. This is what I do for my husband, and this what I do for myself. But when you are a mother, you do everything, it seems, for your children. No matter the request, no matter the cost.
Even though I’ve always wanted to do my absolute best for my children; when K was born, I quickly realized that I was clueless. That was a hard realization. For many years I blamed the fact that I felt clueless, lost, on a lot of different things—I was an only child that was rarely around children younger than myself, I was a teenage mother, therefore I did not have the motherly instinct that other women apparently developed somewhere in their 20s or 30s.
I thought that as I gained more experience, had some skills under my belt, mothering, in general, would get easier. Once I knew what I was doing, things would just fall into place. This is not the case, though—mothering is truly an arms race. As soon as I figure out how to handle one type of situation or another, it’s soon over and there’s another issue on the horizon, and I have to figure out the best way to respond to that as well.
Now that I’ve figured out how to help babies sleep through the night, and how to comfort a child with a scrape, and how to instill empathy for others, and how to deal with hurt feelings, there are other challenges. How to deal with bullies. How to keep a child interested and active in their learning. How to set a good example for your peers. How to deal with people who disagree with you with respect for their opinions. Instead of feeling more comfortable in my role as a mother with years of experience behind me, I feel even more lost, and the stakes are raised over and over, with each passing year.
Soon it will be college choices and first car purchases and how to know if the one they’re with is “The One”.
Since I have no true definition, no roadmap, for how to accomplish my mothering goal, and I so desperately wanted to do right by my children, I end up allowing others to define it for me. Instead of doing the hard work and deciding what I needed to commit, I take my cues from those external to me.
This group of role-definers has even included, at times, my children themselves.
I often ended up doing everything that others want me to do, or expected me to do, and not doing what I thought was best for me. So often, when it comes to what you should be doing in the opinions of others do not have your best interests at heart. How could they? They are not you. On occasion, this made me angry—I had signed on to be a good mom, not a martyr. Sometimes it made me despair—is there no end? Is there nothing that stands between me and my children?
Now, before I go on, I want to make clear that this is not—in any way-- a diatribe against stay-at-home mothers. I know that SAHMs everywhere have more than enough on their plates as well. I know sometimes they can feel as if they are the helm of a ship that has no course, that they can be uncertain of the direction of their heading, that they can feel the impending mutiny at their backs.
But when I come home from work on a tough day, and I am faced with dinner and dishes and homework and laundry, I feel myself wilting. When I wake up on a Saturday morning after an insanely busy week at work, I pray for the chance to sit. Just sit, and be. Think. Recoup.
My children, on the other hand, want to know what I am going to provide to them in the 48 hours where they have my unadulterated attention. They want to know where we are going, what we are doing, what we will be eating, what we will be watching, who will we be seeing. And I think, more mistakenly than not, that if I can accomplish some of these things that they so desperately want, they will be satiated, and I will be able to do one thing that I so desperately want for myself.
It just doesn’t work that way. There really is a never-ending list, and it can be damn hard to find the saturation point—that place where you feel as if things are under control. I rarely ever feel that things are in order enough for me to take a step back and take a break for me. Once one demand has been met, two more are brought before me. I don’t know if there has been some fatal flaw in my parenting up to this point. Or if this is just part and parcel of the working-mom guilt. Or if this is just the way things are.
The moral of my post, I suppose, is that it can be hard to talk about these issues. I struggled to write these things down, and I still wonder if I should even post it at all. The main purpose of this blog, after all, was to document the change in outlook of our family—to watch our progress as we got back to the things that truly matter to us. And yet, I think these issues are important, and need to be addressed. Either I have seriously mental issues, or there needs to be more discussion about defining this role of motherhood amongst mothers themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment