- Share This Post
- submit
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
We get into a lot of trouble when we start thinking of motherhood in terms of work and not as a relationship.
Yes, I think it should be a noun, not a verb.
It's not surprising that my generation has fallen prey to the Professionalization of Motherhood in which we come to view our children as products, not people. One has only to look in on the birthday party scene or the school play or the politics of chaperoning a field trip to discover that parenthood all to often becomes a competitive sport. After all, many of us spent a decade or two earning good money for our labors before our little ones arrived on the scene. Steeped in the culture of daily briefings, transparency and modern applications of Scientific Management that would make Frederick Winslow Taylor weep with pride, it’s not hard to imagine how we could in turn apply the same ethos to the realm of raising a family.
I’d also submit that this is what makes it so difficult for today’s mother to adjust to motherhood. After a professional lifetime of reliably receiving detailed performance reviews and immediate numbers-based feedback, suddenly we find ourselves in a vacuum. Our babies don’t even smile at us for two months, don’t speak to us for the first year or two, and it’s years more until they can hold their own in a thoughtful conversation. In the meantime, we’re left to trust our maternal instincts, not compare ourselves to others, and just stay the course. All the while, a lifetime of professional paid work is pulling us to do just the opposite.
And in the process, we do what we can to grapple with that work the way corporate America has conditioned us. To outsource it. To do it more efficiently. To force our husbands to split it 50/50, as though they are adversaries to be met and conquered at the bargaining table. But all of these dubious products of the corporate lexicon miss the point.
It's a relationship. 20 years from now, this will be crystal clear. There will be no denying their in-living-color personhood when they tower over us, all of their facilities finally at their full command. The people our children already are will be actualized, our size, the fruits of our labors unavoidably front and center, and we will not be thinking of them as another item on our agenda. They will be either be people that we have served well or people we have shortchanged. Plants we've either watered faithfully or neglected.
Okay, okay, I know it's not that simple (kind of). Katie Roiphe just got into a lot of trouble over at Broadsheet over a slipshod subtitle she didn't write. But importantly, she suggested that motherhood is more than a box to be checked off by the end of business. By the way, this paragraph of hers is just about the best description of new motherhood I've ever read:
"You give up everything you are and care about. The books on your shelves are not your books; the clothes hanging in the closet are not your clothes. You are the vague, slow, exhausted animal nursing its young. Anything graceful, original, sharp, intelligent about you is gone. And it is that sacrifice of self, that total denial of the outside world, that uncompromising violence done to your everyday life, that is this period’s appeal. You are transported in a way you will never be transported again; this is the vacation to end all vacations."
The more we think of it as a relationship, the less cleaning up we'll have to do in ten or twenty years when our children start reflecting ourselves back to us over the loudspeaker. The less we'll have to grapple with the ethics of blogging boundaries, like this incendiary discussion on Motherlode this week, inspired by another incendiary discussion on Motherhood last week. Frankly, the whole thing left me weary.
So I propose this: Let's just start thinking of our children as people NOW, skip that whole Cat's in the Cradle myopia and take the long view. Parenthood is about relationship-building, not efficiency. It's about richness of experience, not expediency. It's about shaping the contours of our children's character, not just their G.P.A..'s and their output. The best children's message T-shirt I ever spied implored: "Be patient with me. God's not finished with me yet." I endeavor to avoid the judgmental set that doesn't understand that. Our children are subject to our teaching and our influence - more completely than
