{Live} The Good Mother: Selfless or Selfish
June 20, 2011 in All Posts, Parenting
Most parents lashed out at Rahna Reiko Rizzuto when she confessed that she left her children in order to pursue her own dreams and find herself after five years of motherhood. Readers practically flayed her on the stake, condemning her for choosing herself over her children. Was it really necessary to accuse her of being “worse than Hitler“? Does being a good mother really mean we have to give up being ourselves, sacrificing our identities at all costs?
Before children, I had always been somebody, whoever that somebody might have been: the ugly duckling (towering two feet above my still-prepubescent second grade classmates with startling B-cups, braces, coke-bottle glasses, and a hideous Dorothy Hamil do), the funny one (to compensate for the unattractiveness), the pretty one (the universe works in mysterious ways), the brain (until being out-nerded a hundred fold at an academic college), the flirt (*ahem* the slut), the trusty best friend (except that one time I was a boyfriend-stealing backstabber) and the ambitious career woman (temporarily on hold).
At every stage, regardless whether I hated it or milked every second, I knew who I was and I was free to be “me.”
But after my first, Jane, was born, I stopped being anyone or anything that I used to know. For three months, I was what can only be described as a giant udder of liquid sustenance, good for nothing more than a sleepless shoulder to spit up on and an all-night eardrum to wail into. Any semblance of my former selves were gone.
Pretty? Sure - if you consider 30 pounds of mushy mom weight, blood-shot eyes and blotchy, sleep-deprived skin attractive. Brainy? Definitely - if you’re talking a “mom brain” that boasts a two-second maximum short term recall and makes me put bananas in the freezer, socks in the microwave and the kettle in the fridge. Funny? Well, at most, maybe funny-looking.
But I thought to myself,
“Okay, this is motherhood. I’m a mom, and I’ll take that any day over a shiny blowout, skinny jeans without a muffin top, and alone time for myself.”
Then just as I had gotten used to the idea of being a mother: *poof* it vanished. A stranger came to my house every day to be a surrogate mother to my little girl while I dragged my zombie-self to work.
My colleagues (all men) had bets going on whether I would return after maternity leave and if I would continue working full-time. Desperately hanging on to my old workaholic self, I set out to prove them wrong and to prove to myself that I hadn’t become any “less” of a lawyer or a “worthless” mom in the workplace. Even after getting knocked up three months back to work, suffering through six months of morning sickness and taking care of Jane - not yet even a year old, I kept grinding day and night and telling myself, “I’m a lawyer dammit; it’s what I do; it’s who I am.”
But when Sam was born and the sleeplessness and stress multiplied exponentially, I realized: something had to give. I couldn’t be the old career only-focused “me” anymore. I was a mom now, too – whatever that meant.
So I scaled back to a part-time schedule and gave up my hard-driving professional identity to focus more on my new emerging self: a combination of part mom, part lawyer and random parts of my pre-children identities. (No; none of the interesting ones like the backstabbing slut have made a reappearance!).
I still struggle to figure out how to be the best mom, the best attorney and the best “me,” after Jane and Sam blew my vision of who “I” was to smithereens. There are days I wholeheartedly embrace my motherhood and would give anything to be a SAHM. And then there are days I wish I could do exactly what Rizzuto did - reclaim my pre-babies life or be “that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed,” like the part-time mom whom Rizzuto describes.
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Chrissy – who has written 426 posts on The Outlaw Mom® Blog - Creative Living in a Conventional World.
[…] to share the details of this grotesque transformation - you know, the damaging impact on my self-image, blah blah blah. But I think the Before and After pictures above aptly convey the magnitude of […]
I feel your words- I remember hearing about Hiroshima in the Morning on The View (yes, I keep it as background noise- don’t judge me)- And, I struggled to not judge Rizzuto. Not everyone’s mothering instincts are the same- She said, “I never wanted to be a mother. I love my kids, but I didn’t love getting up at 3 AM to clean up vomit.” I understood the aversion, the inconvenience, but part of me thought- well, that is kind of selfish. If my kid is sick, I want to be the one cleaning up his puke- because I love him. But, that’s my mothering style- and my mothering style is not everyone else’s. I believe it is true that if a mom is miserable, it will manifest in damaging ways within the children- maybe they’ll be insecure or sad-
I felt that I was a pretty hard-core feminist while I was working, working, climbing, getting my pats on the back- looking good (not like a manatee during my 9th month of pregnancy), smelling good- with my highlighted hair and pedicured feet. But, my definition of feminism has changed. We’ve moved really far as women to be able to choose to leave to find ourselves (even if we don’t agree with that course), and we now have the choice to stay home to make our children our mission (with the ability to go back to work if necessary or if we want to).
Good for you for finding part-time work- That is a hard thing to find in my particular field, so I left it behind and may re-enter again- But, in the meantime, the blogging, writing, photography is my “me” time much like your craft and blogging time- I think it’s the creative outlet that allows us to stay positive and intellectually active. At least, it is for me. Good post!
Thanks for your thoughtful comments! I love your description about not looking like a manatee and keeping up your highlights and pedicures - that was totally me with the first pregnancy and it all went out the window with the second!
For me, it was really difficult to downshift to a part-time schedule and to shift my identity around after kids, and I still struggle with it at times, but it is getting easier. Like you said, having “me” time is the most important thing and my blog has literally saved my life at times.
One of the things I have loved about working, though, is letting my daughter see me in another role, which I’ve posted about at my blawg The Verdict: http://lawyer-mom.com/2011/03/10/see-jane-go-to-work/. The great thing today is that it’s not so black and white and hopefully we all find some workable middle ground, whatever that might be.
This totally sums up how I feel about being a mom. Here at our workplace, mothers are known to be on leave most of the time to attend to every little thing their kids need. Though the company understands their needs and accomodates them, us (the co-workers) find it inconvenient. And then, all they ever talk about are their kids and breastfeeding. I swore to myself that when I become a mother, I will try to hold on to a little bit of myself. And now I am… and it’s hard. But I only have one kid so somehow, it is manageable. I don’t know how well I’ll fare when I have another kid in a few years.
Thanks for stopping by, Janelle! Loved the Minnie Mouse dress you made for your daughter
I find it’s really hard to hold onto your personal self, your wife self and your work self when your new mommy self comes barging in, but it’s also probably because I had my two very close together and was working insanely long, hard hours after coming back from my first maternity leave while being pregnant with my second. You could say I was drowning! It took a while, but now that I acknowledge that I need “me” time, things are a whole lot better!
Hope you can find a happy medium in your situation
(Btw, part of the hell I experienced actually relates to your workplace! Small world!!)
Crazy small world indeed! Though I am happy to say I’m sure I had little to do with the hell you experienced with us since I hardly ever deal with legal matters. The closest I come to legal was every time we needed to post new or updated support policies on our website. We bug Marketing to give it to us… and I think Marketing bugs Legal (they should right???).
We definitely need ‘ME’ time… and crafting gives me that, though my ‘ME’ time is usually very late at night after daughter sleeps or very early morning before going to work but I take what I can. So glad to have found your blog too!