This week my youngest daughter will celebrate her 22nd birthday and six months ago my oldest daughter celebrated 26 years around the sun. I’ve been a mother for just a hair over a quarter of a century - it’s surreal to write that. Even after all this time, I find myself engaged in the act of mothering each and every day. Children need their mother - albeit in different ways - no matter their age.
I also use my maternal skills in my profession as a childbirth educator and doula as I support other women navigating this new phase of their life. I help them be aware of their personal power to make choices for themselves. I cheer them on through the challenges of labor. I encourage them to tune into their intuition after crossing the threshold of birth as they wind through the new terrain of breastfeeding and caring for a newborn human. I listen as they share their challenges or sorrows. Celebrate with them as they delight in their newfound abilities.
Mothering is always at the forefront of my mind and a core part of my identity and life.
Becoming a mother is a significant rite of passage where each of us experiences profound change in both our body and our mind. Crossing through this portal, our priorities can radically shift. We may question life in ways that we never considered before. Our needs are suddenly very different and our love for our child ignites a desire to protect them in a deep and primal way. Many parts of society that we may have simply accepted as being standard fare before the mothering transition might be reflected from our new worldview in a glaringly obvious and not so flattering light. I don’t think I ever really questioned anything about the workings of the world before becoming a parent. I was simply caught up in the big machine, blithely unaware of the messaging all around me as I blindly accepted the dominant culture as being just the way life was. For me, pregnancy was the beginning of a wake-up call.
Who and what would I have been if I had not become a mother? I shudder to think. I know that the way I view life and my thought processes are vastly different from what they were before becoming a parent. In retrospect, I understand that my personal experience of birthing my children naturally and breastfeeding them were a big part of these shifts for me. Because I was attracted to what would now be labeled as responsive or attachment parenting and a more natural path (which felt normal to me, but turned out not to be the cultural norm), I chose to birth and parent differently from my neighbors and what was recommended by the standard medical community. This set in-motion the process of listening to my own voice and my children’s needs versus listening to authority figures. Being responsible for gestating, birthing and raising little humans into big humans catapulted me into becoming a wholly different person (just ask my husband!)
Where I ended up couldn’t have been predicted by how it all started. My entry into motherhood was one that was initially conflicted. When I took my first ever pregnancy test (way back in the dark ages of July 1997), my body was in one place and my mind in another. After a decade of being in a committed relationship and living “in sin” for seven of those years (my parents’ assessment), my husband and I finally tied the knot at a beautiful wedding ceremony in June on a Friday evening blessed with a full moon the day after the 10 year anniversary of our first date. And, just so no one erroneously believes my husband was dragging his feet, I want to be clear: he was always direct and focused regarding his love and commitment to me - my left hand had sported a diamond on its ring finger for three plus years. I was the one dithering.
Upon nearing 30, getting married seemed the next logical step - an important one before thinking of starting a family. I always knew I wanted kids “one day.” It wasn’t something my partner and I talked about, but seemed an unspoken assumption for the future - whenever that might be. With my 20’s looming shortly in the rear-view mirror, the road I needed to take seemed clearer.
During this time in my life, I was studying acting and pursuing performing in local theater as well as doing some commercial work (I know, I know - one of thousands bounced off the turnip truck). Having checked off the “Get Married” box in my life, now I needed to check off the get-your-finances-in-order box by landing more commercial work and the achieve-a-personal-career-goal box of being cast in a significant role in one of the productions at the theater company I was a part of. Once I checked off those two boxes, I felt I would be ready to move forward.
One day in the weeks after we returned from our honeymoon trip in Sedona, Arizona, I was rushing to get to an audition on time. Driving on the streets of Los Angeles in my burgundy-colored 2-door 1980 Volvo, I suddenly felt a wave of intense hunger combined with a weird nausea that compelled me to stop at the McDonald’s I could see from the corner of my eye on the right side of the road. I quite literally never go to McDonald’s. I abhor fast food; it makes my nose wrinkle and my lips curl back. However, an order of crispy fries and a creamy milkshake were a siren’s song at that very moment, an urge unable to be denied as I veered suddenly off route and off my timeline towards those golden arches. When I told my husband I had to stop by the fast food chain to pick up something to eat, he looked at me like I suddenly sprouted two heads. Maybe a pregnancy test was a good idea?
So, full confession: my first child was not exactly planned. She was our little Sedona surprise. While I had felt a gentle tugging in my heart to start thinking about having a family and that this primal urge was the unspoken impetus for my finally taking on those wedding plans, I wasn’t consciously trying to get pregnant. Our birth control method was trying to navigate around my ovulation zone in a very unscientific way (which my husband likes to refer to now as “maybe baby”.) After nearly 10 years of this, we felt we had a pretty good track record.
I knew that I wanted a fresh start with getting married before getting serious about having a child. I needed to recoup from the wedding expenses, save some money for our baby-to-be and hopefully accomplish 1 or 2 mini-career goals so that I had something to show for the direction I had taken over the last decade of my life. A year seemed a reasonable time frame for completion of these goals as I didn’t want to wait too long (I had just turned 30) and preparing for a pregnancy seemed a reasonable idea as I was completely clueless.
Well, being prepared was not how it was going to turn out because after I peed on that pregnancy test stick, I got the shock of my life seeing those two pink lines confirming what I suspected after a missed period and chowing down those fast-food fries. At the time, I was alone. I didn’t tell my husband I was taking the test - I wanted it to be a secret; a holdover of ambivalent avoidant attachment from my family growing up. My first thought after the initial shock of gazing at the pink duo was, “What will my baby think of me?”
According to society, I was a loser. I had no real career success. No status. My finances were completely depleted as I had spent all my savings on the wedding in order to hold up my end of the load – not a wise move, but good intent. I was a dreamer waiting tables. On the road to nowhere. I was nothing. A nobody. Not good enough. Scared.
When I finally told my husband, I broke down in sobs. I couldn’t even support myself physically and lay prone on the bed, gasping out the news, tears running hot rivulets over my face onto the pillow below, my face blotchy and puffy (I’m an ugly crier). And, beautiful soul that he is, he met me in my moment of complete vulnerability and need as he held me tenderly in his arms. He listened. He reassured me. And he was actually very happy and excited to be a father, which in turn, gave me permission to finally feel those feelings, too.
I would have loved to have entered pregnancy in a state of readiness and to have set in motion a healthier fertile ground for our first child. If I had known, I would have avoided being under such incredible stress in the months before conceiving (I planned and took care of all the details of the wedding unassisted by family or friends in addition to working long hours). If I could have a Hermione Granger Time Turner and look upon those two pink link lines with joy instead of shock - I would do it. Not really for myself, but for my daughter. She deserved better. She was worthy of feeling wanted at the start right from the moment of discovery. And, maybe, not having to deal with toxic fry grease from old Mickey D’s.
That’s one of my mothering regrets. However, fully accepting that moment and who I was at that moment in time is part of understanding that I am simply a character who is a one part in the larger drama of life. While it would fulfill my ego to be the heroine of every moment and believe that I am good and doing the right things always, that can make for a rather boring story. It’s the overcoming of obstacles - internal and external - that leads us to becoming who we really are as we learn from our experiences.
As I ponder upon that first thought that popped into my head after realizing I could no longer deny being pregnant when those rosy twin lines hurled me unceremoniously into accepting reality, I know that I learned what I could not learn in any other way. That being a mother is enough. I am just the right mother for my children. They did not need someone with big career success. Or social status. Or a mother who was important or significant. Or perfect. They just needed me to be there. To love and to see them. To be fully present in their lives. I was enough.
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