As I wrote, this NanoWriteWhatYouKnowMo process is pretty exhausting. I’m going back to a time that was filled with uncertainty, and I’m a person who likes to be in control. Mostly, though, to become a parent is the most out of control experience, ever (even if you have to set limits and create boundaries and all that good stuff as time goes on). You can’t prepare for that kind of love. That’s the bottom line, really.
One reader wrote of being a first mom: “I think that the surprising sadness is just the flip side of the really astonishing love; there’s no way to really anticipate the way you’ll love your child, even after hearing many, many mothers talk about it. And then when you lose that child, similarly, there is no way to really be prepared for the way that the sun goes out.”
She shared with me in an email that as much as she thought she could steel herself from that love, she discovered it washed over her anyway.
I said to a friend of mine that I’d been sitting with her comments and the catchphrase of any good first grade teacher—You get what you get—kept echoing in my mind. I decided that parental love is like being hit by a giant wave. Whatever waters you find yourself in, you’re there. Regardless of any particulars, you get wet.
**
There are moments when I look at my kids and they seem so amazing, not just through my eyes, but I imagine for others looking at them: the brilliant reader or terrific cook, the artist, the stellar sibling shows of attention. There are other moments, through my eyes and I imagine others’ eyes, too, when my kids seem less than so amazing: the struggles in school, the cursing at the class picnic in age inappropriate ways, or the least desired player for a team.
Sometimes, it seems that as parents, we spend about equal time kvelling and actively worrying.
Here’s the thing: I love my kids when I’m bursting with pride and I love them when I’m about to pull my hair out.
Last weekend, we had an evening of epic misery and while at first I thought I’d been trying to cajole kids from bad moods for six hours straight, at a certain point—I think in retrospect it happened about four hours in—I wasn’t being supportive or helpful, I was whining right back at them. It wasn’t pretty, I can tell you that. I was soaking wet.
True story: I didn’t love them one iota less. And I don’t know how that’s remotely possible.
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It’s kind of odd, for lack of another word, that in the blogging world, the first mothers and adoptive mothers are often “in it” together, as readers and as people cheering for one another’s lives to go well. I can’t immediately think of other incidences when I’ve been admitted to another side of the experience so intimately and really, so freely. It’s also kind of anxiety producing to want to be supportive of people with very different situations than your own—yet with experiences that are connected to yours, too in some significant ways—and worry that unwittingly you’re saying something completely wrong, even completely hurtful.
As a writer trying to chronicle the experience of being an adoptive mother, I worry all the time about saying something hurtful. It’s part of the task of writing about our most important experiences, that sense of knowing there are many truths and in trying to share just one, you may, in speaking yours, come across so wrongly to another’s ears.
One place first mothers and adoptive mothers share is that wave, the soaking wetness, the aftermath of the waves’ crashing, even if the aftermaths are different.
**
I’ve been a parent a while now. I thought, when I leapt or flew or pushed the baby out and got my entrance card—however it was I arrived on the Planet Parenthood—that there are universal things about motherhood. Universal, as in, everyone shares at least this. Every time I really think about what this might be, I come up short, though. Universal isn’t about raising a child, because for many, many reasons—death, divorce, adoption, or profound illness and on and on—not every parent raises every child. Some families are tumultuous and complicated; others are seemingly simple, straightforward. Some kids are sleepers; others are not. This list of how different parenting can be, it is endless, right? I venture to say that even the wave might not be wholly universal. Maybe it’s simply the thing that comes closest.
