Planting Dandelions (5 page)

I was then, and am still, for lack of a better word, a stay-at-home mom. I didn't intend to be. That wasn't what little girls who grew up watching
Mary Tyler Moore
were expected to become. I thought I would have a career. If I had a baby, I would take maternity leave and resume my career once that project was launched and running smoothly. But that idea was based on maternity benefits as they existed in Canada, and children as they existed in my mind. Having real children, in the United States, was a different proposition. There was no career to interrupt or resume. I barely got my U.S. work permit before I got pregnant, and then I worked temp jobs, none of which came with benefits or paid enough to make day care worthwhile. Even if I had a permanent position that paid well, I couldn't wrap my head around the meager American maternity leave of six weeks. It takes me that long after having a baby just to start thinking about personal hygiene again. The notion of myself as a briefcase-carrying mom, with a steady salary and a freezer full of breast milk, was the first of many maternal illusions I'd come to forsake, and probably the easiest one to let go. I was a college dropout who had always been able to talk my way into jobs that exceeded my education and maturity. But with no degree, and a foreign résumé, I was going to have to move my marker back to start. I was just as glad to sit out.

Patrick's paycheck covered our car payment and the rent and utilities for a two-bedroom apartment. Being at home afforded me the time to be creative with our resources and frugal with our money. I breast-fed and cloth-diapered, shopped with coupons, and cooked in batches. I studied parenting and nutrition books, joined Internet forums, and went to La Leche League meetings. I threw myself into domesticity with reckless abandon. I was zealous, idealistic, and probably quite tiresome, but it takes a certain fervor to get through the baby years. It helps to fall in love with your captors. The infatuation anesthetized the pain of separation from the person I was before: rested, unfettered, accessorized.

Some new parents struggle with abandoning normal. They wait for its return like castaways watching for smoke on the horizon; go slowly mad waiting for sleep, sex, and privacy to come back for them. I found it easier to face facts. Normal wasn't coming back. I moved deep into the interior of mothering, and forgot I'd ever known anything else.

Human beings have been keeping infants and young children within arm's reach ever since we had fur they could cling to. But in twenty-first-century middle America, that tradition is considered an alternative lifestyle. Fortunately, even in the suburbs, there is subculture, and it didn't take long to find kindred oddballs. Wearing a baby sling in public is like going out in a Highland kilt. It identifies you to your clan. I was taken in, and embraced, by a small tribe of mothers gathered under the umbrella of attachment parenting, a name popularized by Dr. William Sears's
Baby Book
. We met for weekly playgroup and monthly potlucks, and I looked forward to those times with an eagerness formerly reserved for romantic rendezvous. I was twenty-nine years old, and though I thought of myself as a feminist, and had grown up with a loving mother and sister, two splendid grandmothers, an abundance of aunts, and assorted female elders, for the first time in my life, I fell in head over heels in love with women.

How could I not? These were smart, passionate, funny, and fiercely independent women. Some were young moms, barely out of their teens, with tattoos and piercings; and some were routinely mistaken for grandmothers. There were those with advanced degrees and impressive résumés; and there were those who had become mothers before they had a chance to try their hand at anything else. Some were transplants, like me, and some had never left their hometown. They were all very brave. It takes guts to trust your own authority in the face of disapproval—and sometimes, harsh judgment—from doctors, relatives, and total strangers. Even within the group, eyebrows were sometimes raised at the mothers who were furthest off the grid: breast-feeding not just through but past toddlerhood; adopting controversial positions on education; or taking the concept of natural parenting to such an extreme that their kids were half feral and terrified all the rest. But our experience was common at the core, if not at the fringes. We could sympathize with each other's sleepless nights, aching backs, and cracked nipples without feeling defensive. We could joke about not being able to pry our attached kids off our bodies, and laugh at our mothers' concern that we were having sex next to our babies in the family bed. As if we were having sex, we said. We laughed harder at that, and then we cried. We reminded each other, over and over, that it was all such a short, sweet time; that our children would one day wean from our breasts, sleep through the night, and be independent. We were raising a healthy, emotionally intelligent, free-thinking generation to be a light to the world. We were all on the same mission, mothers-in-arms. I'm not going to pretend it was a utopian matriarchy. It wasn't. We could be unkind, sanctimonious, and petulant. But it was a sisterhood. And to me, it was oxygen.

Identifying myself as part of a movement not only provided me with an instant community, it made it seem like I had a plan. I adopted it like a new religion, with all the proselytizing and intolerance of the recently saved. I didn't just disagree with formula-feedings, disposable diapers, day care, and baby-schedulers, I had contempt for them. I pretended compassion for parents who were at their wits' end, but I really thought those who spanked and made babies cry themselves to sleep were child abusers. Yes, I was that asshole. I didn't make allowances for circumstances other than mine. I secretly judged working mothers for choosing a paycheck over the emotional well-being of their child. I conveniently forgot that I needed help learning to breast-feed at first, and had been lucky to have a midwife who could guide me. Those who chose not to nurse had to be uncaring or ignorant, and those who quit hadn't tried hard enough, obviously. It was difficult to fathom how other people could have their priorities so backward. I was both baffled and irritated when I was told by a neighbor, “You have to get away from your baby sometimes.”

Why, I wondered, cradling my tiny son in his sling. He'd grow up and go away from me soon enough, perhaps as far away from me as I was from my own mother. Why in the world would I want to get away from him now, when he most wanted to be with me?

There would be plenty of time to take care of myself and my marriage later, I thought. If I noticed that some of the most fiercely attached mothers had spouses who seemed oddly
detached
, I didn't connect it with the intense focus on child rearing, or to my own marital health. Everything was secondary to my way and truth.

It must be said, before anyone glares hard and long on my account at the next mother they see nursing a toddler (who is probably getting enough evil looks as it is, and could use a smile instead), that my views weren't representative of the Order of the Sling. Some of us rode in on higher horses than others, and even the most evangelical among us was sure to have a counterpart on the other side of the playground, thinking we should all be arrested for indecent exposure of our breasts, and for endangering our children by sleeping with them. Moms are so hard on each other because we're so damn hard on ourselves. None of us can really be sure we're doing the right thing, or know how it's all going to turn out. Today, I believe most parents—even the spankers—love their kids as much as I do, and are doing the best they can, like I do. But you couldn't tell me that back then.

With each child, I became more relaxed, or maybe I was just more exhausted. At any rate, I was less rigid in my views. I found it was possible to compromise, and still be a good mother; perhaps, a healthier person. My firstborn wouldn't take a bottle or pacifier, for instance, because I hadn't dared introduce one before the recommended time, lest dreaded nipple confusion impair his breast-feeding technique. It worked. He was
very clear
on the difference, and spat out every kind of artificial nipple I tried. I couldn't be away from him for more than an hour or two at a stretch. It was awful. I was discovering that I did need to get away from my baby sometimes, if just to go to the dentist.

“Do what you have to do,” I said with a meaningful look, as I left him with one of my nursing friends one morning so I could keep an appointment. I was only half joking.

With the next baby, I wasn't taking any chances. As soon as he seemed to get the hang of nursing, I gave him a bottle. “This is a bottle,” I told him. “And this is a breast. Questions?”

He had none.

I was prepared to give the third one a pacifier as soon as his head was all the way out. He generally had one in his mouth, one clipped to his shirt, and one tucked in my pocket on standby.

Over time, I found I needed to revisit more than just my position on feeding and soothing. Having a second child forced me to consider how long I could possibly keep pouring so much of myself out. I was starting to think I might not be the earth mother I wanted to be, any more than I was the executive mom I thought I would be. After the first two years of immersion, the romance of homemade yogurt and hand-sewn sock puppets began to wear thin, as did my self-esteem. The labor involved in taking care of small kids is menial and repetitive. You're cleaning up other people's body waste day after day. There's an aspect of it that works on your ego in a good way. It can be a humbling act of devotion. It can also make you feel like shit. My complete financial dependence on my husband was subtly corrosive, too. I began to feel as if I wasn't really qualified to do anything but mind children, keep house, sort the mail, and make appointments—tasks that translated to the bottom of the pay scale in the job market. It frightened me. What if Patrick dropped dead, and I had to provide? Where would I even begin?

On top of all that—or more truthfully, buried deep beneath it—I was getting bored. Potlucks and playgroups were my main social outlet, and they weren't enough. I called Patrick at the office to talk, and sometimes fight, several times a day. I poured my creative energy into projects that never got finished, problemsolving that didn't help anybody, and any other diversion I could put between myself and the dread truth that as much as I adored my children, I needed something more to feel fulfilled. But I couldn't admit it without a specific idea of what “more” might be. I needed a clear exit sign.

It came in the form of a part-time job as an assistant to a priest at the Episcopal church I had wandered into one Sunday when my firstborn was a few months old. I wasn't sure what I was doing there, but it intrigued as much as perplexed me, so I kept wandering back. The liturgy was familiar; the “smells and bells,” as Anglicans say, of my Catholic schooling, minus the guilt and the gory crucified Jesuses. The service brought some structure to the week, when my days were so much like each other that it seemed to have no beginning or end. On Sundays, at least, I had something to get up and get dressed for, a place to go. It was a portal to a world that included, but didn't revolve around, children. And it was a space where I had a chance to connect with myself, a prayer of hearing the small, still voice within—if the signal hadn't gone dark permanently. The priest, Susan, was a sexy, mature woman with a sleek silver bob and flowing purple batik robes—so radically different from the cadaverous Catholic priests I'd known as a kid, that I had to do a theological double-take. I was wary about the Jesus-y bits, but I was drawn to her offbeat book groups and workshops on meditation and dreams. It was in one of those that she mentioned she was losing her assistant.

The small, still voice pinged.
That's your job.

I didn't say anything, but when she offered the position to me a few weeks later, I considered myself drafted. “Yes,” I said, without really knowing what I was agreeing to do. It turned out to be the perfect part-time job for the next five years, requiring me to develop professional skills that went well beyond making appointments and sorting the mail. It alleviated my fear that my next résumé would have to include a section called “The Missing Years.”

I enrolled the children in a half-day Mother's Day Out program, two days a week. They had hardly ever known a babysitter, so it felt like I was shipping them off to boarding school. Life was supposed to come through me before it came to them. It was my role to screen, diffuse, and manage their every experience. Nobody else, not even their father, was qualified enough, in my eyes. I planned to keep this up through the school years by educating them at home. Before any of my children could hold a crayon, I was already researching curriculums. One week I leaned toward the freestyle “un-school” approach to learning; the next I was sure that a classical education with Latin lessons was right for my future academy. Or we would mix it up, borrow from the best of both. I imagined us sitting around the dining room table, conjugating verbs and finger knitting, myself as a cross between Mary Poppins and the wizard Merlin—every lesson a magical adventure with talking animals and musical numbers.

I loved the idea of homeschooling. Still do. But I must have been thinking of someone else's home. My fantasy didn't account for the fact that I'd never been interested in teaching kids, or admit the possibility that there were trained teachers who had always wanted to teach kids, and might have something of value to offer mine. How could they? In my mind, motherhood was a kind of enclosed terrarium, a bell jar that contained everything my children would ever need to grow. I didn't realize how much bigger their lives—and mine—were going to get. Like the little boy in one of my old storybooks who buys a goldfish and has to keep finding larger containers to hold it, I've had to ditch one cherished idea of motherhood after the other for a more spacious one.