Friday, September 23, 2011

On becoming a mother, reluctantly

I found out I was pregnant a month to the day after Eric and I got engaged. I had never intended on having children and was convinced I was infertile because of celiac disease and a long-ago conversation with my doctor. After the initial shock and fear wore off, I was relieved. Relieved because it was with my future husband, relieved because he has two children and I had gotten used to the idea of spending my life with them all and because he had done this before. But oddly, relieved because a huge life decision had been made for me.
I recently read this article: Are You Playing Baby Roulette? which was disturbing and, well, relatable.  Not that I had consciously decided "hey, I think I'll just let the wind take me where it will", but I certainly lived with a teenage sense of invincibility. I thanked God that it happened with Eric at that point in our relationship and not any sooner. I had no ideas for my future, no life plan, no college degree, no focused passion to follow. So getting pregnant was a big puzzle piece put into place. I eventually worked out that relationships had always been my focus, that having my own family may be the thing I never realized I always wanted. But because of that I have the fear of becoming a parent who is so unmoored in my own identity that I lose it all in my child's.
Some days I feel like I'm going crazy. I get unreasonably angry at my little girl for not acting how I want her to act, not sleeping when I want her to sleep. I am alone with her a lot, Eric has to work a ton to support us all and with the kids half the week, I get little relief. And I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't do it any different. That I don't sometimes think that having children is a selfish act. I still get panicky when I think about my baby growing up in this world and that I do not have the resources to equip her to do so. But I am changing and growing so quickly. Learning and adapting to this life I had never planned. And much of the time, I love it. I have never loved as deeply as I love my girl and have never known someone or been known by someone as completely as Eric and I have over this past year of marriage.
It is a constant struggle, it is rarely easy. But it is wonderful and it is worth it all. And I thank God for keeping it together when we certainly can't.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

square peg in a triangle hole

It's looking like this blog is going to be about my social issues, which are many, but I guess that's just where I am right now.

Getting married means you make friends with other couples, because people don't usually want to be a "third wheel" and couples don't want to make a friend feel like they're being invited into a threesome or something. Kidding. When I got married I had a baby immediately after and we didn't have those couple friends yet. And when your husband and you have different friends to begin with and belong to different communities and are over a decade apart and your spouse doesn't rely on friends the way you do and neither of you drink anymore... common friends are pretty hard to come by. But we're newlyweds with an infant and two children, so we spend what very little "alone" time we have together. Which means we hardly have friends at all in the way we did before: the quantity time of sharing a house with other people and living in a small-town-feeling big city where you can run into friends everywhere. The quality time of drinking wine and getting heady with a group of friends on Sunday nights. Of weekend brunches and summer cookouts.
Thankfully there are a huge amount of wonderful, caring, intelligent ladies in my community who had babies around the same time as I did. They supported me through my pregnancy and gave me advice and support and gifts, even though I was hardly close to any of them before I got pregnant. And without any real effort, my single friends and I drifted apart. It happens. Having a baby changed my entire life and I had no idea how to relate to the person I was before I had her, let alone how to relate to the people I had lived a completely different life with.  And try as I might to keep connected, I can't figure out how to straddle the line of being a mother and being an individual.
I love hanging out with other parents. They bring wisdom and insight and they understand you, which at first is something you can't even do for yourself. But then I want to go to a bar and drink whiskey and not talk about what my baby eats now and the cute thing she did and how annoying breastfeeding can be. But then I try to and I realize that all I seem to know about the world anymore is what my damn baby is up to.

It's getting easier. The more independent little E gets, the more I can do as well. I can read the news and listen to music and catch up on the stack of books I've been trying to get around to. And maybe I'll be able to have a conversation without the word "boob" coming out of my mouth.  And maybe I'll start to accept that talking about being a mother is different than always talking about your baby, it's something that everyone can relate to, because we've all had one.

Weathering the storm (repost)

So, I'm sitting in my house thinking about all the times I've been through a Philadelphia winter, huddled in a house with a dozen friends eating food and playing games during a snowstorm. And thinking how I cannot even imagine that happening these days, with this hurricane on the way. How those times have tapered off over the years. And I feel a little crushed that having a family has completely usurped the very close family of friends I'd so quickly been welcomed into when I came to Philadelphia 6 years ago, as an angsty, mixed up, soul-searching young 19 year old.
I understand that dynamics change. That much of my first few years in this city and this community were full of booze and hormone filled bad decisions and drama, and that we've since grown up. That many of us have formed real families of our own and have been pulled farther into our household and out of our oikos. And our friend groups have gotten smaller and become more based on our relationship status and childrens ages than our starry-eyed desire to change the world in big picture ways. But I want both. I NEED both. My family is my life, but my family is not all of who I am. And people have always mattered to me more than anything. I believe I have the capacity to love more than I do. And I wonder if any of you are feeling the same.
So what I'm asking for here is a new movement. A new reach to stay connected outside of this screen. To resurrect family dinners that consist of far more than our immediate family. To have Sunday brunches and record listenings and afternoon tea. To be intentional in forming new relationships and reviving old ones. In surrounding our children with our friends and our conversation and our passions as creative, smart, funny individuals. I want my family to know you and be known by you. And I want friendships that aren't only based on the existence of said family.
I want being poor to not keep me from being generous. Not to worry about how little food we have in the fridge and how messy our house is to keep me from inviting friends into it and feeding them what I have. I'm not looking to change the world in the big picture sense quite yet. I'm looking to change my world so I have the energy and passion to do bigger things down the road.
Maybe I'm the only one who hasn't figured out this balance, maybe the old dynamic is too far gone, but if you feel the same I'd love to try. All that to say, I want my friends in my new life. I want a middle ground. And I want your help in this. I'd like to resurrect family dinner, maybe moving from house to house. Once a month to start? We'll do the first one and pick a date once I get a feel for who is interested. So... there's that.