I Remember

Last night I held my friend’s 12-month son as he fell asleep. He lay against my chest sucking his thumb, reaching for my hair, searching the room with his sleepy eyes. Eventually he nodded off while we rocked gently to avoid the squeaks in the chair I’d spent so many nights with my own son.

I remember sitting in that chair, trying to find just the right position to simultaneously accommodate my newborn’s nursing needs and my post partum body, using every pillow in the house to get the right angle to prevent my back and neck from going out of alignment again. I’d reach for my bottle of water by the chair, because my thirst was unquenchable. I remember his little toes, tiny as peas, holding them in my hand and marveling at their absolute perfection.

I remember how I thought for a while that I needed to teach him to fall asleep without nursing. I tried to soothe him by rocking -- while his tears drenched my shirt, his back arched, and he rooted down, until I finally gave up. Then the feelings of frustration in me stronger than I knew possible, as I tried unsuccessfully to get him to nap, nursing for hours at a time, held down on the bed by his needs, while I needed to pee, or was ravenously hungry. I remember it dawning on me that I wasn’t alone in my experience, that other mothers were up all night, just like me, comforting their tired babes, pacing the floors, changing diapers, caring for others in the wee hours of the night, and I drew real strength and comfort from the universal connection with those faceless women.

I remember seeking out the wisdom of Ram Dass, and dwelling on his age-old philosophy of Be Here Now, and finding value in the simplicity of being present in the moment, because it was all I had. Each time I relinquished the illusion of control, and gave up some of the pressure I had placed on myself to have more than what was happening in the moment at hand, I learned the beauty of surrender without losing my self.

I remember how I thought, in the midst of massive sleep deprivation, sore nipples, aching back, and twisting screws behind my eyes, “There is no other reality than this”. It felt like this existence was all there was, and all that will ever be. And in the long hours of the night, meeting my humanity in a way I never had before: feeling discouragement, pain, hope, and love--all at once. On the few days of clarity when I could see beyond the tiny sphere of baby world, I would get a glimpse, like the glint off a prism, of a time when I would see colors again, feel energy to move about freely, and have my body back.

I remember being stunned by my lack of preparedness of having another being pressed against my body continually, day and night, without extended intervals of absence, and how it changed my every thought, movement, belief, and expectation. I thought I knew what was coming--having been a nanny, auntie, godmother, midwife. I knew nothing.

I remember being awash in the enormous complexity of the experience; how it filled me in a way nothing else had before, how it gave me a sense of wholeness I’d never felt, yet filled me with fear, anxiety, a fierce protectiveness of the irrational sort, and love that moved me to tears. I remember the vulnerability that crashed through me where once a powerfully independent, reasonable woman dwelled. I wondered who she was and where she had gone.

Last night, after everyone was asleep, I stood and watched my son dreaming. Where a baby once was, now is a tangle of long, sapling limbs that stretch across our bed, and I remembered…

MotherFromAnother

“Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relation with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal past. We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory” (Patricia Hampl, p.33, I Could Tell You Stories).

“How could I love this child honestly, unconditionally, if a part of me is afraid of him, of myself—of us? How could I really see who he is and nurture who he is meant to be, with a sheath of doubt shrouding my perceptions of him? And might that not alter his authentic self, the original path he was meant to pave in this life?

I recognize the churning of my own unfulfilled needs, the agony of my longings. It is little wonder that we hold our heart’s desire at arm’s length for fear of having and losing those we love. Surrendering to my baby, I finally realize, is not at all about defeat or loss or weakness. It’s not about letting the baby drive me up the wall or off the road. It is about seeing with the heart.

Surrender is about being open, letting in and offering a depth of love and vulnerability and commitment—in motherhood and in marriage—that I might have previously yearned for at a distance.

In a sense, it is about giving up, giving up the barrier between love and fear. In doing so, I feel more connected—to myself, my son, my husband, God, the history of time. Somehow, sitting here, I feel related to every mother who ever rocked a baby in her arms.

I surrender.”

Let the Baby Drive, Navigating the Road of New Motherhood

By Lu Hanessian

Page 167

When she becomes a mother, it is as if a woman must go deep into the bowels of the earth, back to the elemental emotions and the power that makes life possible, losing herself in the darkness. She is like Eurydice in the underworld. She is pulled away from a world of choices, plans, and schedules, where time is kept, space cleared, commitments made, and goals attained, to the warm chaos of love, confusion, longing, anger, self-surrender, and intense pleasure that mothering entails---

Sheila Kitzinger, midwife, social anthropologist, and mother.

Sacred Places I Have Nursed My Son

In a Chinese Restaurant
Standing in line at the post office
the bank
Grocery store
Home Depot
and pharmacy
in my mother's garden at sunset
Flying over Chicago
Take Off Landing and In-between
In the snow
At a wedding
In a church
and a synagogue
On my (95-year-old) Grandmother's sofa
On the shores of Long Island, the Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific Ocean
On the toilet
During seven-hour train rides
and Satsang
At an anti-war rally
The airport in Dallas, Boston, Albuquerque, and Burlington
A dock on Lake Wentworth
The thrift store floor
At Thanksgiving Dinner
On the bank of the river in the Green Mountains.

Originally printed in Mothering Magazine, May/June 2004

Anne Roiphe, noted novelist, journalist and mother addressed the issue of maternal conflict when she wrote, “If there is too much anger there can be too much guilt. If there is too much guilt we can have trouble letting our children go off to explore the room, the school, the world. If we are too guilty we become frantic with the need to prove to ourselves and others what good mothers we really are. Most of us, feminist or traditional woman, at home or at work, manage to contain the small showers of maternal anger and guilt that are simply a part of normal weather conditions”

from her book Fruitful: Living the Contradictions: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood (1996).