This is ridiculous, but I'm always surprised when I catch myself with very weak human thoughts. It's not that I think so highly of myself that I can't have an Achilles' heel, but that I spend so much effort rejecting any shortcomings that surface.
I've mentioned before on this blog that growing up and especially as a teenager, I looked at motherhood as an afterthought, a goal I had for after I had accomplished my other ambitions. Becoming a mother was equivalent to settling down, because there was no way in my mind to juggle the juxtapositions of the stability of motherhood with the danger and recklessness of the life I desired.
The truth is I have weekly identity crises. I am in love with motherhood, but it's still difficult to reconcile my desire for being a good mom to the Fin with the desires I have to do crazy things. Is it okay for a mom to get a tattoo? Is it okay for a mom to pick up and spend a weekend away, doing nothing but laps in a cheap hotel pool just to keep moving? Is it okay for a mom to trade playtime with her child for drinking cup after cup of coffee, staring out a window?
It'd better be, because I was Lindsay first, a mom second. Just like Finley is herself first, my daughter second.
I laugh now that I bandied around the phrase, "I'm a feminist" in high school and afterward, because I had no idea what it meant to be a woman until now. And it's not congruent with motherhood, or a relationship with a man, or any of the cliched stereotypes that you think makes you a woman--being a woman means being a lot of different things all at once, and I think the most feminist thing I could do at this point is be true to all of those roles at once, as difficult as that is to spin them all simultaneously.
2 comments:
it is totally ok to trade babysitting to go do Lindsay stuff and to take a weekend getaway! She is ALWAYS welcome here! (really, i mean it.) You are doing an amazing job!
I hope you're a regular reader of the exponenet blog and subscribe to the magazine (exponentii.org). Even if you don't necessarily identify mormon, you may identify with liberal feminist women who are also mothers, who don't find it sacrilege to pray to a devine feminine, and who daily try to manage their changing identities as feminist and tender women.
(not to mention, you would be an IDEAL candidate for submitting an article- they are doing a mothers day-focused edition; articles are due on friday, but I bet a talented writer like you could whip something up easily. I can't believe I didn't think of this before!)
You're kind of amazing.
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