The Eggheaded and Eggbellied

A good friend of mine from childhood, whom I’ll call “Madame M” wrote this about my last blog entry:

“The good news is you'll be too tired, excited, and in love to worry about which bucket you fit in for quite awhile. :)”

Ah, yes, but Madame M, let me tell you, was raising two stepchildren while pregnant with her first baby, negotiating the loss of her eldest son to an avalanche earlier that year and working full time as an engineer in silicone valley. She loves her children dearly (her little girl was joined by a little boy about three years ago), but still works full time. And alas, well, this kind of examination of culture and its literary evocations is my work. Just to clarify. Hell, they even gave me a Ph.D. in it.

Not that Madame M is the first to grow cranky at this running conversation about styles of motherhood and evocations of “hipness” A very clever Lynn at http://www.thenewhomemaker.com/node/70264 writes:
“Another reason all this bugs me so much is that I was never cool to begin with. Ever. Not a day in my life. Would I like to be cool? When I was a teenager, god yes. I would probably have loved to have been cool right up until I had kids. After that, it SO did not matter any more.
If I *care* about my toddler's eating habits, as in the blurb from that book in the last blog post, there's something wrong with me. I should care more about Manolo Blahnik shoes or snorting coke or my band or my memoir or getting pierced or whatever. Talking about my kids? that's like SO not cool, unless I can somehow link it to something cool like, I dunno, my yoga routine.
And you know what? Screw that.
For instance. I've been a knitter for 35 years and it pissed me off when the Hip Young Urban Knitter thing took off, not because a lot of fun young girls were starting to knit and design--bless em, I'm glad to have them in the knitting sorority!--but because that's who everyone started marketing to, and Square Old Urban Knitters like me were not only marginalized, we were looked down upon.
And now I'm not hip enough for motherhood?! Who the hell ARE these people!”

I love both of these responses because they underline something I’ve been talking about regarding feminism and womanism and all those other isms that to be a girl gets you invited to: the assumption that there is one way to be a feminine person and that it’s fairly homogenous throughout North American mainstream culture. From what I can tell about what goes on in the real world outside of theory textbooks and laundry soap commercials, there are as many ways to be a woman as there are women who are one. There are also as many ways to be a mother as there are mothers who are becoming themselves every day.

Not that a young man becoming a Nietzschean, or a constitutional law scholar or a Republican is not going to closely investigate and discuss these choices. In fact, although there may be a correlation between the way he launders his clothes or puts out the garbage and his personal philosophy, he may rarely make that connection (unless it’s a question of green politics and/or eco-criticism). But motherhood many times claims a correlation between the smallest practices and the philosophies that drive them, as I’ve know little as contentious among the world’s controversies as how (male or female) one chooses to raise one’s children.
Hence my excitement about the conversations at hand.

Okay, so I promised last time to talk about what I thought I’d done well during pregnancy and what I screwed up so here it is:

1) I didn’t lose my mind and eat everything in sight like many of my friends said I should (mostly because you can get away with sporting an extra few pounds), but I did have a chocolate and salami binge over the holidays.
2) I swam weekly, but not twice a week as often as I’d wanted to – class requirements and holiday time constraints being what they are. Every time I swam I felt better. Every time I didn’t, my bones ached and my fingers swelled like those salamis I mentioned earlier.
3) I slept but not nearly enough and now that I’m getting close to the last two weeks of uninterrupted sleep I’ll have for nearly ten years, I’m regretting some of those late nights of staying up just to prove I was still cool.
4) I didn’t get through nearly as many Netflix as I thought I would but I have an extended period of nursing here that I suspect will take me through every egghead, Merchant-Ivory, A&E rerun of every French film I ever missed.
5) I didn’t go back and edit my last scholarly book, but then I didn’t really intend to.
6) I didn’t blog or journal as many of the strangely crazy moments of this process as I should have. It’s renewed my respect for the human body and natural processes. That you can get this big with another being living inside you and not die seems to me pretty heady and cool.
7) I did think about this a lot and mentioned it to a number of people whom I talked to a lot.
8) I hung out with my good friends a lot. I think I will see them less over the next few months and miss those hours of uninterrupted conversation.
9) I learned the value of comfortable shoes.
10) I also learned the value of pretty shoes that just get you into bed with your significant other . . . and the outcome of such adventures.

That’s enough for now. I’ve got some grading to do and some housekeeping. It seems I can’t quite get the place clean enough, of course, I’m working around a physique that looks like I swallowed a hoppity-hop.