Hot Mamas and Cool Characters

A colleague's colleague from gradate school, Lisa Hammond Rashley (http://web.infoave.net/~lrashley/), came to our small campus to give a talk on "Babies, Books and Blogs" last Spring. I was not yet pregnant nor did I have any reason to expect that I would be soon. Yet her brilliant talk unsettled me so deeply that I caught myself uttering several juicy expletives and oaths, as well as knocking over half a cup of coffee, at which point I decided to retire to my office to fuss in private. It wasn't so much that she filled us in on the draconian dietary fascism of the ever-popular What to Expect when You're Expecting (more than half a whole-wheat bagel at a time is cheating on the pregnancy diet), or went over some of the mainstream baseline assumptions about motherhood one can put together from soap advertising (we all stand around in sunlit laundry porches waiting for someone to get dirty), it was that mothers were writing back, all over the country, in their blogs and websites, about what real motherhood was really like. And it was controversial and women felt like they'd finally found their voice.

Excuse me, but hadn't we done that back in the 1970's with Roe v. Wade, NOW, Gloria Steinem and the Equal Rights Amendment? The answer that was coming back from the trenches was a resounding "No!"

Despite Women's Studies departments, novels by Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey's book clubs and a whole level of academic study about what it really meant to be female and/or a woman in this country, huge chunks of the real deal were still left uncovered. Motherhood has some irksome truths about it. For one, not everyone bonds immediately with their squalling little infants while they teethe, cry, shit and peeve their way through the first year of life. Perfectly good mothers find themselves taking some time to bond with the little creatures well enough to not want to just give them back to where ever they came from. And our assumptions about the naturalness and ease of breast feeding are also pretty much shite: it's not uncommon for new mothers to find themselves crying in frustration over their cracked, bleeding, tortuously swollen breasts while both mom and baby figure out what they're doing. Nor is it common, despite our advertising otherwise, for women to really want to obliterate themselves forever despite their overwhelming love for their children.

So to be honest, part of the discussion I'm raising here isn't new, it's just that it's mine. For other points of view (or if you find this blog interesting) you should also check out:

http://www.hipmama.com/node/115

http://literarymama.com/

http://www.mamazine.com/

http://www.salon.com/mothers/mamafesto.html

I'm sure there's something like this out there for new Daddy-dudes who want to buck the system and father on their own terms, though there are some great books out there, including Pop Culture and Alternadad, which my husband (Dan -- you may as well get his real name as I'm sure he'll come up repeatedly) has read cover-to-cover with great excitement.

Okay, so neither Dan nor I are operating in a vaccum of discussion about all of this nor are we the first to put into words the concerns of transitioning from an intellectual, perhaps neurotically self-aware place to the change of parenthood (for Dan's blog, see http://papazook.blogspot.com/2007/01/terms-of-service.html).

For myself, I think I'm just surprised that my belly aches and my feet hurt and that they didn't before now. Seriously, I look like I swallowed a hoppity-hop and am pretty amazed that human skin and bones (let alone innards) are able to do this. If nothing else, the experience has really impressed me with the human body, most of which I usually think about as something to walk the human brain around with.

I'll regale you next time with what I've done right and what I've done wrong, but for now I need a nap. It's the last couple weeks of this adventure, I sleep about an hour at a time as it is and I ain't apologizing for keeling over sideways when I can. I'm told it could be the last time in several years that I have that luxury.