Well, yes. For those of us who don't leave the baby in its cot with a bottle and go out on the lash with seedy men night after night (this sounds pointed, of course it's not, I'm thinking of the ISPCC ad, 'Johnny doesn't cry anymore because he knows no-one will come'). My day is full of times when I shuffle through mundane and boring, or stressful child-related tasks and interactions.
My four year old is often seriously unpleasant to be around. Captivated as I am by my baby, sometimes I just don't get any joy from fighting mush into him and all over the kitchen, or playing ten thousand games of peekaboo (well, ok, I quite like that) or changing a nappy three times in a row. Sometimes I just want him to go to sleep, so I can sit at the computer, or read a book. I'd like to get drunk and come home whenever I want and sleep all day the next day and not have to be responsible for anyone else. I've even stood at the fridge swigging from a bottle because of being so strung out - nothing as ritual as one tequila slammer, that's far more healthy!
Because that's what it comes down to - the weight of being emotionally responsible for these small people, essentially 24 hours a day, whether you're with them or not. As my mother said, once you become a parent, you don't have the right to die anymore. The lucky among us have a co-parent to share this weight, ideally equally, but often with varying levels of responsibility.
Carrying babies makes women more responsible, it seems. You have a connection to your child that doesn't have to be learned. Is it for this reason that mothers are far less likely to leave their children than men? Women leave their children sometimes, but it apalls us in a way that the absent father doesn't. Even dedicated, loving men seem to be able to walk away from their children's daily lives. They share houses, give financial support, but they give up that weight of emotional responsibility easily. They forget the Christmas concert, they no longer mop up sick or wake for nightmares. Is it anthropological, this feeling that their role is to provide, rather than nourish?
This is why I am uncomfortable with pro-life people who insist that adoption is an easy answer to unwanted pregnancy. There's nothing easy about it, I don't think. There are, I have no doubt, countless adopted children who feel secure with their parents and have no feeling towards their biological parents. But I am confident that for every one of them, there is another who feels keenly the separation and abandonment their infant selves endured, assumes that they must be unlovable as their birth mother didn't want them. I'm not saying adoption is a bad thing, but it is no easy choice for anyone concerned, I don't think.
The issue I'm skirting here is the sacrifice that is at the core of motherhood. To have small children is necessarily to suffer a loss of self. Hopefully it's not permanent, but I believe it is inescapable.
You are tied, you are not free. Ideally you embrace that role and see it as furthering the future of the planet, in raising the best people you possibly can. It's hard to see that long view when you're in the middle of tanrums and poo. But you have to look, you do it with love, even if you grumble day to day. And don't devalue it,for yourself or others. .
For days now, I've had in my head an uncomfortable contradiction. Can you be pro-life but allow yourself to resent your children and the demands they make on your life? Isn't that the sacrifice you would impose on others who wish to abort their babies in order to live their lives by their own terms? Being pro-life should mean being pro-life: protecting and valuing children's lives, and the people who do so as parents. Not just stopping children's termination. I believe fully in quality not quantity. Where is the worth in populating the world with unwanted, damaged people? Mother Teresa said 'there is no such thing as an unwanted child! Show me an unwanted child and I will take them in' or words to that effect. In Mother Teresa's orphanage, the workers are not allowed to hold the babies, or stay with one too long;. They must feed them at arms length. So Mother Teresa's pro-life legacy is a legion of people who were not allowed to develop as they needed to, who were denied the love and comfort people need to become whole. And this in a country (or a world) so populous that children can be maimed to ensure a better income as beggers, or sold into sex-slavery. God's work indeed.
In our more moderate first world society, perhaps people don't have the same excuse. Certainly I would support reform of the support services so that they made it easy for women to have their children. Good maternity services, childcare services, parental leave, welfare systems that protect adn educate. I would support that over abortion rights, who wouldn't? But I don't believe that you can espouse a commitment to the pro-life movement on one hand, and on the other devalue the sacrifice we make in raising our children. Don't choose to have them against your own will and then blame them for ruining your life. Don't let your children feel they are in your way, that their existence is stopping you from doing something more worthwhile. It's often miserable, this job, but I just don't believe it's any less worthwhile that doing something in the adult sphere. Put it this way: raising a good, strong, whole son who knows how to love and respect women and be a dedicated father has got to be worth as much as helping someone who has been hurt by a man who is violent, damaged, incapable of love. Prevention is better than cure, perhaps.
I'm lucky. From an early age I wanted nothing more than to have children. I was desperate to be pregnant, to birth and hold a baby. My mother breastfed me and it has always seemed normal and instinctual to feed a baby from myself, skin to skin. I still get bored, impatient, frustrated. I don't always feel fulfilled, I feel challenged, inadequate, lacking. I certainly have not managed to adhere to the ideals I had before I had children. I still believe in them though. So it's easy for me to insist that raising the best people you can is enough, is as good as making money, as career ambition, as fame, charity or whatever.
I conceived my first child at an extremely inopportune time. I ultimately knew I couldn't go through with a termination, mostly because of the longterm affect it would have on me (and my husband) emotionally. But I would have been happy had my pregnancy happened to stop before it began, and if I had been able to take something to bring on my period after a month I would have. And here I am, I was right about the things that would be too hard, or all wrong, or miserable when they should have been happy. And I have to remember my comittment to trying to do right by my child when those feelings get overwhelming. Suck it up and do a better job, Jo. That is what motherhood comes down to. Get what you need for yourself within the boundaries of parenthood. Find a way. Accept the difficulty. And keep the bigger picture in mind.
Midge, I really do know how you feel. What it's like to feel that you gave up your twenties, that your thirties are falling away too. That there is more inside you than the life you fell into. You didn't ask for the life you got. And you never signed up to doing it alone. Why should you have to? Why should you shoulder the greater responsiblity and sacrifice? It's not fair.
I'm not for a minute questioning your love for your children. But given all the restraints, I hope you can find the grace to enjoy the good times and the positives within this tough stretch, and your lovely children, and not just see them as some sort of prison sentence. We should be able to give this time without martyring ourselves. I hope we can find a way to enjoy it, to gain from it as much as we give.
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