The Bluejay\u2019s Dance: A Birth Year<\/em><\/p>\nLast November, I discovered that I was pregnant with my first child. And these past few months, I\u2019ve done little but vomit, sleep, and try to find foods that will stay down. My mother predicted that this would happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was pregnant, all I could do was run to the bathroom,\u201d she has told me, over and over, trying to assign some of her experience to mine. Trying to find something useful to say.<\/p>\n
My mother had been pregnant four times, the first occurring when she was twenty-five and married to a man who, in her eighth month, smashed a champagne bottle on her head. She hadn\u2019t seen her mother in almost ten years, and had no resource besides magazines and women at the office to guide her through.<\/p>\n
Her advice to me focuses on the practical: Eat Saltines. Sleep. Throw up when you need to\u2014don\u2019t fight it. Get a rocking chair without arms.<\/p>\n
Having a baby is something I\u2019ve wanted my whole life\u2014to be a mom, to have a family, to love. These were things that kept me hopeful during the brittle years of my parents\u2019 marriage, during the nights I kept my headphones on to block out the sound of glass breaking across the trailer.<\/p>\n
But now that I can feel this little one stir inside me, the desire to love is also ridged with an incredible fear that, not only will I love poorly, but that my desire to love is tainted, broken, shaped irreparably by the ways my mother\u2019s love leaked so bitterly from her.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou should take a parenting class,\u201d she chirps at me on a voicemail, \u201cbecause you and Jeremy have never handled a newborn before, and that will help you know how.\u201d<\/p>\n
I want to pick up the phone and chirp right back: You should have listened to us when we said your boyfriend scared us. You should have told me that you loved me without expecting anything in return<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe anger fights a surge of guilt\u2014if my mother had someone to take her to parenting classes, someone who watched out for her in those lonely, difficult days, things might have been different.<\/p>\n
Many friends have told me that, as I become a mother, my perspective on my childhood will change. And, in some ways, it has\u2014I\u2019m not sure that what I expected of my mother was what I really wanted. I don\u2019t know how to feel the weight of what she felt, mothering us: the needs of four kids, the unpaid rent, her father\u2019s angry voice ringing in her head after we were all asleep, my own father tuned out and too tired to listen.<\/p>\n
What I imagine I wanted was the stereotype of mother<\/em>: meals ready, love unwearied, self-sacrifice, a small thing compared to the fulfilling joy of nurturing a child.<\/p>\nIt is not enough, I think, to decide that you will love ceaselessly; it is not a simple act, something that you concede to as a way to fight off whatever curse or fear you feel chasing you.<\/p>\n
But as I comb through mothering blogs and parenting books, that is the message I\u2019m getting. That motherhood is worth the sleepless nights, the dry heaves, the blood that will eventually stream out of me; that, once I meet this child fully, all the difficulties of life will reveal themselves as preparations for this child\u2019s coming, this child\u2019s ability to make my life complete.<\/p>\n
I suspect my mother was told this too, and that, in the face of what she experienced, it fell short of the needs she had, the aches she carried.<\/p>\n
Louise Erdrich, in her memoir The Blue Jay\u2019s Dance: A Birth Year<\/em>, is critical of the messages that expectant mothers receive about their varied labors. \u201cMost of the instruction given to pregnant women,\u201d she writes, \u201cis as condescending as the usual run of maternity clothes.\u201d Not only it is \u201ccutesy,\u201d but it avoids the pain that mothering brings, the difficulty of \u201cself-erasure,\u201d as Erdrich puts it.<\/p>\nBecoming a mother neither completes nor diminishes you, but rather expands you, puts you in a position where you are being forever stretched and changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe self will not be forced under,\u201d Erdrich says, \u201cnor will the baby\u2019s needs gracefully retreat.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that is what makes me think on my mother\u2019s words, my own thoughts bitter in my mouth, my fears keeping me up at night as I feel my belly stretch and my body ache: that the self I am now is not enough to give my child, and that the person I expected my mother to be was someone she could not be, no matter how much she tried.<\/p>\n
How much she tries to give us still, her phone calls unanswered, her voice a cheery mask to the sadness that has stayed with her.<\/p>\n
If the self will not disappear\u2014if motherhood is not a phenomenon that will swallow my fears and wounds\u2014then I must continue to face them, and face my mother, who sits behind a receiver with hands wide open, waiting to give, hoping to erase the things she did, the person she was.<\/p>\n
And I must, and already do, love this little one with everything I have. The question is this: can my love turn to my mother, too, recast the light that\u2019s been shed on her, the pain that she and I have spent our whole life trying to name?<\/p>\n
The answer is: of course, it must, there is no other way. I simply do not know how it will happen. How will I birth a child, become both daughter and mother? How I will give love without fear?<\/p>\n
And maybe I won\u2019t know until this little one comes, life still pushing out of me, strength abounding, mysterious, and unafraid.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don\u2019t know how strong we are until we are pushing out our babies. -Louise Erdrich, The Bluejay\u2019s Dance: A Birth Year Last November, I discovered that I was pregnant with my first child. And these past few months, I\u2019ve done little but vomit, sleep, and try to find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1059,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[69,180,169,62],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allison-backous","tag-children","tag-mothers-and-daughters","tag-parenting","tag-parents"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2013\/02\/pregnant.jpg\" "\\"pregnant\\"")
<\/a>Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don\u2019t know how strong we are until we are pushing out our babies<\/em>.