Upheaval of the self

So true. So eloquent. So much of want I want to be able to express, but haven't, is in this post "on becoming mother" (seriously, click over and read it if you're bored). Someday soon I will post more pictures of Josie and actually touch on how the past few months have been without bitching about the past few days. :)

Cate also references her pregnancy "identity crisis" in this post.  I remember going to an art opening party while pregnant and I remember the tear-filled fight I had with Nick on the way home. Hipsters just didn't look at me the same anymore. All of a sudden, I had nothing to offer, nothing to say. I couldn't talk about the artwork, because I was...(shudder...gasp) pregnant! I was no longer valid or a feminist or anything. I think that's the night I had my pregnancy identity crisis...

I thought this quote (which I yanked from Cate's post) from Naomi Wolf's 'In Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood' was beautiful.

The tension was this: I was mourning, protesting a point of departure in the road that I could never retrace. An 'I' would go forward, swept irrevocably on by the tide of the natural order, and that 'I' would sit on the sofa hour after hour and be someone's Lithium, someone's Lethe, someone's Popsicle - someone who would come to be the love of my life, but whom I did not yet know. And the 'I' would reconfigure eventually around that need, and take joy in it, and spin a new identity. But it would never again be the 'I' it had been before.

So many older women kept advising me that the other-self to come would be a better self. I found this less than reassuring. This ostensibly transformed person of the near future might indeed be kinder and more patient than my pre-maternal self, whom I was at least familiar with, shortcomings and all. But that maternal 'I' did not exist yet. I did not yet know if I could successfully transform my current self into her - let alone, given how fatuous descriptions of motherly qualities sounds, if I would even like her.

 

Meanwhile, the maiden 'I' sometimes had to weep with the sure, coming death of the maiden self, the self that could 'arise and go now' at will; the self that is not food for others, but eats and drinks of the world.

A huge part of why some of my more recent ranting posts have been so negative, and so juvenille ("this sucks?") has been because a large part of me is rebelling. What I fundamentally NEED to do and what society and my bills think I need to do are so completely seperate. I have always wanted this role, and yet now I feel like I'm doing it part-time like a weekend parent. I did so much research while I was pregnant about natural birthing, breast-feeding & attachment parenting. I have always wanted to baby-wear, and I did for 3 months. But how can I be the kind of baby-wearing, breast-feeding mama I want to be while I'm here?