Full time Motherhood--Oh Vey!

This summer has been a time, making up for all of my previous negligence--I'm sure, of being a FULL TIME MOM. It has been eye opening on so many levels. First, I've not wanted to jump off the two bridges on this island. Second, it's much more manageable than I had previously imagined. Third, I've rather enjoyed it--shock, shock, shock. I, like most women like me--double degreed, pampered, spoiled--assumed doing this job full time was not suited for me. My first few months alone with our infant son I found myself in a state. There were many days when I tried to figure out ways to give the baby back to the hospital, to let them know what a terrible mistake this was for me and for him. The image of me with my lumpy body, sore nipples, and terrible hair--never cut one's hair when in this mental state--should have been on every poster for Post-Partum Depression. It was the first time in my life when I felt I couldn't cross this hurdle, when I felt ready to give up. It was a new emotion for me, a child who had always done well in everything I had set on my sights. To say this was shattering for me would be a mild understatement. It was the earthquake from which I am now recovering.

When our nanny arrived, I was torn between wanting, needing the help and not wanting to relinquish my role of being the only care taker, despite doing it all in a crazed state of shrillness. So, for the last four and some years, I've had the helicopter nanny, always hovering over me, ready to swoop down to relieve me of my responsibilities. Some days, I was only too happy to be granted the freedom. I got used to being able to walk away, to parent from a certain distance. Please don't mistake this statement to mean I didn't care. No, that's not it exactly. It was being given a filter for the panoply of emotions when one is a mother, affording me a perspective much needed given all of my tendencies to obsess, to be perfect. So, I became a strange hybrid of hyper-vigilant mom--the kind that reads labels on boxes before feeding the food item to her child--and a mom that maintained the rituals and routines of her previous life. I realize now I was the kind of mom most feminists would admonish for, oh, so many reasons. See, I didn't go back to work, to teach, until his fourth year. That didn't mean I wasn't working since I sat around in a numbed state of panic about my novel, my upcoming novel, and fueling all of my melodrama into personal memoir essays. Work was, like much else in my life at that time, sporadic, at best.

Each summer on the Vineyard with our helicopter nanny flown away to hover over her own family, I managed taking are of my son without having a nervous breakdown at the end of my time. In fact, I noticed the emotional, mental leaps he and I would make, each of us coming into our own, as they say. He is now at an age when he needs a teeny bit less supervision. I'm more at ease letting him outside without my constant look out for the foreseeable and unforeseeable dangers. I have discovered, to my amazement, how interesting he is, and will be. He still jumps, hops, runs, the full embodiment of rambunctiousness, making me wonder what it would be like to have a calm, quiet, little girl.

There are aspects to the new cultural mores for Parenting I find mind numbing. This new pressure for us to not just parent, but to be the source of entertainment for our children is a trend I find troubling. A little boredom never damaged children, did it? Boredom is what teaches us to be resourceful, creative, and, sometimes, mischievous. Our parents were not our play mates. And so, I refuse to play with my son. Whether he will talk about this with his therapist for years on end remains to be seen.

Last night, I found myself on the floor, piles of plastic pieces surrounding me in a circle. Being forced to be the only person in his life meant I had to put together a castle from Playmobil. I now have new bruises on my knees, my fingers scratched. What would take any other person half an hour took me two hours to put together this new toy. The thought of abandoning it was not a consideration since my husband would not be arriving for two days. And in truth, this time here has become another way for me to overcome those notions of myself that I had developed over the years like how inept I am about following directions to put things together. And so, I plodded on till the castle was finished, each character dressed in their proper armor. I took it up to his room, setting it on his floor, so it would be the first thing his eyes would see when he woke up. It was a proud moment for this reluctant Mom, now Full Time Mom.