I’ve been trying to understand why we have children. I know why very simply without thought, I just feel it in my chest: hope. Hope for the future of this species we’ve kept alive so far.
But also there is something about dreams and success, I think. But I think of my mother and how she took herself out of the center of her life to raise us — made our needs first. And of my mother’s mother, and how she made her children’s needs first so that they could be the best they could be. And of my mother’s mother’s mother and how she did the same. All to get to me, who in a fractured way will do the same. And I sort of wonder if, when I was born, my mother hoped for me that I would grow up to be a good mother, if that was her greatest hope for me. We all work so hard to provide for our children and then die while our children grow up to work so hard to provide for their children and then die while their children work so hard to provide for their children and then die. That is simplistic, but the patterns is sort of realistic.
And I remember when I graduated from my first graduate program and I came home for a weekend and my dad said that he was so proud of me, that it was clear I could do anything I wanted to do, that I was capable and smart enough. That was his pride. But I felt all that and I also felt that I wanted to be a mother. And being a mother means surrendering your body and self and time to raising new people who must be the center of the universe at the expense of all else. At least for a time. You’ll be well suited to motherhood, my father said recently, and I was honored and I know that it’s true — but I also wonder if that makes him proud of me. If he worked so hard to provide for us so that I could be a mother, be a body and raise another who for years will speak in sparse sentences and turn my brain a little mushy, at least for a while. and I also couldn’t help but wonder why no one realizes that I’m already in motherhood — that I’ve been raising a girl and her brother and two dogs and two cats for almost six years. And I’ve been doing all this while also writing books and going to graduate school and becoming the person who my father thinks can do anything — anything except gracefully accept the fate of an infertile spouse, which left me primally aware of my purpose in life and that writing books and living in the studio and mothering someone I didn’t get to know from birth didn’t make me feel fully complete.
This is all convoluted, I’m aware. But I asked a friend recently why we mother — she doesn’t have children or inherited children — and she said that we are evolving. Each generation is better than the last. When my mother’s mother was parenting, there were no books to help her. Freud cracked open the psychology of the mind and the effects of childhood, and that has led us to realize the power of early influence which has spawned a library of parenting books that help us to raise a better generation. I was talking this weekend to someone who is writing a book on the 18th century, and he said that in the 18th century, most people walked around half-drunk because the water they drank was in beer — fermentation was the best sanitation process they had. All those drunk people couldn’t work as effectively and couldn’t parent or birth such healthy children. And many people died, either in childbirth or from a then-prevelant disease that we don’t even think about anymore. From there look where we’ve come.
But also look where we’ve come that our planet is wobbly and we’ve managed to create greenhouse gases and nuclear bombs and pesticides. In this way we are worse than before. I remember reading in Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being that every generation — every generation, quoted back until before Christ — all felt that the generation following theirs was worse. I look at my childhood and then I look at Jack and how, for all his beauty, he gets too sucked up in video games and television, which we didn’t have. He doesn’t have as much homework as we did, and, because parents of our generation tend to hulk over their children and not let them have the space of childhood, children don’t know how to handle responsibility and freedom as well and end up hyperparented and doing worse in school. Children these days, it seems to me, have it too easy. They get carted everywhere. We’re too afraid of kidnappers and so don’t let our children fly down the street on their bikes unattended, learning from their own scrapes, finding their own creative ways to bike back up a hill. Children these days are more prone to diabetes, filled with more junk food than before, stuck in their houses, raised by babysitters because their parents are both at work.
I am being dire and simplistic, I know. And I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if each generation is better than the one before. But I believe in my future children. I feel the hope of the next generation with everything I eat, everything that’s being turned into a new human being, all the organic bananas and asparagus and arugula that remind me to hope again, sometimes it seems in spite of everything. That hope is my biggest job, and it makes me feel like I can do anything.
May 3rd, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Comments (3)
