01.03.06
day 1- retrospect 1: pregnancy is terrifying to me
to start, i’m going to post these old writings of mine… i need to relive them a bit.
here’s the first– i’ve just cleaned it out of an existing myspace blog i used a couple of times.
Reading on the state of society these days, the state of women in the world of men… how somehow, we’ve managed to make our liberation so much less than free. All things being equal, more women are making choices that decry a higher sense of consequence, a higher sense of self-worth, but they’re also making choices that demonstrate the ongoing return to to difficult cyclic trappings… more specifically child-rearing. I feel it when I read this book, “Mismatch”– a very defined fear of child-bearing– and it’s life-altering consequences. The fear of what pregnancy will do to my body, the fear of what children will do to my will, my future, not to mention the fear of my own capacity to so intensely effect such vulnerable selfish little creatures as children can be. In general, there’s not really a desire to have my own except if I were assured a greater degree of support than is typically given to a woman that is a mother in these days.
I’ve been afraid of pregnancy and motherhood since I understood what my mother had become as a result of having six children. Inside, I don’t think there is a greater nobility to being a mother. Yes, you learn to make “sacrifices” for children—but in a way, this is the joke of evolution. Grandchildren are the ultimate proof of your success as a human, in the logic of genetic survival, and inevitably transfers its weight in the psychological experience of parental pride and hope as best realized in the fruit of your loins successfully actualizing their own set of intermingled genetic communities.
But I know (as deeply as I know anything) that there is more to this painful human road than just the mere commandment to be fruitful and multiply. We have the mental and physical space of modern society to begin to resolve the conflicts of living in awareness of the apparent death that stares us down as an inevitable fact. In other words, we can (if we are ever in the financial and psychological position to choose to do so) find meaning and fulfillment in this existence. Religion answered questions as long as our ability to answer the unanswered questions remained unknown at a physical level. Ultimately, we seek meaning and this can extend beyond instinct to procreate and the fearful inventions of religion. At a personal level, this is precisely what I experience, the need to resolve and understand my own life and mind, to seek out real answers that resound with my own levels of knowledge and experience. And in some roundabout way, I fear that children will quickly remove my ability to effectively answer these questions.
Make no mistake, this is not merely a fear of their ability to consume my time and resources (although this is certainly a component), but I also sense (as I observe the parents around me) that once in place, children would ultimately subsume my own existing sense of individual worth and time. The more I see parents being honest about the nature of parenting, about how incredibly needy and selfish these little adorable beings can be, and even more than that, the given reaction mothers find themselves destined to live out in a near-compulsory realization of their own maternal tendencies (however much this is pre-determined by their own physiological responses to mothering as opposed to what they’ve internalized value-wise from society is virtually irrelevant at this point, as they are no longer in a position to ask what parts of being a woman inevitably ties them to their children) as supported (or not) by the existing institutions and mentalities of society.
At this juncture, my concerns about the nature of child-bearing in society today leaves a bit of a queasy anxiety in my gut. There is so much placed on the foregone conclusions that is motherhood I am not readily willing to assume, especially when we delve into the nature of what society expects of fathers. Here, in this funny place—where I have always been afraid of motherhood, is the continuing struggle of women for a reality check. We still tend to invoke the near-holiness of motherhood, while the fathers remain at best a politically correct stabilizer in the mix. The small percentage of fathers raising their children on their own have no difficulty securing a mate, receiving accolades for their outstanding generosity, while the overwhelming number of fathers remain little more than a distant phone call, and this is acceptable—a grin, a shrug, says it all, “I mean well, but hey, I had to sow my oats when I was young, I wasn’t ready to settle down” And this is the consequence, the ultimatum they live; so vividly opposite the fate the mother is forced to live out after that awesome yet flighty shattering moment of conception. These men are deadbeats at worst and studs at best, spreading their seed with no sense of consequence as modern medicine’s contribution to the ever-growing american (hell, western!) moral divide– the pill allows them to casually fuck—inviting new paradoxes to lunch with the old relentless schism of power in its social, mental, and physical disconnect between men and women
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But we, the ones with the wombs, have been bound so tightly to the child we bear it cuts to the bone. Whether you want to talk about the reality that many mothers experience (the inevitable overwhelming physical and financial responsibility for their offspring) or the biological imbalance that is hormonal responses to child-bearing, there seems no escape once a woman makes the decision to give birth. While, fathers can fall through the cracks like raindrops and disappear into the sea of “eligible bachelors.” It’s discouraging that there are a disturbingly high number of fathers who still manage to move through society without paying for the children they conceive. Something like 1 out of 9 fathers who leave the biological mother no longer own up to the existence of their offspring, or more specifically, their own fatherhood.
I understand children fairly well, but I also understand myself—I see how much I am not just a lasting receptacle for the demands of the world… that I need the space to become a full person, to understand myself relative to my own weaknesses, to change what hurts myself and those I care about. I have certainly not reached a position where parenting could possibly lend itself to an accelerated learning curve. Sure, sure, we all grow a hell of a lot, once children enter the picture, we grow in response to the immediate and absolute demands and stressors we experience. But I defy this quasi-sacred image of a mother as a vessel brimming with gentle self-sacrifice, giving, and bottomless love. As a standard, it’s ridiculous and unfair, let mom’s be human without shock at their anger, tiredness, selfishness, brokenness, chaos, unclarity, hope, fear, and all the things that are just part of being a mammalian parent.