The Accidental Mother

So, as I mentioned on Gigi's blog about dinner, Hank's have frozen soywhatevers from Trader Joe's tonight--and I was having one of my daily meltdowns about what a crappy, lacksadaisical mother I am when, suddenly, I remembered this little essay I typed up a few months ago. It was a darker time; I was even more out of it than I am now. Words in italics didn't come through and I'm too lazy to figure it out, but oh well. Here it is for your reading enjoyment, Ladies!

The Accidental Mother

Is it bad to use your baby as a Swiffer™ to clean your hardwood floors? That’s the question I’m asking myself on this, the afternoon of Hank’s seven-month birthday, as he scoots around our apartment. It turns out that those disposal diapers are a marvel for picking up all sorts of things—lint, cat hair, dust balls. But I have to wonder: Would my mother approve? Would anyone approve? What ethics are involved? I mean, it’s not as if I meant to use my baby as a Swiffer(™). It was a little like the discovery that cloth diapers were for women far, far more vigilant and committed than I, or the discovery that sucking on the cat’s tail causes more trauma to the cat than to Hank, though I worry that my child is going to be the first in history to be treated for hairballs and then I wonder: What’s in that hairball medication anyway? Should I be slipping a little into his bottle of breast milk? The diapers, the tail sucking, the fantastic discovery that Hank’s recent penchant for scooting means that finally, finally I’ve found a way to keep the floors clean (and by “clean� I mean that we’re no longer swimming in a sea of our own lint, just wading)—all these lessons came to me accidentally.
Just like pregnancy.
Just like motherhood.
Just like our beautiful boy, Hank, who is not only scooting up and down the hall these days but who is also dancing along with Janis Joplin songs and saying “Hi,� when he sees my husband or me, or the cat.
“Hi,� he says when I tear myself away from the computer to change his dust cloth (um, diaper).
“Hi,� he says to my breast when I sit down with him at the computer and try to simultaneously breastfeed while I try to work on my book/grade student quizzes/finish a freelance project that’s been gathering dust.
“Hi,� he says to the cat, who eyes him warily and skulks away to the other end of the house.
We’re sure he’s a genius. Let the other babies’ first words be such mundane ones as mama, dada, or baba. Not our boy! He chose the best word in the English language as his first. So much is contained in those two letters: Greetings, Tall Person, I see you! Hello, Fellow Traveler, might I perchance have a little nip from your tail? Salutations, Lovely World. Hi! It’s pure genius.
So I call myself an accidental mother and by that, I mean that B.H. (before Hank) I fell squarely into the category of women who were somewhat, um, shall we say, ambivalent about babies. I didn’t have anything against them, in theory, but for me seeing a baby on the street was a little like seeing another person’s cat lolling in the window when I took my evening walk. I noticed it, of course. Oh! What a pretty kitty. But I didn’t really dwell on it; I didn’t necessarily want to take it home with me. I didn’t exactly covet it. So when that little pee stick turned up with two lines rather than one, just a few months after my 36th birthday, I was surprised by the glee, the unexpected giddiness, I experienced. Holy Crap! I thought, I’m going to be a mama! And when Hank turned up, I was thrilled by the fierce pride and love I felt for him.
It didn’t hurt that he was, by far, the best baby in the hospital. I checked, just to be sure. The other babies were squalling, wrinkly little things with squinty eyes and red faces. Not our Hank. From the get go, he was bright eyed, and beautiful.
“Hi,� I said to Hank when my husband laid him in my arms for the first time, “I want you to know that I’d step in front of a train for you. No questions asked.�
Other people were also surprised by our decision to have a baby.
“I’d completely given up on you,� my mother said, and promptly headed to Target to begin the preparations.
“What’s the theme for your nursery?� my sister said when I called her during the third trimester. “Um, theme?� I said, “I guess it will be Hello, Baby!� “Never mind,� she said, “I’ll get you a gift certificate.�
Our friends, an eclectic group of writers, playwrights, musicians, actors, and poets, all without a single 401k between them, said: “What are we going to do with a baby?� But when the time came for the baby shower—a cocktail party with little plastic babies skewered on toothpicks and the theme Not Your Mama’s Baby Shower!—they came through in grand style. “He might have to wait for a while for Salmon Rushdie,� I said as I added a collection of short stories to a three-foot pile of books and Onesies.
“My goodness, you’ve reproduced!� said my arch-nemesis from graduate school when I ran into her in the coffeehouse a couple of months after Hank was born. The conversation began like this: She said, “What have you been up to?� and I said, “This,� and showed her Hank, who was drooling and drowsing in his stroller. “He was the best one at the hospital.�
Being an accidental mother is no small task. You have to make a deep and abiding commitment to discovering things, well, accidentally. Here are a few things I’ve discovered in the past few months, for anyone aspiring to be an accidental mom:
1. Let go and let go early. It will be very, very tempting—especially in the early months—to buy into the myth that no one can do for your baby as well as you can. Fight it. Fight it like you’d fight an outbreak of the Spanish Flu. Without time away from your little miracle, without time spent on your own projects, whatever they may be, without a little occasional solitude—even just an hour sitting on a bench in the park staring into space, or napping next to the homeless guy, who is also napping—without these things, you will become an exhausted, bitter, and angry mother, the kind who eventually threatens your kid with all sorts of crazy things. If you don’t take a nap right now, I’m going to trade you to a band of gypsies for a bottle of dandelion wine and a bag of figs. For example. Better to leave your little miracle for a couple of hours with crazy Uncle Scott, who dropped by on his way home from his show, still dressed as Falstaff, than to insist on doing everything yourself. Your baby will be fine. One of my best accidental discoveries has been that people who know absolutely nothing about babies make the best sitters. Why? Because they are terrified they’ll screw it up. My husband and I came home from dinner one night to discover a floe chart taped to the refrigerator. It was a chronicle of Hank’s every movement (bowel and otherwise) as well as his intake of breast milk, in ounces and cubic centimeters, and how often he cried, for how long, and our friend’s musings about what it was, exactly, that had made him cry along with advice for future sitters. Too much National Public Radio before bedtime is a BAD idea, our friend had concluded. This advice extends most especially to your spouse or partner. I’m lucky. My husband is ten years younger than I and belongs to this new generation of men who seem to grasp, intuitively, that the care and feeding of an infant is everyone’s job. Remember: Your husband isn’t doing you any favors by taking over for a while. That child is his offspring, for heaven’s sake.
2. Make friends with the breast pump. No matter what. No matter how tired you are or how much your breasts ache or how weird it seems to you. Do it. Give your pump a name, if you have to (I call mine Frieda). Put pretty little stickers on it. Play music while you’re pumping, if that’s what it takes. But do it. Because you know what you’re putting into those little bottles? Freedom, Sister, that’s what.
3. Relax. Household chores are for when baby is awake and alert. Besides, babies, even very young ones, like to feel as if they are an integral part of the household goings on. They like to help. They like to Swiffer™. Naptime is for you to spend time reading, writing, daydreaming, snoozing, or doing whatever else meets your soul’s needs, your heart’s desires. As one of my favorite subversive mommies Ariel Gore wrote: Children need interesting mothers. As my girlfriend’s grandmother’s needlepoint art, which hangs just inside the front door of her house in Iowa, reads: Boring women have perfect homes.
4. Follow your heart. If your heart tells you that it’s perfectly okay to sleep with your newborn, then by all means do it. Women around the world have been sleeping with their infants since time immemorial. If your heart tells you that whoever came up with the war cry Let him cry! was probably a battalion leader in the Civil War and it tears your heart out to hear your baby cry, then go to him. For heaven’s sake, go to him. And if your heart tells you that it’s perfectly okay to breast feed your baby anywhere, anytime, regardless of whose sensibilities you offend, go for it. All the child care philosophies, doctor’s advice, and infant care manuals in the world are not nearly as useful and important as your instincts. Follow them. Of all the gifts my mother has given me in the past months, the best was something she told me. She said, “No one knows your baby as well as you. You know what your baby needs.� I agree with her completely, but I would add this caveat: No one knows my baby as well as me and my spouse.
5. Cop an attitude. To be an accidental mom, you’re going to need an attitude. When that cranky, old man in the coffee shop simpers, “Can’t you feed that baby somewhere private, like the ladies’ room?� you’re going to be need to be able to look him right in the eye and say, “Why, yes, that’s a terrific idea. Why would I want to feed my child his lunch from the comfort of a chair when I can huddle with him on a toilet seat in a smelly bathroom? Why don’t you eat your lunch in the can, Bub?� Or, when someone asks for the millionth time, “Have you returned to work?� you might want to try saying something like this, “Returned? Have I returned to work? Do you mean, am I working? Let me tell you something, Bud, I never stopped working. I never stop working.� Then you might give the person a rough outline of the way you spend your days, and nights. By the way, have any of you noticed that this question is never asked of men? Not one person has asked my husband, “So, have you returned to work yet?� So cop an attitude, Accidental Moms. It’s your best hope of survival in a culture that still seems to insist, in a million ways large and small, and in spite of our gains in the past thirty years, that motherhood be synonymous with martyrdom.
6. Learn to creatively multi-task. Let’s say you’ve got too much to do (hypothetically, of course); let’s say that even the baby can’t keep up with his role as Dust Mop Extraordinaire. If you shave the cat, you solve several problems at once. Besides, it’s hot out. The cat will thank you for it, in the long run.
So that’s what I’ve learned, Accidental Mom that I am. If I were a better mother, a more organized mother, I might have come up with the requisite ten items that most lists seem to be structured around. But I’m not.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t start out to be an accidental mom. Where I come from, a woman’s house (even in this day and age) is not just a house but the defining symbol of her competence and worth. Let’s just say that you really can eat off my mother’s floors, or perform heart surgery. But one day, not long after Hank was born, I found myself holding him in my arms as I ran the Swiffer™ across the living room floor and tried to talk on the phone with my best girlfriend in Phoenix—a conversation whose heart was My house is a disaster zone, and I’m exhausted. Hank was cranky; I was cranky; and my best girlfriend was “concerned.� Afterward, I put him in the baby carrier, the one that you strap to your chest, tied an apron around him, and began to wash the dishes. I remember thinking: This is not what I signed up for. And then, suddenly, it hit me. It was as if a ton of bricks had fallen from the sky and landed on my foot. It hurt. Here’s what “it� was: Someday, hopefully a long time from now, I’m going to be on my deathbed. My seventy-whatever years, if I’m lucky, will be coming to an end. And when I’m there, on my deathbed, what will I say? “Jeez, I wish I’d spent more time cleaning my house.� Or, “I wish I’d kept a neater home.� Or “I wish I’d been more organized.� Somehow, I don’t think so.