Writing Down the Middle of the Road by Danielle Lapidoth

Why does writing about motherhood have to be either funny or about postpartum depression? A friend of mine asked this very fine question, and I had to think about my own slide into humor when discussing the ups and downs of the married- and mothering-life. Why, indeed? Men manage to write about all sorts of ridiculous things very, very seriously, whereas women, writing during their children’s naps, tend to either make light of parenting difficulties or else draw them out to the point of depressing and alienating readers. Naomi Wolf’s diatribe on motherhood, which I bought while pregnant, made me anxious and unhappy, as I worried first about the way my pregnancy and birth process were going to be managed and appropriated by people who had their next golf date and not my or my unborn child’s best interests at heart; and also about the dire effect a child would have on my perfectly equal relationship with my husband. It made me so blue that my husband wisely advised me to put it away, which I did with a sigh of relief. That bit of advice, well-intentioned and exactly what I needed, would probably set Wolfe off. Pregnancy and motherhood are very, very serious; their impact on your life is very, very serious; and life in general is very, very serious. Looking the other way won’t help. And no man should dictate your reading matter.

On the other hand, the reams of hardy-har-har written by been-there, done-that moms about vaginal farts left me feeling even more shaken, if that’s possible. If this is what it is all about; if there is nothing, well, yes, sacred, about bringing another human being into the world—and some argue that no project launched in the backseat of a Chevy can be sacred—then what is the point? Why rearrange (and theoretically, risk) your entire life for something so trivial? And have your vagina battered in the process?

I guess there are a couple of reasons for the literary schizophrenia to which motherhood drives women. First of all, when you are really in the thick of it—with two children under four, let’s say, and 7 months pregnant with the third—you have little if any time or energy (even if you like to believe you have the innate ability) to think deep thoughts that are not related to you and your family’s daily routine and survival, and suddenly you may find yourself wallowing in a cesspool of resentment (this is what I do now?) and nostalgia (think of my glamorous former life!) On the other hand, if, as a mother, you can’t laugh at yourself long and loud for a few lifesaving moments each days (hence the jokey genre) then you will go mad (which brings us back to the misery-genre.) When you look at mothers’ writings you essentially see two personality types producing what comes naturally.

Of course there are exceptions, women who have written brilliantly—humorously, intelligently, honestly—about their experiences as mothers. And men who have written about mothers—often their wives, or their own mothers, but sometimes purely fictional beings--as though they inhabited a woman’s skin, sore nipples and all. They’re even rarer, but they are out there, and kudos to them.

When I write about motherhood, my brain is taking dictation from, and doing some light editing for my ovaries as well as my head. It’s as though I exist in two dimensions, my writing self observing my sometimes farcical mother self and my mother self reigning in my didactic writing self. A pinch of salt and a pinch of pepper, a lot of mulling time while holding my end in basic kid conversations (“A poodle, Buddy!?) and four kid-free hours three times a week in which to accomplish whatever cannot be accomplished in the presence of children. If the net result is less than totally serious, that’s because my life, thank God, is less than totally serious. And if it is less than hilarious, my life, thank God, is not a sitcom.

Sometimes I wonder whether I am betraying my sex (I have more than a few friends with young children who are on Prozac) by making light of some of the difficulties of motherhood. But I’m not writing for my sex (sorry, ladies) or, for that matter, against the enemy, who, let’s be honest, has historically made of mothering a second-tier, unpaid, thankless task. Exceptions abound—somewhere. My sometimes-wise but often-maddening father used to praise stay-at-home mothers (like mine, and, he has convinced himself, like me—though I do work part-time) to the skies, but could never, and would never, have stayed home himself. He wasn’t good enough, he claimed, and my mother was. Because it comes to women naturally.

Well, for some it does and for some it doesn’t. But just because it comes naturally doesn’t mean it’s the only thing worth doing. And if doesn’t come naturally, it may be worth learning, although how we can learn it is less clear. Our fathers weren’t born lawyers, were they? And if some of them were, should they have had to bother with law school? My grandfather simply passed the bar in 1926 and set up a practice on Wall Street that supported a family for fifty years. Maybe that was the best system: to admit that for some people, certain skills are uncannily inherent, while for others they require hard work and mastery. Whether one route or the other guarantees a better practitioner is difficult to say, and perhaps useless when applied to the mothering case, since whether a woman desires children or not may not be a function of whether she’ll know what to do when the moment to actually mother arrives.

And in the end, no matter whether one is a born mommy or a made mommy, motherhood at its very best is perfect madness. I use those words advisedly. I wouldn’t change a thing (perfect) but I am aware, when my disembodied brain watches Mama (me) crawling around collecting puzzle pieces for the umpteenth time that day, or wiping piss off the bathroom floor, or transferring milk from the green bottle to the red one, that this is a crazy way for anyone to spend her time. And I’m also aware that, given the way my family is structured (and Naomi Wolfe has a lot to say about this, may she find her inner peace some day) that my husband doesn’t do it nearly as often as I do.

But I believe, 90% of the time, that this is for a bunch of good reasons, upon which he and I have agreed. Darling, this is not a criticism. I’m a very happy woman. I really would not change places with Naomi for anything in the world.

This may be (to get back to the question of whether humor betrays suffering legions of mothers everywhere) because I just have it easy. Am I not suffering enough? Am I spoiled? By my circumstances or my temperament? (I am not, and never have been a perfectionist, which I am convinced contributes immeasurably to my mental health—that and the fact that I ran a lot of boarding school dormitories prior to having children.)

My life right now is a sometimes compelling, sometimes mind-numbingly dull combination of the mundane and the magnificent, the profane, and what the hell, let’s admit it—the sacred. My kids experience tragedies and triumphs (of, thank God, an admittedly minor order) each day and I am swept along by the gales of their laughter and the monsoons of their tears. By the time I sit down for my four (three once you discount the grocery shopping and errands) hours of peace and quiet, I have spent hours and hours in their company and weirdly enough, I have somehow in that time figured out exactly what it is I am going to write about. It’s as though my mind runs perpetually on two tracks, so that while constructing my one hundredth Lego barn I am also writing; and while writing—now- I am also making a very useful shopping list so that when I swing by the store on my way home I know exactly what I need to buy. Some days when we gather around (I use the word “gather�? loosely here—often one of us is underneath) the dinner table, the essay and the shopping list feel equally miraculous.

This kind of multi-tasking is one way to balance your life, which every parent will admit is difficult. Whether it’s sex, time for reading, time for work, time for reading-as-work, time, time for writing, time, in the case of a newborn, for a shower or for sleep—something has got to give to make way for your children, their puzzle pieces, their grubby, infinitely endearing hugs, their hideous flailing tantrums. Yes: it requires an extraordinary amount of juggling, a supportive spouse, and a patient editor to organize your life and produce an essay or two. And all the background noise of your life has to be balanced, as though by a good set of earphones, so that no one note dominates your writing, so that humor and insight, irony and sympathy, the sentimental and the cynical, all have their place.

And of course, you can’t fight the clock. You simply have less time, unless you get a live-in nanny. But I suspect that writing about parenting with a full-time nanny in charge of the kids is like writing war correspondence from a bed-and-breakfast in Peoria. I’m pretty sure it’s been done, but it’s not going to win any prizes.

So, yes, writing about parenting is difficult. As difficult as parenting, perhaps. Of course, the same question--whether it comes naturally or is the product of rigorous training—applies. And as with parenting, there are pitfalls and pratfalls along the way. But also as with parenting—it can be done. Let’s get to work.

Danielle Lapidoth is a wife (of one) and a mother of two (soon to be three), who lives in Zurich, Switzerland. In addition to parenting, she writes poetry and essays, edits other people's work (www.webscribe.ch) and teaches secondary school English part-time.