Studies Show That the Breakdown of Parenting into Quantifiable Units Demonstrates That it is Largely Chore-Based

I'm thinking about parenting, and little boys, and autism spectrum disorder, and I'm thinking, again, about the way social media is a place to telegraph triumphs in the name of positivity while all of the challenges often remain unacknowledged, neither tweeted nor prominent displayed in status updates.

However, in the interest of full disclosure, you must know there are days where my five-year-old boy has me on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I don't know whether you can chalk it up to age, gender, and/or diagnosis, but being in the house with him is maddening: he doesn't talk to me about his day, he doesn't draw at the table with paper and markers, he doesn't race his Hot Wheels down the long hallway; he pinballs off the walls and furniture while making repetitive, nonsense vocalizations, and this is interspersed with opening and closing the microwave twenty times, sliding open and closed the closet doors, opening and closing the freezer, and turning the sink water on and off over and over and over again. His energy is intense and odd, and his toys remain relatively unplayed with. Then, when we leave the house, he's always afflicted with the ants-in-his-pants jitters, and if I don't keep my eye firmly on him, he'll be gone. It happened twice at the aquarium today. I was looking at a fish, and he was already in another exhibit.

Beyond this, it seems important to also mention that parenting-- which, contrary to what you may have heard-- is not always "rewarding." Perhaps, yes, in the long run when our children are moulded, with our help, into high-functioning adults: I'll use the word "rewarding" then. In the meantime, in the interest of honesty, parenting often feels like a burdensome chain of chore-based activities. From the preparation of breakfast, which must be accompanied by teaching moments (How do you ask to leave the table? Use your napkin. Don't scratch the table with your fork. And so on.) all the way to reading that bedtime story, which I can't skip because of how important it is to his future as a reader. Frankly, my friends, I'm exhausted. Parenting (on a case-by-case basis, of course) can have you close to pulling out your hair or bursting into tears. Or drinking too much wine at the end of the day, which is better, I guess, than bringing a sippy cup of gin to the mall for a mommy playdate.

And yet, and yet, and yet. It's all so paradoxical, isn't it? It's not as though I've ever thought, "Send him back." Or "Why did I become a mother?" Or "Get me the hell out of here." In fact, anytime I've ever felt that my motherhood was threatened, ever worried about my son's well-being, I've become distraught. I've wept from the immensity of my love for my boy. He is my life now, for better or for worse, and I wouldn't trade him for more nights alone in the bathtub with a pile of soggy New Yorkers stacked on the floor next to me.

Which gets me to the other half of the better or worse equation. Of course we're going to telegraph those triumphant moments, the betters for the worsts. Because those moments feel like shining achievements of sanity. Those are the "aha!" moments that remind us why we ever gave up going to shows, taking quiet trips to the art museum, or enjoying loosey-goosey nights out with the girls. Take, for example, this morning: My son walks into the kitchen and says, "I was a baby in a different house, but this is the house where I'm going to grow up to be like daddy, just like a seed grows into a tree." And I was like, "Whoa, way to be profound before I've even had my coffee."

Unmasked

James Baldwin in Letters From a Region of the Mind makes the observation that “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” which, on the surface, strikes one as sentiment bordering on the sentimental, as something pat and easily contained on a bumper sticker. Yet, as sentiment, the statement is emotionally accurate. James Baldwin knew the human heart.

Consider this: How much safer were you before love? And then: How much did you wish to cast off the hockey mask and enter the frays of romance, or of childbearing, or, even, of loving a pet that you knew would die before you? We walk around, before love, safe behind the armors of loneliness, and we ask those we deem worthy to strip it all away so that we stand there, a throbbing heart, exposed, the cages of our safety masks and curved ribs as good as gone.

Thus here I stand before you— world, fates, family— all of my masks gone, stripped down to the skin, and I ask, meekly, that you let me be in my nakedness or that you wrap me in the blankets of goodwill. Spare me the excoriation. My husband, late forties, the man I hand-picked and pursued, has just competed in a triathlon, and he is vital, a force, more alive than anyone I know. I see him pushing past all probabilities in terms of mortality, so when he rides his motorcycle home from the hospital at four in the morning after a long night of work, steer the drunk drivers the other way. 

And my son, my one and only child, the one who has already scared me, scarred me, with health concerns and mortal danger, let him outlive me, let him mourn and miss his long-dead mother. He is everyday getting farther away from that proverbial well that wishes to suck him down into darkness. Abnormal MRI, seizures, autism: He’s shrugging them off like a coat he has outgrown. In Mexico, when he fell into the deep-end of the pool, his father watched him plunge below the surface only to paddle up to where he was able to hoist himself over the side of the pool, away from tragedy and back into the waning sunlight. World, fates, family: Be safe and let me be safe.

And my two dogs? The smaller brown one has many years ahead of her. My old, white dog turned twelve last month, and I can see her eyes going milky. Her back legs slip out from underneath her, and I have to hoist her up. All ninety pounds of her. She has gotten more nervous with old age, and she can no longer hold her bowels very well. She doesn’t mean to shit on the floor, and I can feel her shame. She knows something is wrong. I clean it up with no admonishment. I just stroke her until I see her tail wag. In truth, I think she has another two years in her. When I picked her out from the homeless man’s litter twelve years ago, she could fit in a cat carrier. I was not projecting this far into the future; I did not think of her death. I just wanted to let a little love in.

Well…I Didn't See That Coming

Shitmotherfuckerfuck. Not, of course, that such profanity was screamed or whimpered, although I was surprised to hear myself whimpering having never heard such a thing before. Yet this is the kind of language I imagined my vagina would use if it could speak. My uterus and its sick heaving, me vomiting over the side of the bed as I approached transition, my asshole puckering and then failing to hold in the shit as I pushed it and my son out at three-thirty in the morning during a particularly cold March morning in Connecticut. Fuck. Motherfucker. Shit. Because birth is just as profane as it is profound. 

I suppose there are the occasional women out there who have the kind of birthing experiences to be envied. Something more like poofing feathery angels from their twats while they scrunch up their motherly faces all slick with a comely sheen of sweat, and then those babies turn into children that flit about and charm the world with their glitter glue and spangled soccer trophies. That’s okay. I don’t need to wish them into the cornfield anymore. After all, we’re made to forget the pain, to abstract it so that we don’t even have the words to describe the way our bodies are mangled. 

But if I had to describe it, I would tell the whole story. That, for example, the birthing suite and it’s tastefully muted walls, beyond a certain point, were details lost in the rage of childbirth. That the Joni Mitchell I had playing— the candy of her voice— could not be heard over my retching and keening. In fact, all of the ways that I thought I had prepared myself were as effective as closing a slider door on the tsunami crushing towards me. 

Oh, but once I couldn’t handle listening to myself whimper anymore, I called it and asked for the epidural. And the anesthesiologist swept in like a goddess in institutional blue. I sat on the end of the bed and leaned over as still and trembling as I could manage between throes, and the thick, blissful needle slipped deep into my back while I hugged the ball of my as-yet unborn son. Then…numbness. Complete, dead, utter numbness. Because she thought I should get some sleep, the epidural was proceeded by a spinal block, and my legs, the whole bottom half of me, were as rubber as bread dough. 

Thus, it seems the telling should end there. That this is the point where what was should overlay quite nicely on top of what should have been. Epidural. Bam. Birth. But— the word should, it only serves to fuel regret, self-doubt, and worthless obligations. It reminds us that although one’s cervix shouldn’t be torn during childbirth, sometimes it happens. When one commences with the process of pressing a human through a hole that begins as little more than a dimple, one should plan to expect anything. So should can be useful after all.

That, for example, my son’s heart decelerated, the machines binging and my husband going to fetch the nurse. That the nurses and doctor rocked my dead legs back and forth to dislodge my son from the birth canal. That I had to push him out before full dilation so that not only did he tear the opening of my vagina, but he rent my cervix. That he came out as pointy as a pinhead. That the doctor was stitching for so long and the blood loss was so significant, my mother almost passed out. That I would be up for more than thirty-six hours. That I would look pale and bloated in post-partum pictures. That my son, fresh from the womb, slick and a little bit purple, would look me in the face as I floated above the experience. That the minute he latched on to my breast, I became his blubbering fool. That even after all this upheaval and hurt, I would have liked to do it again. That by the time it was possible, I couldn’t.

So consider this a public service announcement, reader. Anticipate the unanticipated. The more you know about not knowing, the better prepared you'll be to be unprepared.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.

The Circumstances of Your Birth

Either you were pushed from your mother's womb with great effort or a doctor cut the red lining and lifted you into the glare of hospital lights. Either your mother fed you from her breast or fed you formula like the majority of us 70s babies. In the worst circumstances your mother was gone too early for you to have a memory of her.

Either you were born whole or something happened in utero when cell met cell or during birth, and you've been forced, by nature of your bearing, to rise above a physical or mental handicap. In the worst circumstances, genetics or delivery has rendered you so broken that people avert their eyes when your mother rolls you into the neurologist's office.

Either you were born into a family as an only child, or you had siblings for companions. Either you were happy with this scenario or not. In the worst circumstances, you had a sibling once, but something happened to him or her. You may or may not remember. Your family may or may not talk about what they lost. Photos may or may not be displayed. This feature sometimes hangs like a thread. Pull it, and the whole family falls apart.


Either you were born of good stock, your parents both bright and attractive, neither harboring hidden fuck-ups, or you were born of parents, one or the other (or sometimes both), who struggle with deep-seated dysfunctions that were handed down to them by their parents, and you wonder if you can make it all stop with you. In the best circumstances, nurture overcomes nature, whether its a self-provided nurture or one afforded by family. In the worst circumstances, the defective aspect of your nature has been compounded by a lack of effective nurturing, and you either have no idea that you're a mess, or you have no idea how to clean up the mess that is you, thanks to a lack of both breeding and upbringing.

Either you were born in the best hospital your town has to offer, your mother given a basket of diapers and formula samples, or you were born in a home with a midwife and doula present. In the most remarkable situations you were born in an emergency room when your mother didn't even know she was pregnant, in the back of a cab because your mother waited too long and your father was on duty, or on your mother's kitchen floor because she was single and didn't get help in time. In worse situations, you were born in the grass of an impoverished country where you were sent off to an orphanage to wait, hopefully, for first-world parents you may or may not ever connect with.

Either you were born into a family that pulls you to them, the physical second-nature, all mouth-kisses, bear-hugs, and spooning in your parents' big bed, your mother's breasts as commonplace a sight as the hummingbird feeder in the kitchen widow, or you were raised by a family that was afraid of the body and its affections, and you're still unsure which way to tilt your head when you awkwardly wrap your arms around your father on special occasions. In worst situations, you were never shown tenderness and you've grown up unable to connect in a meaningful way with another human being.

Either you were born into a world where the car seats are Britax and the preschools are competitive, or you were born into a world where your mother has three jobs or no job, your food is government-provided, and you're often shipped off to the house of a grandparent or aunt when your mother or father is deemed an insufficient parent by the state. Many assume you'll amount to nothing. In worst situations, you're born in a country where famine and disease are commonplace, and any opportunities for labor that your mother may have are offered by first-world countries looking to take advantage of the circumstances of her birth.

Or some combination; it's rarely either/or. How blessed are you?

Miscarriage

Sometimes something terrible can startle you with its beauty. Take, for example, the bright ruby cabochon of blood I saw on my toilet paper a few weeks into an unexpected—but desperately wanted—pregnancy. The sun from the bathroom window glimmered off the perfectly round jewel, which was the first to appear, and then they just poured out of me, unformed and unfaceted, until I was an empty bag again. 

According to the week-by-week pregnancy newsletter I had optimistically signed up for, I was only in that fifth week, which is when this usually happens. The heartbeat comes a week or two later. Technically, I knew I was pregnant only for a short while, although my body knew prior to any plus symbol on a piece of plastic. I had a dream somewhere around conception that I was pregnant, and in it I could see the shape of a baby's hand through the skin of my belly. Sometime around implantation I was half awakened by a tingling in my breasts, which partially registered as dream. So I suspected. And just as I had a feeling I was pregnant before testing, I knew I wasn't pregnant anymore the minute I saw that first drop of blood. I checked in, and my body said, sorry, no. 

The hormone dump afterward complicated the grieving, or it made the grief for a gathering of cells that didn't even have a heartbeat yet more crushing, and I stopped functioning for a little while. My four-year-old said Mama, you're okay as he patted my head. The dogs crowded around my face to lick the salt off. My husband offered support and affection, but his response was more complicated since this was a pregnancy he didn't want.

A miscarriage happens thirty-three percent of the time in women over the age of forty. I guess I'm a statistic now. I'll be forty-three this June, and my husband doesn't want another child. I knew one was the magic number going in, so he's not a villain. I tried to renegotiate, and my accidental pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Therefore, it was the last chance I had for a second child. When we don't get what we want, we move on and hope no bitterness remains.

We have to admit though, if motherhood has resonated for any of us, we're talking a little bit about where addiction and instinct collide. For example, the painful sweetness as your baby first latches on, and you feel that cramp in your gut as his small mouth pulls your body back together. I remember how I wept as I folded the beanie and shirt my newborn son came home in, how they could fit in a Zip-loc. Knowing I will never again experience such complex joy feels like a personal tragedy.

And to be fair, it is personal. Directly after the miscarriage, I was a terrible person. I didn't think I could love my friends who were fortunate enough to have as many children as they wanted. I wanted to snatch babies away from teenagers I saw on the bus. I dreamed up ways to become pregnant anyway. But then when I became my true self again, once my body settled, I remembered how fortunate I am. I have a husband who is good with his son and good to me. I have a beautiful boy who is healthy and whole. I was able to become a mother and many women aren't. Many women lose their babies to accidents, violence, or disease.

In the end, really, I am one of the lucky ones.  

The Other Polarizing Disorder

Sometimes, late at night, well into my second glass of wine, my husband at work and my son sleeping, I mourn the loss of other people’s children. It’s usually during that hour when I’m immobilized by weariness yet unwilling to drag off to the bathroom to brush and wash, so I sit in front of the computer, study the photos of little boys, and have an unhealthy cry for Ronan, the one who died of tay-sachs; for the Staten Island mom whose sons were yanked from her arms by Hurricane Sandy; and for another mother whose entire family was washed away by the Southeast-Asian tsunami. My grief is discriminate; I mirror the bereavement of mothers who had and then who did not have anymore. I pluck stories from around the world about the entire annihilation of motherhood.

Let me tell you something about the way parenthood can change you: It is like an anti-anti-depressant or like a polarizing disorder that doesn’t just swing to and fro but that swings wildly. This is not to say that the opposite of anti-depressed is depressed or that it’s all bad; I’m talking about the loss of casual numbness about anything. Joy, for example, is amplified into something wildly exuberant. Love for a child can make you as giddy as a teenager, with all the angst-y hysteria, plus some added depth. On the other hand, anger is a coiled whip that now sits closer to your hands, and sadness can grab your lungs and squeeze them until your heaving tears in front of your computer at midnight for people you have never met. This sickness of parenthood may just be mine. I don’t know…

Fear, too. And compassion. They become more palpable. At Disney’s California Adventure there is a Ferris wheel that features gondolas on tracks that roll and swing out wildly hundreds of feet in the air above the park. Yesterday my niece and I rode up and around, and what looked like fun on the ground became nauseous, instinctual discomfort. Far below I could see my son asleep in his stroller, his grandmother waiting for us on the bench. Across from us in the gondola a girl visiting from Arizona clutched her father’s jacket in abject terror, the tears gathering but not yet falling. All I could do was talk to her in a low murmur: “It’s okay honey. I know it’s scary. We’ll be on the ground soon. Don’t worry.” And so on. I couldn’t stand to see her like that. I didn’t even know her.

I think this is probably more personal that I can fully grasp. Last summer my son suffered a series of partial seizures, and for a week we knew from his MRI read that something was wrong with him, but we didn’t know whether it was a disorder that would work itself out over time or whether he was showing the beginning signs of a “demyelinating process” that would piece-by-piece disassemble the puzzle of what makes him him. We wouldn’t know until we saw the neurologist. In fact, we’re still not completely positive. I have seen two full-blown febrile seizures that turned a very busy three-year-old into a vegetable for a half-hour. The things I have seen. I’m all too aware of the possibility of losing the one, small person that marks me as someone’s mother, not just from my own experiences with my only child, but also vicariously from others less fortunate, which sounds too mild to describe the catastrophic ending of motherhood.

At amusement parks there is always that game where you’re supposed to climb across a ladder made of rope to win a prize. The rope is anchored in the middle on either end so that the climber must rely on speed and balance to make it across, or the ladder will spin on its one tether and knock the climber off. This is what it feels like to be the parent of an only child. I imagine that two children would be like two tethers at either end, and I could climb across with more confidence, but since I wanted two and only have one, sometimes I feel like I’m spinning around on this rope ladder, and my grip is really compromised. I’m really worried I’m going to slip. I don’t trust my ability to balance.