Lately my life feels so messy, like pieces of me are just spilling all over into places I never intended for them to go. I feel like I am giving too much in places and not enough in others; I feel like my body is betraying my mind and that my mind is shattering into pieces. I'm crying more, sharing more, and praying more. What is happening? Is this insanity?
No, it's not. What I am feeling is change and the biggest emotion I am having is fear. Only, I keep forgetting this and just fly with my feelings and then crash and land on my butt. Do you do this too?
I think so. I think everyone does.
When I was told I was being transferred to UT...I felt something different in my stomach. It felt awesome. I had no idea what I was feeling until...
Right away I knew it: HOPE
Hope isn't something I am used to experiencing. I tumbled the word in my mouth like a sweet candy, savoring its flavor.
My heart felt fuller, yet I was confused. What filled my heart before this?
I realized that before I had hope, I had a little space in my heart reserved for hope. Since I knew despair so well, I knew that the opposite feeling must exist somewhere. I knew I could feel it one day, maybe.
I realized that since I had been diagnosed I have been waiting for hope. But "waiting" wasn't really the right word.
I'd been hoping for hope. That sounded better.
But wait, what was that verb?
HOPE.
Does hoping for hope mean that you have hope?
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The Mother of All Battles
Throughout the years of raising my children, I have been flabbergasted by the frequent and uncensored comments of both stay-at-home and working moms. I have heard working mothers question what stay-at-home moms "do all day." On the flip side, I have frequently heard acerbic comments from stay-at-home moms about their working counterparts. During a casual conversation, I overheard a mothers saying about another mother's parenting style, "Well, she's never with her child. She's always working," she observed callously. The judgment in her comment was razor sharp. I was too stunned to reply in the moment, but I should have defended my friend who, as a single parent never gets a break from the nighttime routine or the 7 A.M. Saturday morning wake-ups. Another acquaintance once explained her choice to be a stay-at-home mom, "I could never let someone else raise my children," as if mothers who work outside the home do not raise theirs.
One never hears working men sitting around beating their breasts and crying "Mea culpa" for returning to work. Most men seem to take for granted that parenting and working outside the home are not mutually exclusive endeavors. By the same token, I have never once heard a male make a comment about the stay-at-home dad in the neighborhood. Men don't feel the need to compete on this level, so why do we? Perhaps it is because motherhood is so central to our sense of self. We want so desperately to be good mothers, but have limited understanding of what constitutes a "good mother." And with no "good mother" standard to which we can aspire, perhaps we look to other mothers as a source of validation for our own choices. Without any accepted definition of a "good mother" are we willing to settle for making ourselves feel like a "better mother", leading to our current intragender conflict?
Surely if there was a formula to raising children- a one size fits all approach guaranteed to produce happy, functioning members of society---someone would have figured it out by now. And I can say this intellectually, but it does little to address my ambivalence about my own choices. I extracted a great deal of joy and a sense of accomplishment from my work. But, there were certainly days when I wondered if I missed something by working. I sat at my desk more than once and cried over missing my kids. And I often wondered if my work life was worth it.
I have to admit, however, that I am glad that there are mothers who work outside the home and not only because I was one of them. I simply do not want to live in a world where the only doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, etc., are men and childless women. If women uniformly stopped working during their childbearing years, the glass ceiling would never shatter. I want to know that other mothers are out there making and enforcing the laws of our country, teaching our children, advancing research, and caring for the sick. I want to know that the workforce includes mothers like me; this gives me faith that my needs will be represented whether it is in the design of a new product or the drafting of new legislation. And in five years when my daughter enters her freshman year in college, I want to be able to tell her: "You can be whatever you want to be" and I want it to be true.
At the same time, I understand the desire to be at home with one's children. I am now a stay-at-home mom. Being at home allows me time to teach them, I can get the crock-pot ready by 11 A.M., and I get a chance to nap. I feel more rested and less stressed. Life is more manageable without having the daily stresses of work superimposed on the unavoidable stresses of parenting. Except, now my financial security is being threatened. But, I do completely understand why many women choose this approach to maintaining sanity in their family life.
I picture my own daughter struggling with this choice when she becomes a mother and wonder what I could say to her. I would say something like, "You have to do what is best for you and your family." I would tell her honestly that it is rarely an easy choice, but that, as with most things in life, she can always change her mind. And I would caution her to avoid judging the choices of her peers for this is and intensely personal and private decision.
Now that I am dying, this entire debate- in fact all motherly debates- seem ridiculous. Whether I nursed my children or fed them by bottle, worked outside the home or left the workforce, let them cry in the cradles or rocked them to sleep now matters very little. All that matters is that I loved them. And love is not some "one size fits all" phenomenon; it comes in many shapes, sizes, and forms.
We women waste a lot of energy on this issue. Just think of what we could accomplish if we redirected our energy towards something we could all agree on like improving our schools or protesting nuclear proliferation. We ignore everything we have in common as mothers to fight an ideological war of words that is getting us nowhere. It is time to declare a cease-fire.
I am closing this blog by adding a slideshow of some of my favorite moms. These women inspire me on a daily basis. I hope you enjoy.
Love you all and truly mean it...and God loves you too,
Shanna xoxoxo
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