i began talking about child number three when i was pregnant with child number two. this was a pretty bold move for someone who spent nearly four years under the impression that she might not be able to have children at all. but two in vitro attempts led to two successful pregnancies, and for the first time i allowed myself to envision myself with a house full of children.

but the second pregnancy was a tropical storm of emotions. for almost six months we reacted to quad-screen test results by preparing ourselves to welcome a special-needs child. we searched (unsuccessfully) at the offices of specialists and in the many alcoves of the internet for definitive predictions regarding our little bird’s number of chromosomes. if we could have checked out for a while, filled our car with plenty of gas and taken an evacuation route to sunnier pastures, we would have.

but this pregnancy was not like that. it was the constant, embodied awareness of darkness and light, fear and joy, reluctance and exuberance. there was no way out but through.

it’s funny how the female memory works. i can recall and describe the experience of my second pregnancy, but i am no longer capable of conjuring up and experiencing its particular level of agony. likewise, the pain of childbirth and the sleeplessness of the newborn phase are wrapped up and obscured in my head by a spectacular sense of wonder and awe.

saved from the monkey's first haircut

apparently, the male memory does not work this way. when the subject of child number three comes up, my husband, who has become the official keeper of the more base realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn parenting, reminds me of the tropical storm we just barely survived in 2009. “why,” he pleads, “why and HOW could we ever survive that again?”

nevertheless, i have baby lust. ayelet waldmen reminds me that i am not alone:

“other women in the park are having these same internal debates, i think. when a newborn shows up, there’s a pause, a hiccup in the general hubbub. we all stare, misty-eyed. we coo; we ooh. and then someone’s kid whacks someone else’s on the head with a shovel, or a toddler gets stuck on the top of the slide and gives a wrenching shriek, and we all briskly shake off that gentle longing” (bad mother, 182). 

maybe baby lust is merely the biological pull that ensures that the human species will persist. it doesn’t feel like this though. it feels more like standing at the edge of the creative center of the universe. staying outside of it takes almost as much of an emotional toll as bravely venturing in.

i am a mother and a minister, and it struck me yesterday that these are two vocations in which one is often expected to be superhuman. and by “superhuman,” i mean not human at all; above being human; perfect. an interesting facet of this expectation of superhuman-ness is that in both cases, it includes a sort of disembodied existance. the body will get you every time, with its animal ways and love of gravity! my world is marked by clerical robes and nursing covers, both of which i am usually happy to hide behind out of fear that my body might be objectified or labeled as shameful and inappropriate.

meanwhile, young mothers in every profession are experiencing their bodies as the main event. it is difficult to ignore the body when it expands to carry another life, acts as a one-woman-catering-service for a little one, and contracts (usually in all the wrong areas) before it’s time to start the cycle again. perhaps this is why i love the kind of honesty about the body found in ayelet waldman’s bad mother:

“how well i remember [my] rack! those perky breasts that hovered just below my chin. those pert nipples. that swelling cleavage. after four children and a full seventy-two months of breast-feeding, the last six of which were spent with my nipples clamped in the death vise of a breast pump, it is only by dint of foundation garments designed by teams of MIT professors who otherwise spend their days drawing up plans for the world’s longest suspension bridges that my breasts achieve a shape even approximating round. when i undo the clasps, buckles, straps, and hoists of these miraculous feats of engineering, my boobs tumble to the ground like boulders falling off a cliff. i could polish my shoes with my nipples” (28). 

it is my job, as a minister, to talk about miracles. turning water into wine, walking on water, and raising people from the dead are common topics of conversation for me. so why, for the love of god, should i refrain from talking about the miracle-working powers of a good bra?

on the list of things that have transformed my life are things like martin buber’s i and thou, viktor frankl’s man’s search for meaning, marcus borg’s concept of jesus, and now this:

this is the SPANX bra-llelujah full-coverage, front-closureunderwire bra. yes, it is expensive, but is it really possible to put a price on comfort and this carefully-engineered, non-surgical restoration of one’s pre-kid shape?

friends, hear the good news! we do not have to super-human. we simply have to invest in super-human undergarments.

brallelujah!

[the source for this post can be found on the bibligraphy page located on the sidebar to your right.]

my dad, a residential realtor by trade, has recently listed an antebellum home that was occupied by the same memphis family for 150 years. in response to my begging, he recently invited andy, the kids, and me to crash a happy hour gathering of architects at the site.

the archetects were like kids in a candy store, and joined me in shameless picture-taking and investigating every square inch of the home and its features, from these aqua curtain tiebacks (the product of the last re-model),

to the fourth story attic tower.

but what struck me the most about our tour of this magnificent home and the enchanted grounds around it were the conversations i overhead while we were walking around. “what would be the best use of this gem?” people asked each other. it could, once again, be a single family home, of course. or it could host a downstairs business and an upstairs residence.

or… (and these are the ideas that really inspired me) the home and grounds could be shared somehow. one architect’s idea was that two or three families could live in the home. there would be private residence space for each family and a few common area rooms. another thought was that a single family could live in the antebellum home, and several smaller homes could be built on the grounds. these “lots” would sell for modest prices, and the homes would occupy a small footprint and not diminish the manicured wildness of the tree-filled landscape. my imagination was off and running with dreams of sharing this place with family and friends, committed to raising our children in this expanse of nature located right in the heart of the city.

i have always been intrigued by groups of kinfolk and comrades who build a life together that strays from the “good fences make good neighbors” mantra of traditional american culture. when i was in divinity school, i became enamored with the bloomsbury group — virginia wolf, her husband and sister, and all of their various artist and writer friends who shared a home in england.

members of the bloomsbury group on the grounds of their home in sussex

what attracted me then was the creativity and exchange of ideas fostered by this sort of life. but now that i am a parent, i am also attracted to the idea of shared responsibility and the notion that communities or villages might just do a better job of raising our children than we can do alone.

let’s face it: andy and i cannot really afford to move our family into antebellum bliss. but our brief time on the grounds has me thinking about making intentional connections with neighbors and constructing a life where responsibilities can be shared. this is not a new idea, of course, and folks in other countries have been living this way since the beginning of time.

in bad mother, ayelet waldmen writes of her mother’s committment to shared resonsibility:

“during the headiest era of my mother’s feminist phase, she even figured out a way to spare herself the bulk of the cooking; she and the other members of her consciousness-raising group formed a supper cooperative. each day a different one of them would cook for the group, separate the food into individual family-sized portions, and drop them off at the others’ houses” (54).

along those lines, i have friends who take turns going to each others’ houses to help each other with home projects. and jennifer, who was featured in one of my early “mothers of invention” posts, wrote about a makeshift cooperative pre-school that she and other mothers created for their children.

perhaps we don’t have to pick up and physically move our families in order to move into a space of shared responsibilities. it has been said that by partnering with someone in marriage, one’s burdons are cut in half while one’s joys are doubled. perhaps this is true of all of our cooperative affiliations.

so, when i’m not thinking about how i can make the quick million i would need to move into “the big old house,” as my children call it, i’ll be pontificating about how my version of motherhood might entail becoming more of a village person. it’s fun to think about, don’t you think?

[for more info about the source for this post, check out the bibliography page on the sidebar to your right.]

in her 2009 book, bad mother, ayelet waldman opens with this line: “we are always watching: the bad mother police force, in a perpetual state of alert-level orange” (5).

how true this is. i flashed my bad mother police badge long before i even had kids, as i scoffed at those parents who were so driven by their children’s schedules that they forgot about their own lives. since then, i’ve eaten those words and MANY others uttered in expert tones. what is it about parenthood that invites such judgment?

i’ve examined this judgment in other posts , and i’ve read the accounts of many women who have reluctantly added “other mothers” to the long list of challenging people in their lives. i’ve also addressed the widespread and ridiculous standards that serve as the backdrop for our parenting. i am just one person in a progressively expanding army of unsatisfied mothers who are joining forces to institute a healthier culture.

but the complaints about judgement and the frustration with standards seem to exist in these discussions as two parallel but unrelated realities. waldman begins the important work of connecting the dots between them. basically, she says, when we judge ourselves against the impossible standard of “the good mother,” we feel so deficient that we are compelled to console ourselves by comparing our own ways with those of “the heinous bad mother” (15). we judge others in order to recover from judging ourselves.

i love this bit of insight! quashing the “bad mother police” just feels like an impossibly overwhelming task. but adjusting my self-standards actually feels do-able. it’s exciting to think that by doing some good internal work, we can each help to create an environment that is supportive, and not “alert-level orange”.

[the source for this post can be found on the bibliography page located in the sidebar. the photo in this post is from http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3575/3464797518_c40f36fd3a.jpg.]

motherhood, like every enduring institution, has its catch phrases. currently, most of these phrases seem to pertain to the enterprise of juggling. real life conversations among moms rarely occur without references to “juggling it all,” “keeping all the balls in the air,” “dropping the ball, ” and my personal favorite,”running off and joining the circus.” wouldn’t it be fun to mingle with a group of women and take a tasty sip of your beverage every time someone described her life as the ongoing exercise of hurling people, commitments, expectations, and roles into the ever-loving sky?

but i must concede that the juggling metaphor is a good one. it encapsulates so much about motherhood: the overcommitment, the multi-tasking, the sense that part of it is an act (and one crazy enough to be circus-worthy), and the inherent and inevitable moments of failure.

here are two women’s descriptions of juggling. the first is by ayelet waldman, author of bad mother and harvard law classmate of barack obama:

“i know that someday my daughters will chart their own courses, they’ll make their own mistakes. they in their turn will have to figure out how to keep all those balls in the air, how to maneuver despite inevitable frustration and failure. but just as i burden my daughters with my expectations, i also try to remind them that jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. whey they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up on the air” (41).

and the second meditation on juggling comes to us with a dose of humor by way of the fabulous tina fey, in last night’s saturday night live monologue.

now, if you’ll excuse me, i’m headed off to join the circus.

[source for this post can be found on the bibliography page, located on the sidebar to your right. the image in this post is from http://www.horizonstructures.com/]