Saturday, January 5, 2008

Nurturing to Nurture

This is the section of novel I was working on last year that Sam's quote reminded me of:

Sometimes the planets align and the older two children occupy themselves in some intense, creative task like block building or drawing or chopping up of my new issue of Mother Earth News while Adam takes a nap and I have enough time to shut the bathroom door very very carefully to not make a sound audible enough for child ears, which is to say not at all audible, so they don’t get wise to me and decide to destroy my solitude and I take a very hot shower all by myself. I wash my hair and condition and soak up the heat. I try not to think about the waste of resources it is just so I can feel the warmth penetrate my shoulders and flesh, down to my spine and the depths of my gut; to feel heat filling up the emptied spaces near my heart. If it’s been a rough morning and I have only just gotten the baby down and the children were climbing on me and whining and needing me or my services constantly, I need the warmth and the quiet time even more.

I stand there and look down at my naked skin, stretched loose by my babies, my breasts enlarged with milk beyond their diminutive origins, the scars of their distension spread across them like the wrinkled creases of a deflated balloon, the water following the curves of my stomach, pooling slightly at my navel before falling to my feet. I feel so small. Sometimes I shudder slightly, weeping as I witness myself in my slightness, my tiny woman-child frame. I feel incapable of protecting or nourishing anything or anyone. I feel so vulnerable, so in need of mothering, of someone’s lap to climb in to feel safe, warm, home. I know I am that to my children. I am the protector. They feel secure and comfortable near me and in my arms. The touch of my skin is their impregnable sacred home.

I watch myself in my infinite incapacity to be a good mother all the time, in all my million tiny failures, when I yell or resent them or punish or restrict their innate desire to just be. I see it in my skin, in its fragility and paleness, its translucence and elasticity. I am frail, weak, insignificant, and so hollowed by the requirements, the ever-increasing demands of my charges. I have this holy duty to uphold and my hands have too many cracks for it. I am too fallible and human. With authoritarianism creeping into my words and fury and rage creeping into my hands which perhaps do not hit but do become uncontrolled and grab to move with force or angrily push, I inflict pain on that which I am intended to treasure. I hurt that which I am intended to harbor.

I can barely keep them safe from myself, my frustrations, how can I possibly protect them from the world? When will someone come cuddle me, cup me in their hands, whisper lullabies to me, sing me sweetly to sleep, rocking me slow and steady? Did my opportunity pass me by when I was a child? Was all that love from my mother the end of my sense of security? Can I not be filled up for all that I pour out?

I weep and I weep and I weep. For all the needs that I am filling, for all the needs that are not being filled. For myself, for my children, for my mother. I miss her arms. I remember being three years old, being rocked in an overstuffed chenille rocking armchair. I remember her smell. I remember her smell from inside her arms, her long chestnut hair hanging around my face, touching my arms. I know this is the sort of thing my children will remember about me. I know these are the foundations of a life, of an ability to nurture others. I know all of these things and still I weep. I am overwhelmed. I am overworked. I am overtired. All the moments away, the breaks I get here and there, the occasional night out with my husband – none of it is enough in the face of twenty-four hour, three hundred sixty-five day on call status and that ninety-eight percent of that time is spent there beside them for every sneeze and every accident, every peanut butter sandwich and vegan lasagna, every nightmare and every tummy ache. I want to be there for these moments. I want to be with my children. I just don’t want to feel so alone in it. I just don’t want to feel like so many of my needs are not being met. I do not personally believe that I should somehow lessen my responsibility or accountability to my children or that I should ignore or neglect their very real needs in order to salvage some time to myself. Time alone, time out, these are not the main problems. The main problem is still and has always been, and this feels likely true for most mothers, not just myself – that the adults in my life and the adults of this world do not honor me and my work as a mother, do not aid in fulfilling the emotional needs or recognize the traumas of what to others may simply be if not precisely easy work, normal, mundane work that we all have to do and god damn me for complaining about it. I am not whole. I cannot identify for certain even what it is that makes me not whole. I speak at length with Jay about my need for emotional support and if I make the mistake about making it about him, about couching the complaint as his fault or the result of his lacking, then it simply offends him and it becomes my fault for complaining, not his fault for not sooner recognizing that I feel alone, that I feel sorely deficient in the area of having been nurtured in order to nurture. I need to be nurtured in order to nurture others. I need to receive in order to have something to give. The mistake that men often seem to make is that sex is intimacy, whereas I personally, and many women do as well, feel that intimacy must be established in order to want sex, in order to feel close enough to want to open up to someone else. Understanding how to be vulnerable enough to feel close must be a very vaginal thing intrinsic to being female and somehow counter to being male.

Friday, January 4, 2008

things to think on

i ran across this quote from my aunt, i love it..

"And I agree with your concerns and the dilemmas of being a woman in the world when you yourself need the world to be a woman to you."