Go Ahead, Lose Yourself in Motherhood! DO IT!!

JOIN ME IN THE PRIMORDIAL SWAMP OF MOMDOM!!!!!

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So much current thinking and subsequent content on the state of motherhood is boring. If Momland were a country, it would be populated by frazzled and anxious women clad in pastel athleisure wear, chanting the same shibboleths each day about “normalizing” this and “toxic” that. The national drink would be room temperature coffee. Husbands would go to the bathroom and not return for weeks on end. Giant boulders of unfolded laundry would fall from the sky pinning mothers and children beneath them. We’d declare an unending war on ‘weaponized incompetence’ only to find ourselves constantly sabotaged by ‘gaslighting’ and ‘mom-shaming’. We’d all fear and worship the same capricious god: Bluey.

You get my point. 

The trope that I currently find the most tedious is the complaint ‘I LOST MYSELF TO MOTHERHOOD.’ Google it, you’ll find a thousand ‘articles’ that all hit the same beats:

• Don’t get me wrong I love watching my little human blossom

• But I miss having my body to myself and a brain that is free to think of other things besides besides my baby

• I also miss vacations with girlfriends, concerts, going to movies, nightlife, vaping, hula hooping, race car driving I don’t know I can barely read these fucking things etc

• Here are some ways I practice self-care and an affiliate link for good measure

Two things I want to tell you about this sentiment. 

First, on a biological level, it makes sense that we feel like there’s some version of us left behind in the prenatal world. Somewhere there’s a copy of you sleeping past 9am and making spontaneous weekend plans. Now there is a Before and an After, just as there is in many of life’s biological shifts, puberty, death, and so on.

 Our bodies and brains have literally—and I mean that in the very literal sense—been fundamentally rewired to keep a tiny mammal alive. We now function with different pleasure centers, a taught-as-a-snare drum nervous system, a smaller, leaner brain, and we pulsate with a cocktail of hormones and neurochemicals fermented by millions of years of evolution.

 Of course, this transition into matrescence is little discussed during pregnancy. There’s a thousand apps that will tell your fetus is the size of a kumquat or that peeing 17 times a day is normal but we have such little curiosity or regard for what happens to women post-birth that this evolutionary miracle is left as scrap to be puzzled over by Corporate Mommy Blogs hoping to sell you postpartum leggings.

What the *fuck* is a ‘postpartum capsule wardrobe’???

So I get it. I get why moms are looking around blinking, alienated, bloated trying to figure out what happened.

Second, on a societal level, here’s what I think you actually miss: being a first class citizen because as a mother you no longer are one. You’ve turned in your passport as a consumer, a sexually desirable object, a productive worker etc. You are now in a first world dystopia where you are resource starved, lied to, manipulated, exploited and worst of all you’re corny. Your memes suck. You’re an angry Karen. That’s the message, that's - as the kids say- the vibe. Frfr.

Don’t blame your baby. And don’t blame motherhood. Blame all the systems that turn you against your baby and motherhood.

Here’s a good bit and that sums it up (apologies for the bootleg version):

Ok, here’s the good news, though. For some of us, there’s great freedom in ‘getting lost’ in motherhood. For other women, there may be more important endeavors than raising your own human, but for me, this is it. I cannot think of a company, organization, institution, hobby or brunch place that deserves my time more than my daughter. What’s the saying? The best things come at a high cost?

I have relished shedding previous identities like a glistening little lady snake slithering inside the primordial swamp of motherhood.

On our way to Whole Foods

I spent the first decade young adulthood forging my identity through stuff: clothes, concerts, subcultures, and scenes. Trying to find a pose that signaled my uniquely rebellious sensibility while still wearing designer jeans.

Then came the next thrilling and stupid TWENTY YEARS of defining myself through relationships. There were romances, shared bank accounts, flings, a night in jail. It was all frivolous, deathly serious, pathological, mundane, self-destructive groping to find someone who loved me as much as I loved them. I found the guy but really made it as hard as possible on myself.

Woven through those years was a lot of self-making through career, much of it done in public. I spent a decade in the glossy content mines where I racked up bylines fancy newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Lots of external validation and criticism, that ultimately amounted to very little financial security in the material world.

I did my time at non-profits dedicated to excellent social causes. This was good, demanding work and I think I successfully flung my little pebble in the lake of best intentions, with its ripples cascading outwards. But that sort of work left me depleted of all my emotional resources.

After I gave birth my entire sense of self re-oriented and now I feel as though I am on a singular, happy path. In her (very funny) book of essays, Jessi Klein argues that motherhood is ‘the hero’s journey’ for women. The phrase, coined by Joseph Campbell, typically always refers to men gaining self-actualization through adventure. ‘Adventure’, always having similar hallmarks that might sound familiar to all moms:

• A call to adventure to a foreign place like an underground kingdom, a forest, or a land beneath the waves, or a profound dream state

• There are unimaginable tortures by “strangely fluid and polymorphous beings”

• The hero accomplishes a “superhuman deed”

• Hero is rewarded with “impossible delights”

• Hero returns home changed in profound and lasting ways

Here’s Klein:

The truth is that motherhood is a hero’s journey. For most of us it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there.

…

Ultimately, the hope of impossible delight almost always wins out over the impossible torment. I know this because here I am, alive, writing this, and here you are, alive, reading it, which means our mothers did what heroes do: They kept us all alive to tell our own tales one day.

So now here we are. I am the happiest I’ve ever been on my hero’s journey into Motherhood. I have gone entirely inward, burrowed into my own family and home, spending my all energies investing in the small circle of people I love and I’m rewarded with their love back. There are moments of huge torment and impossible delights. My existential angst is for the most part sapped. I’m still prone to moodiness and flights of cynicism, but in general I love my little island off the coast of Momland. It’s lush, peaceful, filled with a constant sense of wonder that I have found nowhere else.

Ya girl ain’t afraid to make some AI art about her EMOTIONS

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