DotMoms

How an unexpected after-effect gave me new respect for my fellow women

By Alicia

When I was young, my mother would periodically make comments about how she had been a different person before having kids. We would tease her about her untameable curly hair and she would say forebodingly, "Just wait until you get pregnant; mine used to be wavy like yours." When her allergies would act up, she'd say, "I never had a problem with this until I had you kids." I remember looking at her blankly for a moment, befuddled by the idea of her existing before we did and then, unable to compute such a concept, I would drop that whole existential chasm and go off and play with my fellow body-snatchers.

When I was pregnant, I remember having my own out-of-body moments, feeling like an anthropologist observing this bizarre terrain formerly known as My Body. Although I had a healthy, easy pregnancy in general, there were dozens of little changes -- you know, your feet swell so much that they look like they belong on a Muppet or Sesame Street character, at odd moments throughout the day your body gets furiously pummeled from the inside, everything takes twice as much energy as it used to. Individually, these changes were too insignificant to discuss with my ob/gyn and too standard to elicit much more than an eyeroll and a 15-minute history of their pregnancy horrors if I mentioned them to someone at work or a friend. So I quickly learned to not share them and just experience these little shifts in how my body functioned on my own.

I was left with a huge feeling of disconnect, though, pretending to everyone else that everything was normal for me while feeling that my body really had been taken over by something unknown. (Which, of course, it had.) This was when I first had the thought: How have so many women put up with this so quietly for so long?

For, despite the extra public courtesy (doors opened, shopping bags carried to the car, you need never stand on public transportation again), while one is pregnant there is precious little concession to the fact that you are walking around with another BEING inside of you. Things are, in fact, very DIFFERENT. Not continually, not all the time, but nonetheless, most non-pregnant people do not scan every new environment they enter to determine the best place to puke should the urge arise. Call me a whiner, but as the weeks and months wore on and the changes became greater and greater (for goodness sake, you can't even breathe easily in the last trimester!) the thought that this is what women have done for all these years filled me with a sense of dazed awe. How have pregnant women managed to function business as usual?

I am reminded of all this because since my son was born, my menstrual cycles have become regular. This may seem like no big deal to the average woman, but let me put it this way: For 37 years I enjoyed menstrual cycles that were very short, somewhat infrequent, and at their worst involved a little extra desire for chocolate, a slightly greater tendency to cry, and a desire to get a full eight hours sleep instead of the usual six or seven. Now, my cycles are like clockwork every 28 days and for the first time, I believe that I am experiencing PMS as women across the world have experienced PMS from time immemorial. Bloating to the point of nausea, fatigue, rage, breasts swelling to the weight of sandbags, for 7-10 days out of every 28. This is the "usual," right?

Again, my only thought is: THIS is what women have done all these years? I have that slightly dazed feeling all over again. Surely not, I think, surely this is not what it could be like for women everywhere throughout the dawn of time because something so insidious, so debilitating -- wouldn't there be national campaigns about it? Wouldn't celebrities be wearing little pins to raise awareness of our plight? Wouldn't there be millions of medical dollars dedicated to fighting this adversity? Instead of late-night jokes about it, wouldn't someone be handing the makers of Midol a Nobel prize?

I thought that pregnancy was a temporary condition; I was an anthropologist visiting a foreign land, but I would be going home in just nine short months. I hadn't really believed my mother when she blamed her body's failures on having kids. Some of the changes get plenty of press, of course -- weight gain, Kegel exercises. But curly hair? Allergies? PMS? Once again, the cliché Your life will never be the same after you have kids takes on new meaning for me. My days of virtually hormonal-free PMS are over. Once again, my admittance into the Mommy Club gives me unexpected insight into what it takes to be a woman. And, I have to say, I'm very impressed with us.

Alicia and her family live in Vermont.

My son is a boy

By Alicia

My 10–month-old is playing in the bath. I'm swirling little, plastic sea creatures in the water between his legs to keep him occupied when he discovers something much more interesting. Reaching beneath a little duckie that is floating by, my sweet, innocent boy spies his penis and begins pinching it lightly between his tiny thumbs and forefingers, a small frown of concentration changing into a tentative smile.

I notice his discovery and say in my sing-song mommy voice designed to telegraph interest and inspire curiosity, "What's that, honey? Did you find your pee-pee? Is that your pee-pee?"

This morning he did not recognize actual words and my voice was just the soundtrack to his life. But now my sweet, innocent, cherub-boy looks up at me and beams the most mischievous, maniacal, monkey grin that can be beamed with only two teeth. He is absolutely adorable in his utter delight. I say it again, more tentatively this time, "Pee-pee?" He beams back at me. My heart becomes heavier.

"And so it begins," I think.

When I told my mom about it later she snorted, "Men!"

"From the time they're eight months until they're 80!" she said.

Exactly.

That is exactly the problem. Something so important to him and I have no knowledge of it, nothing to offer in real experience about that part of his life. He'll be living a life of the male experience and I will simply watch, not having experienced it myself. This was the fear that flashed through my heart, spreading a sense of dread and anxiety in its wake, more than a year ago when the cheerful sonographer declared, "It's a boy!"

Throughout my entire pregnancy I was a mix of befuddlement and skepticism about my baby's gender. "What am I supposed to do with a boy?" I wondered. Out loud. Often.

Whenever someone asked if I knew the gender I would say almost pleadingly, hoping they could impart wisdom that would illuminate the path on which I was about to embark, "It's a boy. I'm having a boy. What do I do with a boy?" I said the word "boy" over and over, hoping it would sink in.

I mean, I know what women are like; I love being one and I love hanging out with them. I get girls. But a boy??? A boy meant hours of playing trains and smashing toy cars and, eventually, endless hours of video games and, heaven help me, the Three Stooges.

"Maybe he will be a boy with a really big feminine side," I reassured myself hopefully.

He's been warning me this may not be the case, though. At five months old he started bouncing up and down whenever we got near anything that lit up or blipped and the only thing he would "eat" at first was a cell phone or the remote control (the real one, how do they know?). Love of gadgets? Male.

At Christmas, he rejected blocks, a musical train, and an animated shape sorter all for the junior version of whack-a-mole. Instead of electronics, his new-found obsession is hammering four-colored balls into their respective holes. He loves this game beyond all reason, practicing whacking like it was a religion; sometimes bashing away randomly in the general direction of the toy and sometimes methodically pummeling the same ball until it succumbs and drops into the hole. Pointless smashing? Very male.

A tiny pang of disappointment hit me as I first watched him pound away at the balls. I was happy to see his enthusiasm and growing dexterity, but he was a boy, after all, and I would only be able to guide him so far before he would continue down a road that I do not travel.

And that was the moment I faced when he was playing in the tub. Although he didn't know it, that was the first time I couldn't really, viscerally share his experience with him. The most I could do was smile and wish him luck, "Yep, that's your pee-pee, love. I don't know what to tell you about it, really... You can ask your daddy, he can tell you all about it."

I sat by the tub, feeling alienated from my baby for the first time since he's been born.

After a few moments he held up his chubby arms, signaling to be picked up. I scooped him up and he smiled his delight that I understood what he wanted. His arms went around my neck, holding me in a hug. My heart melted because it felt so right. "He's my boy," I thought. Suddenly playing with cars and watching the Three Stooges seemed to make perfect sense.

Alicia and her family live in Vermont.

Real mothers don't need sleep

By Alicia

I realized the other day that I'm not ready to be a mother.

This is a highly awkward insight to have considering my son is now 10 months old.

It's not that I'm having trouble with the actual mothering part. Round-the-clock feedings? Did that. Tummy time? Check. Holding Chase through his first set of shots? Did it. And even managed to reassure myself that he would not consider me a traitor for the rest of his life for being complicit to such an attack. Rolling over, crawling, introducing solids –- check, check, check. I love being a mom to my little bugaboo. I love getting to watch his unique personality develop and the universal milestones go by. So, mothering my boy? Love it. Considering myself an actual Mother? Not there yet.

Thinking of myself as a Mother feels like discovering that I'm no longer a woman, or a chocoholic, or that I'm actually adopted. Some essential element that made me me shifted when that little boy was born, throwing me into a new identity. And I'm not ready for it.

I don't know how to make the shift.

I've seen the movies, read the books, even had one of my own. "Mothers" bake brownies, track the tiniest details of multiple schedules (besides their own!), can name the ailment with their eyes still closed when their sick child comes to them in the middle of the night. They make complete, nutritious meals -- dozens of them in a row, night after night! You get the picture. They're like Superman on Ritalin.

I am more like Mr. Magoo on Valium. I mean well, but I'm only as organized as I need to be to avoid having services interrupted (the basics, like credit cards, cell phone, my driver's license). Since Chase was born, I've entered a chronic state of sleepiness just short of narcolepsy. My weekly menu consists of Lean Cuisine meals, cereal, and Diet Coke. Who has time for balanced nutrition? My baby cries in the night -– is he sick, teething, just fussy? And what do I do? Should I comfort him or is this one of those opportunities where he is supposed to learn independence? Real Mothers don't need sleep and they don't question this stuff.

I've ridden on top of buses in Guatemala. I swam across a lake in New Hampshire stark naked at high noon. I was the first woman to own Go-Go boots when they came back. This is who I am. June Cleaver never wore Go-Go boots. She would have been bemused at the very point of them and then pulled a pot roast out of the oven, circling it with those little potatoes. How did I end up in the same club as she is?

I've been holding onto the fairy tale myth of Motherdom -- seeing Mothers as little more than altruistic entities whose sole purpose is to serve others and spread love throughout the land. Santa Claus without all the presents. Now that I've joined the ranks I feel like a master imposter. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in "Catch Me if You Can."

Still, I am slowly getting used to being part of the Mother Club. I now talk with women at work who I never spoke to before, because we are both members of the Club and there are so many notes to compare. Since my son was born, I've seen the wife of one of my hiking friends (also a mother) more than any of the women (single and childless) I used to go out with regularly. And as I appreciate more and more what "Motherhood" really means, I have hope I'll feel entirely at home within the ranks of the Mother Club one day.

I mean, Carol Brady must have worn Go-Go boots, right?

Alicia and her family live in Vermont.