motherhood

One of the things I like most about blogging is that your subject can change as you do. This summer I’ve been blogging pregnancy, and now, with just a few weeks more to go, and to keep up with the changes going on here at GWP, I’m changing the theme to (drum roll) Mama w/Pen. From here on in, keep an eye out for monthly contributions from me on the topic of emergent motherhood, feminist and otherwise, on the first Monday of each month.

And speaking of becoming a mama, I just put an “away” message on my email, in preparation for The Big Event. In the meantime, you’ve not heard much from me this past month because I’ve been either in the hospital or on bedrest, spending much of my time lying on my side (best for babies’ circulation for some reason)—all of which makes it rather difficult to type on anything but an iPhone.

What started as a very cutting edge pregnancy—all those high-tech fertility interventions!—has ended up an anachronism. I now understand, in a very personal way, why pregnancy was once called “confinement,” or “lying in.” Hospitalized for early contractions at 30 weeks, I’ve spent the past 3.5 flat on my side, holed up with Marco, Tula (pictured here), my parents for a little while, and the occasional intrepid visitor from Manhattan and beyond. While Tula thinks bedrest is the cat’s meow, for me, it hasn’t been easy. Never in my life have I felt so limited by my body. I’m a a 21st century woman on a 19th century cure.

There are days when I think, “I can’t believe women, everyday, everywhere, go through this kind of thing, have gone through this, from the beginning of time.” Intelligent design? I think not. There are days when I’m in awe of my sisters who bear pregnancy gracefully, stoically, and without complication. Granted, some pregnancies are easier than others. For me, all attempts at grace and stoicism went out the window with those early contractions, which seem to only intensify as the weeks go by. My knees buckle from the weight of me. I have dark, dark circles under my eyes.

But I’m trying not to complain. Or rather, at least not in public, not out loud. I still can’t believe the technology worked. I’m still in awe that at ages 40 and 48, we’re lucky enough to become first time parents, and that we’re having not just one but two.

So rather than kvetch, which I confess is indeed my inclination right now, I’m trying instead to embrace the absurdity of it all while I bide my time and courageously hope not to give birth for a few weeks more—even though I’m more than ready to be done. Though it’s become increasingly hard to breath, there have been moments of buckling laughter. Like the night Marco wheeled me in a wheelchair with no leg support to the church down the block where Kol Nidre services were being held. Like the other day, when Marco walked me over to stand in front of the full-length mirror. “See? You’re still hot,” he said. “In a funhouse mirror kind of way.”

Funhouse aside, I feel like a character from a Margaret Atwood novel—an incubator and not much else. “Having children is sacrifice,” says Shari, one of the kind nurses I see regularly when I go to the hospital for my twice weekly monitoring appointments to check on the status of my contractions and the babies’ heart rates. “It starts right here, right now.” But what about the incubator? I want to ask, incredulous that becoming a mother has to involve such prolonged discomfort and pain. Instead, I hold my tongue, think of my roommate during my stay at the hospital, who gave birth to twin boys at 26 weeks, and feel immensely grateful to be here, with babies still inside me, at week 34.

If I could think of a topic that travels around the conversations of most women I know, the choice to have a child, and when, often lives pretty near the top of the list.  Following it comes a litany of concerns: how to juggle career, partnerhood, personal and professional ambitions, and more.  Elizabeth Gregory, Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston, as well as Full Professor of English, tackles the topic of timing in Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood with results that bring relief — both in the sense that there is good news to uncover amid all the swirling anxiety, and relief as the strong, clear reasons why many women choose to delay motherhood stand out against a grey fog of cultural pressure that warns against it.

Over two and a half years, Gregory interviews 113 women of diverse backgrounds (gay and straight as well as single and coupled) and focuses on the choices of women who become first-time mothers at age 35 or older.  Recognizing that “later” motherhood is nothing new, Gregory articulates how the difference is that women are now choosing to have first children, rather than last, at what is labeled “advanced maternal age.”  The choices that spur this change swim the  currents of women’s lives: the advent of birth control, and correspondingly, advances with fertility treatment; access to education and the desire for a career; refusal to marry just to gain a spouse, with instead the desire to wait for a peer relationship; commitment to financial security that eschews dependence on a partner.  The best news is how often the women interviewed express deep contentment with their paths.

Gregory’s statistics are compelling: “One of every 12 babies born to first-time mothers in 2006 was born to a woman 35 or older. In 1970, the figure was one in 100.”  Her research reflects the financial as well as emotional rewards of this choice.  She points out that “among full-time workers between 40 and 45 with professional degrees, those who had their first child at 25 made an average of $46,000, while those who waited until 35 made $79,000. A woman’s average long-term salary increases by 3 percent for each year she delays children.” Her exploration of the politics surrounding labor (during birth and other maternal work) and childcare issues continues on her blog “Domestic Product” and in several thought pieces available online.

Ready rounds a spectrum of reasons why women choose to delay, with many citing better emotional preparedness at later ages, as well as not wanting to rush new relationships, or women’s own enjoyment of their 20s and 30s, alongside the desire to be more financially powerful and advanced in their careers, hence better able to leverage work/family balance.  Women who come later to motherhood are more likely to have higher levels of education, more stable partnerships, and be in “peer marriages,” with active partners who commit equally to childcare. Most cheering is the overall positive sense of choice.

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This was the reaction of more than a few folks when they heard that I was starting to blog about motherhood. While it put me on the defensive, I also concede that they have a point. My single friend in Manhattan is feeling a bit inundated on Facebook by friends writing about their children; my husband points out that given the amount of blogging about motherhood, a lot has already been said (some of it very eloquently, I might add!) and that I should probably think hard about what, exactly, Global Mama is going to contribute.

So here’s the idea that motivated me to start a column called Global Mama. A lot of the conversation I’ve seen about motherhood and family life is pretty focused on individual experiences in the good ol’ US of A, which is fine and well (and also important–last time I checked, we still don’t have universal health care or paid maternity leave or a host of other national policies that would help a whole bunch of working families). But we also live in an increasingly globalized world (witness the development of all those mom blogs and the virtual communities they have created). I’m not just talking about the fact that so much of what we bring into our homes in the U.S. is made elsewhere (plastic toys made in Chinese factories) but also that the U.S. is attracting huge numbers of immigrant women–many of them mothers–who come here to make money to send home to their families, so their kids can eat food and buy clothes and go to school. Many of them working for professional working moms. All connected by globalization and the changes we’ve witnessed over the past several decades. All global mamas.

This column intends to bring together a diverse community–including researchers, activists, writers, thinkers, scholars, parents, paid caregivers, and kids–about what it means to have families and provide care in a globalized world. What are the effects of globalization, migration, technological change, transnational and transcultural exchange, and the development of globalized media culture on mothering and parenting? on our ideas about what motherhood is and what it looks like? As Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it in the anthology Global Woman, how do we create a “global sense of ethics” in a globalized world? And how can feminist commentary from a range of perspectives help inform our take on the myths and realities of motherhood and on debates within the public sphere?

So here’s my invitation to you, dear Girl with Pen reader, to offer your feminist perspectives on motherhood and family life on Global Mama! Contact me at globalmama@gmail.com.

PEACE.
It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

In spite of myself (or maybe because of myself, as Marco might say) I’ve somehow made it to the cusp: the third trimester. The home stretch. Music to my ears. I can’t imagine how it’s possible that my body itself will stretch further to make room for these growing babes—2.10 lbs each as this trimester begins, as good as singletons at this stage, huzzah! But I have confidence my body will still expand, even if it continues to choke me out along the way.

Just as I believe my body will continue do its bizarre miraculous thing in spite of what I think or say or do (pu pu pu), I’m slowly starting to have confidence that my intractable mind will stretch to incorporate motherhood, too. I still need some convincing on this front, but things are looking up.

As usual, it’s friends, parents, and spouse who are helping me believe. The other weekend, Daphne, her mother-in-law, my mom, and Marco helped shovel out boxes from the storage room—I mean, babies’ room—to clear space for two new beings. Once I could see the floor in there, I immediately started fantasizing about a rug. A sickeningly sweet baby-style area rug with clouds and moons and stars. “Of all things the babies will need, you’re fixated on a rug?” asks my wonderfully practical friend Rebecca from California. Indeed, I am. It’s the first bit of gear I’ve been able to get excited about, now that I believe these babies are going to be real. This weekend, I picked one out. I ordered it. No small victory here.

The rug makes it real. The fact that at 7.5 months with twins I look ready to pop makes it real. During trimesters 1 and 2, I grew reluctantly accustomed to a sense of the surreal, the unreal, the insane. It’s not a comfortable state of being; I’ve resisted it every step of the way. The reality—two babies growing limbs and organs and fingernails inside me—has been too much to fathom, leaving me barfing with vertigo, body and soul. Working at a start-up this whole time has been a terrific distraction, and while frenetic, in many ways its timing couldn’t have been better. It’s given my mind something all-encompassing to do.

But now it’s time to start putting my feet on the ground, feel the rug beneath me, find a way to steady my head long enough to find a pediatrician and buy a crib.

The rug. The crib. The changing table. The trappings of two babyhoods that have not yet arrived are symbolic, and yet they are more. They are signs of my belief, material affirmations of the unbelievable coming true. Today, Daphne gave me two pairs of booties (pictured above). The babies have hiccups. I believe they are going to make it to reality. And I believe their mother just might too.

(Gratitude to Sarah Saffian for sending me the epigraph to this post.)

As we celebrated Women’s Equality Day* yesterday, we want to talk about one of the most enduring signs of the gender equality gap — the differences in how men and women spend their time on an everyday basis. Many of you have probably heard of the term the “double-shift” when talking about women’s work outside and inside the home, and anecdotally, we all have examples (“I came home from a 12 hour work day and had to pick up his socks.” Or “After work I had to pick up the kids, clean the house, and cook dinner.”) The recently released American time use survey proves what we’ve known all along: women bear the burden of household work.

A couple of snippets:
• At 5:10 pm, 17% of women are doing household activities – 11% of men are.
• At 7:40 am, 11% of women are doing household activities – 6 % of men are.

Really, do check out the link – they’ve done a cool interactive chart where you can compare time use according to age, gender, race, employment, educational attainment, and size of household. Categories vary from “household activities” to “eating and drinking” to (our favorite!) “relaxing and thinking”. The only downside to the chart is that you cannot compare by multiple qualities – for example, are black women doing more household activities than white women at 5:10? Then black men? What about black single mothers? And Hispanic women over 65? (You get the picture.)

Internationally, feminist economists have been arguing for the inclusion of household work into overall GDP estimates – where traditionally, the bulk of women’s work was uncounted, as it did not take place within the marketplace. For the past few years, the United Nations Development Fund has been tracking Gender, work, and time allocation in its Human Development Report. Although only 33 countries reported on time allocation in 2007, the results are nonetheless interesting – globally women aren’t faring that much better in balancing free time and personal care and family care.

Even the “wunderkind” countries of Northern Europe women seem to be putting more time into the children and the chores then men. In Norway, while women and men spent approximately equal amount of time on themselves, women spent more time cooking and cleaning (2:14) than their male counterparts (0:52). Women also spent double the time (34 mins) that men (17 mins) did on childcare.

In Nicaragua, a moderately developed country where interestingly even the one country where women and men have relatively equal free time women, women are the primary caregivers for the children (1:01 hours compared to the 17 mins men spent with the kids), the cooks and cleaners (3:31 hours to 0:31 mins) and less likely to be involved in market activities 28% to men’s 74%.

It is no surprise that the least developed countries have the widest disparities with regards to time. Women in Benin spend much more time (8:03 hrs) on market and non-market activities combined than men (5:36 hrs). Beninese women don’t have much time for themselves (1:32hrs) their children (45 mins) or their household chores (2:49 hrs) and yet they still spend more time on everything, except themselves, than their men. I’m exhausted just blogging about it.

Virginia Woolf spoke of the need of one’s own room and time (and of course money) when writing fiction. And truly, all of these things are needed for most successes. Who knows how much more the world could gain from women if more men got more involved in activities beyond the market? There are signs that times are changing, however: although recent studies do not indicate more equality in household chores, they do point to a shift in younger men’s (Gen X) attitudes and behaviors around fathering. Looks like we are one step closer to taking ALL work activities seriously, whether inside the market or out. And that’s what we call equality.

* Don’t miss the National Council for Research on Women’s tribute to Women’s Equality Day on their blog, The Real Deal. (Full disclosure: both Tonni and I have posts up! We did them in our personal time.)

This here post comes straight from dear friend of GWP and mine, and fellow writer, Daphne Uviller — who I’ve been writing about of late, here and here! –Deborah

I visited Debbie the other day to try to help her nest a bit, and she gave me two books, one of which was Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, which she said was a little too much for her (meaning Debbie) at this point.  I agree — it’s not a book that should be read while pregnant, but later, while struggling with what it means to be a good mother or even, as I often do, how to get back to even wanting to be a good mother.

I read the whole book in one sitting and while I disliked a few parts, I admire Waldman for her honesty — I consider myself a very honest writer, but she goes where I hadn’t dared — and her talent and her insight.

Here’s what I took away from it:

1) Men MUST be equal partners, not just pay lip service. Okay, that’s old news, but never bad to be reminded.
2) Men do not worry about being good or bad fathers, they just are what they are. We should follow their example. This is wrapped up in the whole idea of observing, of living in the moment rather than judging and worrying. More old news, but still, good to hear.
3) I’m glad I don’t live in Berkeley.
4) I kind of wished I lived in Berkeley.
5) Part-time work that you love is the answer to the work/life balance conundrum. (She doesn’t state this explicitly, but confirms what I already figured out.  We writers, money permitting, have it made.)
6) I think I’d like to try going on Celexa.

And the chapter on her abortion between her second and third child (she has four) made me weep. It is powerful, powerful stuff.

-Daphne Uviller

For Grandma Marge (may her memory be for a blessing)

Ok, it’s time for me to admit it: I’m getting scared. In less than 10 weeks (knock wood, pu pu pu – sorry can’t help it), my body will somehow, with whatever degree of medical intervention, bear forth two new beings whose well-being will henceforth depend, in very large part, on me. I confess to my husband, my closest friends, and my mother than I’m getting nervous. They offer comfort, try to allay my fears:

“Of course you’re scared. It’s scary.” –Daphne (mother of two)

“You’re focused on the first few weeks. I was too. But three months in, everything changes, and you don’t even remember that blur.” – Rebecca (mother of two)

“Too late now!” – Mom (mother of me)

Gee thanks, Mom.

Again, I must qualify. I feel blessed beyond belief at the bounty of having conceived not just one but two babies, twenty-first century techno style. I marvel at the way things have gone so far. In spite of bouts of stress (a layoff, a move, the start of a new company), these babies have grown the requisite parts. They’ve passed all their tests, independent of the fact that their maternal host has sometimes felt like a chicken without a head. They are of me, but they are not me—a lifelong lesson I’m sure, something they are already teaching me, something I am not yet wholly convinced of but want and need to believe.

My father, a psychiatrist, gets wind that I’m having a minor, belated freak out. He calls from the road 700 miles away to remind me I’m not alone. “It takes a village, Deb, and a village you will have.”

And he’s right. When the babies arrive, my mother will come for a month, and my father will join her when he can. Rebecca will come for a week or so, all the way from California. The twins I grew up with, Molly and Busy, will each come from Chicago for a few days. Courtney will be across the park. Daphne will be nearby, as will myriad others. And then, of course, there’s Marco, my sweet attentive artistic Marco (author of the “2” on my belly in the above photo), who can’t wait to hang our twins’ art on the walls and take them to see Star Wars and play them Superman’s theme. We just don’t know yet, given his new position, the extent to which he will be able to be at home, in the beginning, with me.

But come what may, I will not be alone. It’s my new mantra, and I’m trying to buy it. It’s just that my experience of pregnancy, this experience of being so embodied, has been oddly isolating. I’m a social person who stops pregnant women on the street and cries “solidarity!”, and yet there have been many times when I’ve felt alone, as in existentially, in my discomfort and angst. Locked in, with no escape. I’ve tried hard not to crawl too far into that dark hole—I have a small history of depression—and I’ve been successful at keeping healthy and busy. But every so often, that feeling of aloneless (is it just a fear?) creeps in.

A village you will have.

And I will.  The last village elder, however, is gone, and I’ve been missing her a lot of late.  My Grandma Marge passed away a year ago today. Grandma was a certified nurse—head of the department in her day—and used to bring great comfort whenever I was sick. Pregnancy is not illness, and yet its symptoms have been physically challenging, reminiscent of times I’ve felt ill. Grandma Marge made it our wedding last year, but she died before the technology worked its magic. How she would kvelled and basked in our news, enabled by money that I, her only grandchild, inherited from her. And how I would have loved to have shared the blessing of these babies with her.

If I can write it, maybe I can will it: these are our babies. They are not mine alone. I will be their mommy. But they will have a daddy, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and if I believed, departed great-grandparents watching over them from somewhere. (On top of it all, I recently joined the notorious Park Slope Parents listserv. Never again will I worry about anything child-related alone!)

I am not alone, I am not alone, and yet…I am. It’s my body that’s primarily responsible, and that seems both a miraculous blessing and a bit of a curse. In spite of my feminism, I’ve internalized wholesale the cultural mandate that the buck stops with Mom. Because let’s face it, in reality, so often it does. How desperately, already, I find myself wanting to rewrite that script. But is it feminism, or existentialism, that I’m grappling with here? I’d love your thoughts.

It was recently pointed out to me by my dear observant friend Daphne that when talking about this pregnancy with her, I haven’t once said anything about the fact that there will soon be two new little beings around here (knock on wood) and that I will be their mother. I think the reason for my reticence lies snug inside those two parentheses: knock wood.

I am not, in general, a superstitious person. My grandmother, an orthodox Jew who would have been 100 last week had she lived just two more years, believed in the evil eye. Before getting pregnant, I neither knocked on wood nor spat three times (the Jewish equivalent) when mentioning a hope or a dream. And yet I’ve been a bundle of superstitious tentativeness when it comes to talking about the life forms I’m gestating as real people who will one day exist outside.

Why?

My mother, a therapist, says it’s obvious: “Self-protection, honey,” says she. And it’s true. I’m of advanced maternal age and I’m carrying twins, which automatically throws me into categorical high alert. But I’ve been carrying this unfathomably wondrous primordial soup in my uterus now for almost 27 weeks, and all has unfolded, so far, according to plan. When, I wonder, will I allow myself to hope, to dream, out loud?

I have never, ever wanted something this much. Well, that’s not completely true. I wanted a husband, and then, when the first one didn’t work out so well, I wanted another. I wanted a book contract, and later a second and a third. I achieved those things. I’ve been blessed (if you believe in that sort of thing), and I’ve worked hard to realize my desires. But with pregnancy, it feels different. We did everything in the book—and then some—to get to this point, but from here on in, it’s pretty much out of our hands.

The universe is encouraging, helping gently to push me along. Last week Daphne sent me an envelope in the mail with a note scrawled on the outside: “the first of many hand-me-downs from me!” Inside were two little sets of newborn-sized socks. The gear amasses. My mother-in-law sent baby shoes. A friend from childhood, herself a twin, gave me two matching onesies with images of the Dr. Seuss creatures, “Thing 1” and “Thing 2.” My aunt corralled a gently used double stroller from her physical therapist. My cousin has offered me her breast pump. Soon it will be time to get the babies’ room, currently full of boxes from our recent move, in shape for its forthcoming residents. I’ve been calling it “the second bedroom.” I can barely even say “babies’ room.”

Don’t get me wrong—I’m moved beyond language at the thought that there will be babies. When I see newborns on the street, I choke up. Just thinking about those teeny socks makes me cry. It’s just that somewhere between the concept “babies” and the reality “my babies,” or rather, “our babies,” my thoughts get lost in translation. Lost in gestation, maybe.  (Have any of you, I bet, I hope, felt this way?!)

For now, it’s easier to think of these inexplicable creatures that rumble in my belly as my own private primordial entourage. They’re in there doing their thing, and I’m out here doing mine. I wonder if I should be talking to them more. I try to get my husband to put his mouth near my belly and sing. But we both have trouble, it seems, relating to them as people who can connect to us as “Mom” and “Dad.” It will be different, I know, when we’re all out here living on the same side.

For now, they’ll remain a mystery. They’re abstract to me, but I can’t wait for them to become concrete. Yesterday my friend Kathy suggested I write them a letter. And maybe I will. This is how it might start:

Dear Baby Things (1&2),
Keep cooking. I’m here for you, waiting. You may be my entourage, but I’m your number one fan.
Love,
Your Mama-to-be

I am so heartened by the comments on my post from last week, “Blogging Pregnancy…or Not.” Thank you, from my heart. I just responded, in comments, more individually, but I wanted to give a group shout out from here too.

You seriously have made my day. It’s been a busy few days with SheWrites.com, but I’m planning on getting back here and writing more VERY soon!

In the meantime, look what I just made — you can make one too:

Visit She Writes

I’ve been so busy during this pregnancy either a) puking or b) helping start a social networking site and company that I haven’t found time to write much–or even journal about–the bizarro incredible experience that is pregnancy itself.

Part of me has feared that “pregnant women are smug”, and pregnant women writing about pregnancy are the smuggest of them all.  In other words, to say anything in public is to risk falling in with the sanctimonious mommy crowd. Perhaps this fear has something to do with the fact that one of the only times I pregnancy blogged these past few months, over at Recessionwire, I got flamed. (Thin skin anyone?  I blame the hormones. Thankfully, the editors took the really nasty ones down.)  Of course, it probably didn’t help that I gave that post a sanctimonious title, “The Fortune Within”, though in my defense, I used that title because I had wanted to contrast the way I felt about this much-tried-for pregnancy with the major theme I’d been writing about over there–love in the time of layoff, my lack of fortune without.  But apparently some commentors felt that any woman who writes about pregnancy is, well, smug.

So here I am trying again, after recent promptings from friends, therapists, and even my business partner.  Why not write about pregnancy, these people ask me, when it’s so foremost on your mind?

Whenever I try to kick myself into writing gear, I start reading again.  I realized the only two pregnancy/motherhood-related books I’d read during this pregnancy so far had clinical titles like The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, and Twins!: Pregnancy, Birth, and the First Year of Life.  The first had been given to me by my husband, the second by my husband’s mother.  When I gave myself permission to go one step deeper, I had reached for Amy Tiemann’s Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family and Amy Richards’ Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. These books helped me feel it was possible to have a kid (two, in my case) and still have a professional life.  (THANK YOU, brilliant Amys!)  But they didn’t inspire me to write about what I was going through myself.

So the other week, I turned to memoir.  Thanks to the “Motherhood Books” group that Jennifer Niesslein formed over at SHE WRITES, I remembered I’d always wanted to read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, when the time came.  That time, apparently, is now.  Anne Lamott is so quirky, so brutally and painfully honest about the horrible things as well as the beauty, that I got inspired.  She’s the opposite of smug.  And she makes it seem ok to want to tell the truth–which for me, has not been all shiny and baby blue and powder pink.  For me, the truth of twin pregnancy at age 40 has so far been about trying to balance physical ailments of striking (yet normal, apparently) proportions with an intense struggle to slow my life down enough to make room for an impending reality for which I feel massively ill-prepared.

And so here I sit, at 5:00am with pregnancy insomnia, tiny miracles kicking around inside me, writing about writing about pregnancy.  I don’t think I’m quite writing about it yet, but hey, it’s a start.

(Does this picture make me look smug?!)