On Being a Mom

This is really quite something. E is 6 months old yesterday. And I feel proud. I'm doing something good.


What a lot of angst I have about being a mom. What does it mean? What does it require? Do I cease to exist in the cause of "the family"? Ugh. And inspite of all my intellectual contrivances, I see myself as I am holding this baby, and there is a sense of rightness in it. It is just about the only thing in my life that I am sure of in my gut. So that makes it a place to start. A part of my path, not a stumbling block.

I hate my mom. And I am tempted to hedge it with long explanations of how I love her and hate her and blah, blah, blah. But there it is. I hate her. She abandoned me as a child and she has abandoned me as an adult, to process the pain alone. And if she loved me and did her best, how can I justify damaging the next generation? How can I justify becoming a mother? When I know that the outcome, no matter how much work and therapy I do, is pain.

And I think it is requiring me to redefine what a mom should be, and what a human should be. I am human, a person whose nature is to make mistakes. and that has to be okay. To be a parent does not mean to shield myself or my child from pain. It is to learn and try to model how to process pain, how to grieve, how to take responsibility for hurt, how to not take it out on others. To be a parent is to see and acknowledge my kid and her feelings--all of them--and accept and love them. It is to tell the truth. And to keep talking when it might feel more comfortable to run away or to blame or deny. Ending the shame. To be a parent is to be honest with myself about what I see in my life and in E's life, and to take what action I can.

So this is mom-dom as I see it. "Oh shit. I'm a mom." :)