This weekend Heather Havrilesky wrote astutely and humorously about how our society views mothers — or rather, “Mommies.” Our ‘Mommy’ Problem, as she called it, is that once a woman has children, she is immediately seen as a Mommy above all else. She writes:
“Motherhood is no longer viewed as simply a relationship with your children, a role you play at home and at school, or even a hallowed institution. Motherhood has been elevated — or perhaps demoted — to the realm of lifestyle, an all-encompassing identity with demands and expectations that eclipse everything else in a woman’s life.”
As a mother of two young girls, I get it. I feel it. And I resent it. But I have to say that what has been hardest for me to accept is not how society views me now that I’m a mother, but how I view myself.
When my adult identity was still in its infancy, in my early 20s, I was working as a magazine editor, making my own money, and living in my own apartment. In all my naïveté, it didn’t dawn on me that getting married and having children (both of which I wanted to do) would cut away at the identity I had already molded for myself. I was in New York City, where anything seemed possible and options seemed limitless. Why wouldn’t I be able to have it all? Like so many women of my generation, I eagerly bought into that feminist fantasy without any hesitation.
When I got married at 30, and later got pregnant, I willed my impending motherhood into my sense of self, which wasn’t all that hard to do because I happened to be an editor at a parenting magazine then. But after I had my first daughter, and was laid off on maternity leave as part of a staff purge (how is that for valuing mothers in our society?), I was blindsided by my sudden lack of identity.
Gone were the copy deadlines, idea meetings and intellectual purpose; in their place were midnight feedings, pediatrician appointments and diapers. Motherhood transformed me to the core. I had been told it would, but I had been unable to fathom how much of my identity would be engulfed by it. In those blurry early months I had no room in my head for thoughts beyond nap schedules and keeping track of which breast my daughter was due to feed from next.
So I reprioritized. Instead of “leaning in” and finding another staff job, I began freelance writing from home to be with my daughter more. I also begrudgingly took on the lion’s share of the housework because, well, I was there. But I wasn’t happy about it.
Before long, I found myself wading knee-deep in shattered expectations. It had become painfully clear that the life I had imagined for myself once upon a time — as a professional, wife and mother — had been a modern-day fairy tale. The real life I had chosen came with the shackles of a mortgage, a dearth of jobs with flexible work schedules, endless loads of laundry, and the overwhelming task of being responsible for a child 24 hours a day. Without fully realizing how it had happened, I had gone from a Carrie Bradshaw-esque city life to a stifled suburban one that had an uncanny resemblance to the doomed protagonists in Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road.” My youth, freedom, windows of opportunity (my identity) had all diminished.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have been happier if I’d chosen differently. But I hated myself for being ungrateful for the life and family I’d been fortunate enough to have. A better mother would surely have been relishing every moment of her role. As Ms. Havrilesky wrote, “the current culture demands that every mother be all in, all the time.” Still, my preoccupation with a life I didn’t choose lingered, and would burst into my thoughts like a drive-by shooting. I would sense the rapid fire infiltrating my consciousness whenever I felt overwhelmed by running my household, stressed about preschool tuition, frustrated by a career I had curtailed, or aggravated that another day had gone by and I hadn’t found the time to shower. At those times, I asked myself, what have I done?
What I’ve done, I’ve finally realized several years into this motherhood thing, is grown up. Not entirely, mind you. But I’ve made choices, and they have shaped me into the woman I am today.
And if I had it to do again, I wouldn’t choose differently. I would choose my loving husband, my irreplaceable children and my role as mother front and center. And as much as I struggle to maintain my professional identity while being viewed as a Mommy who works from home, I would choose this working arrangement, too, so that I am the one my children hug when they come home from school.
Ms. Havrilesky cleverly observed that “becoming a mother doesn’t change you so much as violently refurbish you, even though you’re still the same underneath it all.” But on this point, I disagree. I don’t “feel like the same person deep inside,” (to quote Ms. Havrilesky) as I did pre-motherhood. I am forever changed by becoming a mother, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.