I wrote this yesterday, September 20th. It’s taken me awhile to gather the courage to post it publicly.

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Today is the thirtieth anniversary of my identity as a mother. Another way to say that is, it is my daughter’s thirtieth birthday. I feel as emotional about this transition as I did when I myself turned thirty, which is to say, plenty. It is the Saturn Return of that time, so now I am compelled to turn back and face my mothering history, to evaluate what has and has not worked and to change what I can to improve the workability of my parenting.

My daughter is a private sort of person who doesn’t appreciate being written about, and I am a writer. I write about myself and my life, which includes my children and my family. I have so far focused mostly on my own internal poetic and philosophical processes because of my uncertain boundaries around telling stories that reveal personal things about people I love. According to “The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear,” the agreed-upon ethics are fuzzy in this area. Different writers make different choices about what to write about where their families are concerned, and it is always difficult, challenging and potentially traumatic.

Obviously memoirists can be ruthless when it comes to divulging their families’ stories, but I don’t personally wish to share publicly any details or story that might cause my children to feel their privacy has been violated. At the same time, I am compelled as a chronicler of crazy truth to bespeak my discoveries and to track my experiences for the benefit of the collective brain.

It seems I find myself in the role of one who speaks publicly, a rather heavily populated niche these days. It is true that I am only one of many, but I speak from my own singular viewpoint, and in case my theory of bloggers expressing the collective thought processes of Earth (and thus facilitating human social evolution) should prove correct, I dare not suppress myself.

So. On this thirtieth anniversary of my first birthing, I am experiencing a personal epiphany around parenting. This essay explores some of what it meant to me to be a parent in times of internal and external chaos and change, and perhaps offers some excuses to get me off the hook that I currently dangle from in my own twisted mind. I write to untangle my own confusions as much as for any other reason. I share my writings because I can—it is technologically possible and I have the tools—and because of various astrological factors (Leo Moon touching Pluto, Gemini Mars on the Midheaven also touching Pluto) which translate to mean that I am compelled, nothing I can do about it. All I can do is wake up and hopefully shift from spilling my guts to sharing my experience and perception in a balanced way. I am doing my best, but between compulsion and confusion, discrimination is a challenge. If I mess up, let me know, I will try to do better. I am all about doing better.

What follows explores feelings that I am still not comfortable with, and it reads awkwardly, but it’s a start, an opening. Warts and all. Bleah.

I first became a Mom at age twenty, a time when I was incapable of love or much consciousness. This is not a self-criticism, merely an observation, and it’s not a hidden poke at young people, as though youth is incapable of those things. This is about me and how I was, and I don’t believe my journey to be typical or representative of others. My children, for example, were more sensitive and aware, emotionally and intellectually, at ten than I was at twenty.

There were at least two of me in the early days: one was a marionette with feelings and reactions. I thought about things, but I was not aware that I was thinking or what I was thinking about. “I lived in a dream, a nightmare, it seemed.” My actions were reactions, programmed responses, not considered choices. This was a shocked-out self, a damaged child who, having been re-traumatized at regular intervals, had frozen into a trauma state, unable to process new information, as if the moment of trauma had never passed.

The other part seemed wise, magical, a pair of knowing, loving eyes that looked through mine and gazed upon life with compassion and truth. I did not personally feel that love, but it was there, separated from the rest of me by a veil of fog. This part could see me and through me she saw others, but I could not feel what she felt except dimly.

She came into me, met and merged with me so that I became one whole being, alive and capable of loving, when my daughter was born. In her wide infant eyes, I saw a reflection of myself, the all-loving, all-knowing Mother. I felt her inside me, I felt my heart open like a flower for the first time. I had no words to describe this experience then, only that this little person who had emerged from my very own body was the most precious, perfect, wonderful creature ever.

Oh, did I fall for that baby. I fell so hard, I was smitten practically back into unconsciousness. I wanted her never to experience a moment of hurt, trauma or deprivation in her life. I wanted her to have everything I had never had, every opportunity, every protection, every hope, every possible dream come true. I felt for her, in other words, as most any mother feels toward her new baby. I’m not claiming that there was something special or unusual about my love for my child; in fact, it’s entirely likely my own mother felt and feels the same things for me, her first baby.

What was striking was the difference that love made in me. I count the beginning of my spiritual growth from that moment they lay her on my breast, fresh from my womb, and I first met my daughter’s eyes. I changed. I became a human with the capacity for love.

The marionette who still made up half of my self continued to act as programmed, though. When my baby girl was a month old, I returned to my office job as I had previously agreed to do in response to my husband’s urging and my own nascent ambitious promptings. I vaguely enjoyed the idea of having a career and being independent in the world, and I knew we needed the money. At the time I did it, though, it wasn’t right for me or my child. It was far soon to return to work. She was too young, and I wasn’t able to handle the stress. Our premature separation tore the fabric of the bond between myself and my baby.

For the first few weeks, I gave her a bottle of formula for the middle of the day while I was gone and nursed the rest of the time. She was a quiet child who rarely cried, but once I went back to work, she howled constantly. My mother-in-law insisted that it was because my milk was ‘bad,’ so I weaned her from the breast. It didn’t occur to me that the real problem might be that she couldn’t handle the formula bottle, or even that she missed me, was frightened and traumatized. Even when her crying continued unabated after she was weaned, I didn’t clue in. I was overloaded, juggling a stressful full-time job full of intrigue and office politics with an unhappy new baby, and I had no focus or awareness to spare.

Still, deep down I knew it was wrong to be leaving my baby, wrong to stop nursing when I did, and I worried constantly. This doesn’t mean I believe all working mothers are wrong; other mothers and babies make their own choices. If childcare is high-quality and caring, and if Mom knows what she’s doing, then returning to work can be a perfectly viable choice. However, that was not the case with me. I didn’t want to work, I wanted to stay at home and bathe in milky bliss with my beautiful new baby, and the childcare we were able to find was far from high quality. In fact, I was horrified to learn that my precious girl was being left in a darkened room all day with the radio on, so we pulled her from that place and the stress of trying to find substitute adequate childcare was added to the other stresses.

I stayed on the job for three months, finally leaving that job only after collapsing in tears in the boss’s office. I caved in under the pressure and found myself quitting without planning to in order to be at home with my child. I tried a month of working midnight shift at another job, but that proved impossible, since the baby was not a daytime napper. After a month of nearly no sleep and several near-accidents drifting off the road while driving home from work during morning rush hour, I quit for good.

Things were never the same between us after that. The ease and comfort, the bliss was gone. I had needed the bonding time to last longer, and so did she. She had been left in the hands of uncaring others and our mother-child relationship suffered the consequences.

I learned better, and my sons benefited. However, it was clear from an early age that my daughter was angry with me, and all her life, she has found new reasons to be angry, to blame me, to push me away. And I was guilty beyond bearing. It has been agonizing.

So what’s the epiphany? Simply that now I understand that despite the fact that I did it, there is nothing I can do about it now. I can’t fix her infancy, and I can’t fix our relationship. All I can do is be here for her when she reaches for me. And I will.

One thing has not changed. I am still in love with that girl. She is my perfect, precious one-and-only firstborn, the one who taught me what love really feels like. I had other children and each of them opened me wider, but only one can be first. I firmly believe her to be supernaturally gifted, intelligent and gorgeous beyond belief, and I defy anyone to contradict me. I love that child. I love that woman. But bottom line, I won’t impose myself on her or push my unwelcome love into her world anymore. It’s here, though. I’m here.

Happy birthday, firstborn. I love you. Welcome to your thirties. They’re not so bad, once you get used to them. May they be better for you than they were for me; I want everything about your life to be better than mine was for me. Not because mine has been so terrible—since adulthood, my life has steadily improved, actually—but because that’s what parents want for our children.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 12:25 pm and is filed under about me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.