Be a Life Line, Be a Friend

My best friend of twenty years came to visit me this weekend; she needed to get away from her twins with whom she spent every day for the past year and a half.  Over much needed wine we got talking about motherhood.  It's amazing how different the real life discussion between women who really know each other is from the rhetoric we're inundated with in pop culture. 
 
Motherhood may be the most important job in the world but in advocating for it, for the understandably valid reason of perpetuating our species, there is a lot of things people "forget" to tell you. They may have genuinely forgotten; if their children are grown it's easy to remember the precious times and forget the drudgery.  And there is an awful lot of drudgery, days in and out of mindless, menial tasks that your miracles depend on.  More significantly, there is isolation. Fewer women are choosing to have babies, those that do are having them later in life and we live in a society that no longer resembles a village, but rather a whole bunch of islands of nuclear and less than nuclear families. Gone are the days of mothers drinking coffee while their children play - we now have scheduled play dates that often need to be fitted in between conference calls and Pilates classes. 

The pressure on women to be everything, to have everything, is so intense that they are often return to their high-powered jobs right after having a baby.  The ones that don't have their career figured out feel insecurity; the ones that do, feel guilt for not spending more time with their children.  Either way there's doubt, insecurity and endless second guessing. 
 
All that could be manageable if there was room for frank discussion but, unfortunately, the people expressing their opinions are usually not the ones affected by it; it's the "experts", the observers, that are going on about the world of women - of mothers.  The principals are strongly discouraged from expressing anything other than complete bliss and certainty in their decision. After all, we fought for these choices so they owe it to us to be grateful and accepting of their lot in life.  The problem is that there are monsters in the closets of most mothers and monsters in the dark are scary; they need sunlight, they need to be examined.  In demanding that women face motherhood gracefully and silently we've isolated them; we've denied them the lifeline they so desperately need as their world gets turned upside down. 
 
We owe it to the mothers in our lives to listen, to suspend judgement, to read between the lines.  We need to acknowledge that it's possible to love and want your children while at the same time having an identity crisis, a hard time figuring out which of the endless choices is right for you, or missing your adult life.  We're not very good at this; we don't want to hear that with the joy comes depression, doubt, even anger.  Those of us opting to not have children want to believe that the choice to be a mother is one made with glee and ease and that the rewards are endless.  It's the guilt, I'm sure, that makes us so unwilling to hear about the darker side of this decision we're unwilling to make.  We need to get over ourselves and listen to our friends, give them the opportunity to air these feelings so they feel like people and not just procreators.  In the end, it will make them better mothers. 

By Magda Majewska