Baby Good, Mommy Crazy

If you stumbled across a letter I could write to my daughter it might sound like the artifact of a doomed relationship.

I love you. I love you even though sometimes you drive me mad.

When you are gone I yearn for you even though at times it was I who banished you.

All the things I used to find appealing—to blow my brains out; smoke an entire pack of unfiltered camels in one sitting; drink a case of Bordeaux after work; smoke pot in my underwear while watching film noir; work way too hard or avoid work;, squander my days while going deeper and deeper into debt; charge my travel to foreign countries in the expectation I’d be dead by forty—became so foolish when you came along.

I HATE, HATE the idea that when you have a baby you “fall in love” with your baby. An idiotic metaphor. Isn’t the mother-child relationship primary and isn’t a romantic relationship only a pale imitation of mother love?

So why does the analogy not go the other way? Instead we should say to our lovers that we feel like we just gave birth to them or that they make you feel like you did the first time you saw your baby. We can, I guess, call our lovers ‘baby.’ Or even ‘mommy.’

What do you call the overwhelming anxiety and pleasure of motherhood? I’ve grown to adore the smell of Dreft so much I wash my own clothes in it now. I’m on the verge of creating a shrine to the onesies she’s outgrown. I’m fairly certain I’ll be saving virtually every item that she’s ever worn. Is this just a phase? Won’t it get a bit strange when she hits her twenties?

Yes, I complained endlessly like the whiney bitch that I am through my whole pregnancy and then I gave birth to this heartbreakingly beautiful ecstatically happy charmer. What’s that say? That whole positive thinking thing is bullshit and this isn’t the first evidence I’ve had of that. I’ve never, ever thought positive. I am sure I am doomed, you are doomed, the whole human race is entirely doomed. And I got this baby. My advice? Think negative.

Every time I dare to mention her astounding wonderfulness I’m afraid that something terrible will happen. I know I’m undeserving of this glorious being. I’m baffled by my luck and wouldn’t think of taking pride in it. Will raving about her wonderfulness still bring the evil eye?

Do all babies stop traffic? When we travel with her it’s like being in the entourage of a rock star or supermodel. Heads turn. People mutter to themselves. They stare, they smile, they approach, the follow us and then we can’t get rid of them. Every time we go to get ice cream people stop by our booth to marvel at our daughter. I feel guilty when I finally have to leave the grocery store or the bank and tear her away from the adoring crowds. They need her.

She sees it is her job to bring joy to the world. She knows she has to smile. She has to cheer up the sad and weary drones plodding through their days, cheer them with her effortless joy. She scans the crowd for sorrowful faces.

There is so much that is extraordinary that she can do. For example, she makes the annoying noise in the universe. This noise is so annoying it would break terrorists, spies, sociopaths. Just play them a recording of the sound of her going eh-eh-eh-eh-eh, eya!, eh, aih!, eee!, eh, eh, eh, yeha, eh, eh, endlessly. They will beg for mercy. The will confess to crimes they haven’t even committed yet. They will do anything just to make it stop.

The most annoying noise in the universe will make you her slave. All will do her bidding in the face of the noise.

I feared motherhood because I feared I wouldn’t be able to make her happy. Yet making her happy is the easiest thing I’ve ever done most of the time. I never imagined THE POWER I would feel. Because I have never had the power to make anyone happy let alone to make someone THIS HAPPY.

Mommy Crazy

So what do you call this? I’m not brave enough to ask a medical professional. I don’t just worry about my baby and the usual things. No, not me. I imagine the apocalypse. Vividly. Sometimes it occurs due to ecological destruction, sometimes an asteroid, occasionally an unexpected economic collapse. No more stores. No more purified water. No more movies or TV or milkshakes. Violence. Cannibalism. A burning wasteland.

Then, I remember that (minus the cannibalism) that’s what life is for millions of people on earth. Millions of people. Little babies. Mothers. Children. Grandparents. They suffer and sometimes die for the lack of the smallest things. Clean water. Steady nutritious food.

Now I’m thinking: Here’s the part where you don’t want to read on. You want to go to something funny like Sarah Brown. And that’s also part of it. The juxtaposition of the trivial, the amusing, the frivolous with the thoughts of injustice, suffering, death. I can’t handle it. The colossal indifference. My powerlessness.

It’s getting so I can no longer tolerate the fact that no one is talking about the war where hundreds and thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers are being killed. It’s as if it isn’t happening. Somehow this seems so horrid that I can’t believe there isn’t a terrible punishment in store for all of us because we can be happy when so many people are being killed. The surplus of the prosperity we want so much and need so much makes this war possible. How can that not disturb us?

No, I’m not saying: We are prosperous and to stay that way we have a war. That’s naïve. In fact, I think that in the last 50 years U.S. warmaking seems to have brought with it a recession every time. I’m saying: If we were some poor scrabbling country we couldn’t afford this war. When a country has enough money to invade a country that posed no threat to it you have to assume they just had a little too much money. Maybe those who live in the U.S. wouldn’t be happy if we were poorer but I’m sure there are people in Iraq who would be alive if we have been.

I never was much of a one for liberal guilt. Personal guilt, yes. Like the time that I snapped at my 13 year old autistic second cousin (as an adult). That happened some years ago and I still feel guilty. That I didn’t want to play cards with my grandmother when she was dying in the hospital. That I didn’t call my other grandmother enough and then she also died. I never can forgive myself for those things.

This guilt doesn’t feel like liberal guilt. In fact, guilt might not even be the right way to describe it. It’s more like fear at this point. Fear that these things can happen and fear that something worse will result from these wrongs.

Sometimes I just think I’ve probably seen too many movies.

Comments

[mom101]

If you don't think anyone is talking about the war, you haven't been to my parents' house over Thanksgiving. Or this past weekend, come to think of it. Get involved, mama. Do what you can. It's the one thing that counters my own fear that I royally fucked up by bringing a child into this world.

[grudge girl]

Wow. I identified with this post on so many fronts. I remember sitting in the living room feeding 5 month old Simon and watching the towers fall, and that's when my mother fear started. That asteroid/starvation/radiation disaster fear. That's when I started taking seriously the end times prophecy shows late at night, and the apocalypse, Nostradamus people. That fear is so overwhelming.

I also know what it's like to have a joy baby girl who wins admirers wherever she goes. All she has to do is look at them, and they're lost in delight--old, young, male, female--doesn't matter. She's so very engaged with the world outside of herself. It's elemental to her nature, and almost completely antithetical to mine. I think I might have been like her at some point, though. Interest/curiosity-wise, anyway. I was never as cute as this little pig-tailed atom bomb of happy.

It's quite a responsibility, isn't it, mothering a creature like this. What if we accidentally quash that quality in them. Or are we supposed to? Or is it simply our job to comfort them when it happens, as it must, because of forces outside ourselves?

It was eerie to read this today, because I have been formulating a post in my head all day about Charlotte, and how she's so completely different than what I imagined my daughter would be, and how I am processing that... trying to learn her, and to learn to mother her.

I understand, if that's any help or consolation, or even just amusing to you.

[roo]

You've spurred so many thoughts in my head with this post, but the only two that I'm articulate enough to write are these: I'm glad you wrote this, and that I read it.

[Elizabeth]

I hope yousave this for your daughter-- it is a gorgeous loveletter to her without cloying sentiment-- true passionate love with all the confusion and unanswered questions that come with it. Gorgeous loveletter.