Lion and Magic Boy

Though you’d never know it to know me now, when I was 15 I clearly said to anyone who would listen: “I will never have children.”

My friend Paula would wax rhapsodically about how much she enjoyed them while I simply shuddered. I never understood children when I was one, and they still mystified me. In the summer between 8th and 9th grade, for lack of anything better to do (and perhaps a small income? that part escapes me now) and a sense of filial obligation, I assisted my teacher-mom with her summer school class of soon-to-be 5th graders.

Oh, what children! I was so far above them (I thought), being, what, three years older and four grades ahead? Yet I was also petrified by them. They looked up to me, yet did they really? I found this strange, and I often willed invisibility for myself, existing in this weird juxtaposition of superiority and the feeling that they were judging me, laughing at me. One girl in particular latched herself onto me, and I could not understand this. I wasn’t especially nice to her, though I talked to her from time to time. I figured she maybe didn’t get much attention at home or something. I wish I could remember her name, as I suspect there was a lesson in that for me somewhere. Something about unconditional acceptance. I hadn’t done anything to earn it, as far as I could tell, yet there it was.

Back to Paula. She has five children now. I should point that out. And I have four. How did that happen?

At 19, immersed in the whirlwind world of Making Life Happen, I found myself married because I couldn’t bring myself to tell the people who had planned my last-minute wedding that I had changed my mind. I was afraid they’d be, what, disappointed? Embarrassed? After all, they had spent money on this! So I walked down the aisle anyway, alarm bells ringing wildly, trying to look like I was enjoying myself. It was a lot like being in a play, except I hadn’t studied my part and I wasn’t so good with the improvisation.

Three months later, I was thinking about babies, dreaming about babies, suddenly coveting babies, which is how Jessica came to be.

All my life I have allowed emotion to take hold of me, pulling me this way and that, while at the same time I felt that I was pushing, willing life to happen, creating experience. It’s not a bad way to live necessarily, but it does account for some of the more abrupt changes I’ve made as I threw myself into each new passion. Experience! Life! Here! Now! And again!

I’ve been passionate about each of my children as they arrived and I’ve thrown myself headlong into the role I have assumed. While once I never thought I would even have, let alone enjoy having children, it’s been to a large degree what my life has been about and I am content with that. I love each of them like breathing; there’s no denying that.

But just as it’s dangerous to allow another adult to define you and provide your identity, it’s also limiting to allow one’s children to be your defining criteria. So many women struggle with this as they look to find their identity as something other than wife and mother. There is an unwritten cultural assumption that there must be a black-or-white choice: either you are a person, or you are a mother. Can’t be both. Sorry, not allowed. Sign here, please.

I don’t accept that. Or at least, I don’t want that. It’s important for me now to step away somewhat from the identity I carefully carved for myself while I immersed myself in a community of women doing the very same thing. And now it’s time to claw my way out of it again.

Therefore I have begun to look at this time away from them that they spend with their father as a gift rather than a punishment. I have found myself in an externally-imposed stasis, so rather than pushing at this to make it go away, I am choosing acceptance in the trust that the gifts from this situation will be revealed eventually. It’s important to remember that there is movement at all times, even if it is imperceptible. I say this, however, while I don’t quite believe it, simply because I know that if I say it enough I will eventually know it at that deep knowingness level.

At the same time: Impatience is a bitch.

The hardest part? I can’t make any sort of plans in my life other than the boring day-to-day ones (broccoli tonight? or a salad?) and the deep soul-wrenching inner ones. As a person used to the wide, sweeping, grand gestures, making changes within this tiny confined space feels challenging to say the least. Would it be a matter of perception, I wonder? Is this box I see about me really formless after all? Does it truly stretch into infinity on all sides?

Like everything else: time will tell.

And what I said about Impatience. Still a bitch.