Chrysalis

Over on the other side of the room, a blue-clad mini-person is gurgling peacefully (for once), safe in the knowledge that I absolutely adore him, and I wonder what kind of person I've become. A mother, yes, but not the kind of mother I thought I'd be.

I spent the first twenty years of life firmly convinced that I never wanted to have children. My mother, for all her fun, child-messy artistic-ness, is one of the most psychologically frightening individuals I have ever met. Especially for a child. I always feared that having children, with the demands they place on people (like me and her) with little patience, would drive me to her end of violent rages and an unceasing fury beating against the world that had never given her everything she wanted.

But now? My son spent a month in intensive care after being born 7 weeks early, and I craved him every moment of it. I crawled into a corner of my bedroom and cried that I didn't deserve him--after all, I'd spent my pregnancy worrying only about myself, about what kind of time I would have for myself after he was born (such a huge issue for an introvert), and whether I would ever have time to work, and whether I would resent him when I didn't. I do resent it, sometimes. But most of the time I don't care. I know I'll get back to my work, which isn't, after all, time-dependent. I sit on my essays for years sometimes before they're ready for publication.

Even when the fat little hobbit drives me to frenzied madness with his crying, I can take a deep breath outside, clutch my hair, come back in, and nurse him until he calms down. I'm not my mother! What a releif! But someone I don't know has emerged from a background, and I'm still prodding around her limits. She appreciates people a little more, since she was so dependent on the kindness of friends during a brutal couple of months. She panics sometimes at the prospect of never having a day to herself again. She hasn't yet thrown the baby out the window, which, as a friend of mine said, automatically makes you a good parent. She snaps at people when she's short on sleep (that's not new). And she's walking a narrow, rickety fence, balancing the hormonal reaction that makes her say she'd do anything for her little boy, give up anything for him; and the repeated statement before her pregnancy that she thought she could only make a good mother if she made her own self (work, fulfillment, human-ness) a priority even over her children. My mother didn't, for all her complete self-absorbtion. She didn't try to make anything for herself, and that fueled her anger. To give this little human a good life, I have to give myself one, too.