(no subject)

[rivka]

In the comments to my last post an anonymous commenter asks, under the header "why are you surprised?":

Rivka, you are one of the most intelligent, sensitive, and articulate persons I've ever had the privilege to encounter. Nonetheless, you've apparently been at least somewhile surprised by how difficult it is to care for a tiny baby. If I'm correct about your being surprised, I'd love for you to comment on why.

It's often hard to read the tone of an anonymous comment, lacking the benefit of history, but this one got under my skin a little. See, I don't think I sound very surprised when I talk about the difficulties of parenthood. I pretty much expected the sleep deprivation, the crying (hers and mine), the pacing the floor, the spitup on all my shirts, and the diapers which appear to contain an entire bottle's worth of French's mustard. The only thing that truly surprised me was our inability to breastfeed. (I had expected it to be challenging, but I thought we would eventually succeed.)

Given that I haven't been posting anything along the lines of, "My God, why didn't anyone tell me it would be like this?", it's hard for me to read "why are you surprised?" as anything other than "why are you complaining? You should've known what it would be like." I did know, yes. I complain sometimes because, well, early motherhood is hard. The fact that I expected it to be hard doesn't, in fact, make it any easier.

It's ironic that this comment was left in a subthread about Andrea Buchanan's book Mother Shock, because a major theme of that book is how upset our society is by any hint of maternal ambivalence. Moms (in the popular imagination) can be divided into two categories - the good mother, who is a continual fount of giving and unconditional love and adores every minute of it, or the bad mother, who abuses or abandons or screws up her children. There's no middle ground to contain mothers who are basically competent and loving but are sometimes sick of it all. Buchanan notes that any brief conversational excursion into what she calls the "shadow side of motherhood" results in an anxious rush to assert that of course it's all worth it, wouldn't change a minute of it, no real complaints.

So I wonder if the anonymous commenter was made uncomfortable by the references in my last post to the fact that, on that particular day, I wasn't enjoying motherhood very much. I wonder if the reminder that I knew about the difficulties going in was supposed to prompt me to minimize them, and instead declare my delight in every last one of Alex's tiny little toesies. I wonder if the enumeration of my many fine qualities was supposed to evoke the feeling that I ought to be more competent at all of this, so maybe I should fake it a little better.

I also wonder if I'm reading too much into an anonymous comment, of course, but it did get me thinking.

(Look! This is also a Gratuitous Icon Post. More Alex pictures available in the June 05 album.)

Comments

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had a really interesting reaction of guilt to your second paragraph, here!

I have to admit, I'm a little bit like your mother in that I often react with some version of "terrible terrible" to people I care about being very public about their feelings and personal experiences. I think this is actually a failure of empathy on my part--I think about how it would feel for *me* to be that public about such things, and I project that onto the other person. It makes it particularly uncomfortable when people I care about get *burned* for being public about such things, because I know how awful that would be for me, and I think: "see? you shouldn't *do* things like that!" Which isn't fair, but it's always my first reaction.

I also understand the "wanting to fix them" reaction, and the inherently selfish motivations behind that. It's very hard for me to see someone I care about being sad, overwhelmed, or scared, and if (see first paragraph) I see those reactions as being a result of something I'm already uncomfortable with them doing, the immediate gut reaction is to try to put a stop to those things. Since I know it's important for people to decide things for themselves, I usually react to this sort of conflict by needing to step back and not hear about their sadness/overwhelmedness/fear since I can't do anything about it anyway, and I WANT TO. It sounds like your mother doesn't take that last step.

And now I'm hoping you don't think less of me for being just a little bit like your mother ... ;-)

-J

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Oh dear! Jae I do not think less of you at all!

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I cancelled my comment because I thought maybe it was overly snarky and also off-topic. Here it is again, somewhat improved (I hope)

"I thought that comment was weird too. I wonder if this person hasn't previously encountered someone like you who writes about feelings and experiences as part of managing them, and writes evocatively for a semi-public group at the same time.

"If my mother got hold of my writing about dissertation-writing, or about Shad problem students, or about being stuck in a strange airport in Belgium, she would totally over-react and think it would have to be terrible terrible for me to be broadcasting my feelings, and she would also want to fix them so she didn't have to share the burden of knowing I was sad/overwhelmed/scared or whatever, and she would remain convinced forever that everything about that experience was bad for me and I shouldn't have done it."

I actually don't know why I brought up the example of my mother; I was just trying to think of someone I know who would misunderstand an impulse to document my feelings. I really liked eeyorerin's analogy of dissertation writing as something that was not harder than expected for me, but still intensely stressful and difficult, and I remember managing that by spending time identifying my feelings and comparing them with last week's and the week before's, both in e-mails and in my dissertation-writing support group.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I want to say here that even though we're radically different in this way, and even though I know my openness makes you vicariously uncomfortable sometimes, you've never made me feel as though you wish I were different or as though you think I should change. So, thanks.