Motherhood, and other Self-Mollifying Enterprises

Less than two weeks after Miss S. was born I started the second year of course work for my Ph.D.  That first semester of motherhood was an almost psychedelic experience.  My fatigue was so entrenched,  I soon found myself in a sort of liminal state of consciousness between the worlds of the books I had been reading for my coursework and the world I inhabited.  One night I might have Moby Dick’s Ahab talking to me in my sleep . . . the next day I’d cross the campus mall imagining I was entering Vanity Fair, or one of the waking dead crossing London Bridge in Eliot’s The Waste Land.  In classes I would reach into my portfolio bag and a tiny diaper would pop out, folded over the crisp white pages of the legal pad I was pulling out . . . or the voluptuous squeak of a rattle sounded as things shifted on the bag's bottom.

Moreover, within a week of leaving the hospital, it was clear I could have become the poster mom for La Leche League.  I had never before realized how much the murmur of chalk drawn across a chalkboard could sound like a newborn’s mewling . . . until my milk began to drop spontaneously in some existential response to the universe’s demands that it be fed. . . in every class I attended. 

“How’s it going Megs?,” my Uncle Chris asked when he called one morning. 

“Well,” I said, glancing up at the projectile spit-up the baby had just expelled over one foot onto a nearby wall.  “I have a call out to our pediatrician regarding the scene out of The Exorcist I just witnessed . . . and my breasts have become semi-automatic weapons.”

There was a sort of guffaw on the other end of the phone as he gagged on his own laughter . . . or perhaps his throat closed out of shock.  “Wow.  That was probably too much information.” 

I laughed off-handedly, completely unabashed.  “You asked.”  

There was no keeping up appearances, and I wasn’t the least bit bothered, strangely enough.  This shy Midwestern girl was engaged with wonder as my body pursued its own creative revolt.  I became curious at the image of myself in the mirror, at how shiny my hair and skin had become.  I marveled at how the new post-baby bump made me look, in my own mind, just like Botticelli’s Venus.  I was fascinated by the way the padding on my hips and arms made natural cradles for my baby. . . and how I finally filled out the seat of my pants after a lifetime of not having hips.

And most of all, I was amazed at how my semi-automatic weapons just kept firing away.

“How’s the little Tsunami?” Wendy asked one morning when I came into our office at Marquette.  Miss S., by then, was five months old.  Wendy had accidently mispronounced her name when she had first heard it nearly a year before . . . "Tsunami" was revived among all three of my office mates when, after my baby's birth, I habitually looked like something stirred up from the ocean bed in a tempest.   

“She’s wonderful.  Well fed,” I remarked, smiling.   “How are you, sweetie?”

“I am doing well!” she replied, picking up a gift bag off her dresser.  “And I feel badly that it has taken me this long to get this to gift to you, but you'll see why I wanted to give it to you after she was born . . .”

I opened it, and saw a book.  Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. 

“Thank you!” I replied, pulling out the book. I had not read anything of Lamott’s, but knew that Wendy was a huge fan of her writing.  It meant a great deal to me that she wanted to share one of her favorite authors.     

“I get this book for all my friends who have children,” Wendy explained.  “But I am warning you . . . practice your kegels while you read . . . or you run the risk of peeing in your pants.”

She wasn’t kidding.  When I got home, I relaxed the binding and more or less let the book open to wherever it wanted to . . . to communicate its wisdom on its own terms.  It opened to the November 1^st entry:

“. . .  today I’m a glorious Florentine fountain of milk, standing like a birdbath in the garden with milk spouting forth from every orifice,” is the first line my eyes rested on.  Surely a more sylvan image than my own artillery metaphor to describe my new endowments, but it drew me in.  Someone else thought the volume of milk they produced that day was newsworthy!

“I’m learning to call people all the time and ask for help,” she adds, “which is about the hardest thing I can think of doing.  I’m always suggesting that other people do it, but it is really is awful at first.  I tell my writing students to get into the habit of calling one another, because writing is such a lonely, scary business, and if you’re not careful you can trip off into this Edgar Allan Poe feeling of otherness.  It turns out that motherhood is much the same. . .” (97)

I read Operating Instructions with the exuberance one has when they’ve just met someone with whom they’ve clicked. . . eagerly, zealously, with such enthusiasm my husband would find me laughing out loud as I read, and speaking out loud in loud affirmations as I carried on a phantom dialogue with the text.   

Had Wendy not given me that truthful book of a mother’s first year of her son’s life, I would have most likely faced my own first year of motherhood in the same self-deprecating way as was, and is my nature . . . marveling silently at the inglorious and awkward forces that had taken over my body and life.  Yet, my journey through my daughter’s first year would have perhaps been a slightly more lonely, slightly more scary business.   


... At the very least, it would have been less affirming, for as the first time Lamott opened her crisp new journal, she began inscribing bits of a life that, years later, I could recognize as my own.