At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
I haven't been doing so well with the whole "having kids" thing this summer. I was ok for most of the beginning of the summer. The first Greek term kept me really busy and I just didn't think much about it. But recently, I've been having a hard time. Fear is behind it. And the knowledge of the sacrifice it will take. I bought a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility right before we went on vacation with Daniel and Bethany. It's good I have it now, but thumbing through the book was a bad idea. It's a very graphic and very brutal reminder of what I'm about to try to do to my body. And it's a reminder of how much every aspect of it is hard work, and uncertain work. Ultimately, I set the book aside and have decided not to look at it until shortly before I'm going off of birth control. There are many women I know who would devour this book with joy. Their bodies, and bodies in general, are mysteries to be figured out and enjoyed. But I've never liked riddles and I've never been comfortable with my body, so there are two huge strikes right there. Yesterday, I was doing research for my paper for the Jonathan Edwards class I'm taking. I'm researching and writing on the women that surrounded Edwards and it's reminding me just how much I love research and how much regret I have that I didn't do grad school earlier in life. I firmly believe that God gave me everything in my 20s for good reasons, but I admit that sometimes it's hard to see those reasons. I wish now that I was ten years younger and going straight out of undergrad into a PhD track. But then, I don't really wish that, because I wouldn't be the person I am today and everything about the last ten years has given me the interests and voice I have. So that's that. But it is really hard to look at my life and the reality that my chances are so incredibly small of doing further academic work once children are in the picture and not feel some regret. The problem is that I can't escape the idea that my life will truly be over once I have kids. Trey has been concerned about this in me from the beginning of our marriage. He tells me I always talk as if having kids will be tantamount to self-immolation. I always deny that this is the case, but the closer I get to actually trying to start a family, the more I see this to be true about me. Bearing and having children seems like it will be the total negation of Hannah. And I don't want that. But I struggle to know if my rejection of it isn't just pure selfishness. I want to homeschool. I want to be with my kids. I truly truly want those things. But I also want to be more than those things, not just for myself, but for my children. There is a big world, with so many interesting things to think about, and sometimes it feels like my soul will die if I don't have space, mentally and physically, to think about anything but children. Sometimes I feel so guilty for feeling this way – most women for most of history have not worried about these things. Identity is only a problem for the privileged twenty-first century woman. If I could change myself out for someone who never thought about these things and who was certain of herself and her space and who didn't have anything more to be known about herself than the community around her, I would. But I can't do that and that's not who I am, and so I struggle. Last night, Trey and I were lying in bed. I half-jokingly reminded him that hopefully in the next year or so, he won't be the only one with access to my body. We continued to joke about it, mostly about the differences between his and little babies’ touches. And then, all of the sudden, very quickly the joke dried up as the reality that everything about my body will be destroyed in the process of becoming a mother set in. My children will literally suck their life from me and it will take its toll on me, and on my husband. The only response I have to that reality when I face it is fear. And this is where I meet up with my sisters throughout all of the ages. My struggles with identity, my regret over lost opportunities, these things set the modern generations apart from the long chorus of motherhood. But the abject fear of giving up your physical self for the creation of another physical self unifies me with all who have gone before. It is raw and it is scary, and this, I think is the real source of my struggles with motherhood.
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At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts I've realized two things recently. First, I am incredibly jealous of people, particularly those close to me. I have a pervasive and unsettling inability to rejoice with those who rejoice. When someone close to me experiences something good, my immediate and first reaction is to feel insecure, as if this good thing for someone else is by default bad for me. It causes me to think that people do not like me, or that I am dumb, or that others never want to include me. It's like FOMO, but incredibly twisted and sad, and it causes me to stress constantly about people, trying to evaluate them and perceive if they are doing better, or getting more out of life than me. I need two things. I need to learn to be deeply and truly content. I need to remind myself daily that if I cannot be happy with what I have now, then I will never be happy. If I cannot cherish the people and the material gifts and the opportunities I have now, then I will not cherish those things if they change. Additionally, I need to learn what it means to rejoice with those who rejoice. I am quite good at mourning with those mourn. My life is a constant “mitgefuehl” with the woes of the world. But I do not know how to be happy with those that are happier than me. I am missing an entire half of the equation of what it means to love people. All of this has struck me recently because I've struggled greatly with jealousy concerning those closest to me. I've been jealous of family members having fun without us. I've been jealous of my sister's beauty and talent, even though I am incredibly proud of her. I've been jealous of my husband’s intellectual abilities, even though those abilities will support and provide for our family. I've been jealous of numerous people very near to me for numerous silly reasons. And as I thought about all of this on the T ride back from the Athenaeum today, it struck me - I will struggle with jealously of my children. If I am jealous now of these silly, petty things when I am in the prime of my life, what will I be like when I am aging and my children are not? I need to learn contentment. The second realization I've had concerns my mother and my fear of motherhood. Just the other day, Trey was teasing me about how much I will worry over our children, or in fact, how much I already worry over them without having any! I admitted to the fact that I already frequently worry about our future children and pray for their souls. We laughed together, but in the midst of the laughter, it struck me that the degree to which I feel anxious over our children, my mother has felt similarly anxious and more for me. It became real and tangible to me in a way I've not known before that I am my mother's anxieties. I am what worries her, has worried her for 30 years, in the way that I worry for my own children. It was staggering to think about, and fearful. I always say that it terrifies me to think of having a child like myself, and it was as if I could feel the anxieties of my mother for me as her reality and my reality merged with each other for one brief moment. Motherhood seems like a frightful thing and I am glad for my mother's endurance in it. (Image by Gertrude Käseboer, "The Heritage of Motherhood.") At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts My poor Norfolk Island pine is dying. I bought it in December to use as a Christmas tree in the grand Snoke tradition, but it hasn't fared well in the months since. I want it to live so much. It needs to live. Not only do I hate letting living things pass away needlessly or due to negligence, but I also want it to live because of my mother. There is no single object on this earth that carries stronger associations with my mother for me than a Norfolk Island pine. Some of my earliest memories involve her love for her own pine and in my head I can clearly hear her voice rapturing over the pretty plants. My mother causes things to grow and live, and she is a nurturer to the core. Sometimes this scares me. I don't see in myself the same intense desire to nurture. Sometimes there is so much more of my father than my mother in me, and he is the complete yin to her nurturing yang. For a while, I thought that centering everything in my life on the gift and desire to nurture was what I wanted to do, and ultimately what God wanted me to do. It's much of what took me into ministry. But it has completely drained me. For a while, I thought I was so much like my mother in this way; but in recent years, I've had to realize that I am much less so than I once imagined. But my dad associates my mother's particular gifts with womanhood generally. In his mind, what she is is what all women most naturally are or want to be. Because my mother is a natural mother to all, he imagines that somehow these are the gifts all women have within themselves to bring to the table of God's economy. But I don't know if I can do it. Both my mom and my dad are inside of me, but everything in me that reflects my dad so often feels illegitimate. And so I often end up afraid. I am afraid of becoming everything that my mother is because it's not everything I want to be or know myself capable of being. And I am afraid of not becoming my mother because she is to my mind, and to so many other people's minds, everything that a woman should be. In the space that occupies these conflicting fears, I find my houseplants. They are small expressions of my attempts to be my mother. They allow me to connect to her, to feel I have something in common with her. But they are small, and in the end, extemporaneous to my life. They somehow allow me to be like her without really addressing the bigger callings of my life. So they need to live. My Norfolk Island pine needs to live. Otherwise, not only am I lost to who my mom is in the larger, spiritual gift of nurturing, but I am also lost to it in the small, tangible spaces. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
I've been thinking a lot about how scary it is for me to think about giving up work to be a mother. I know that all mothers don't stop working, but most at least significantly alter their working life. At the minimum, I believe that as a mother, I would need to hold all of my work very loosely, willing to give it up if necessary for the good of my family. I think the recognition that having children could very well end my work identity is part of what scares me about having children. The truth is, I am not the same person I was ten years ago. I once saw marriage and children as an escape, as a creative outlet for a life that I wasn't happy with. Everything in my life professionally made me afraid. Everything. The idea of pursuing something, sacrificing for something, and loving it, could never have entered my mind. I wanted many of the same things I want now concerning family life, but I wanted them for the wrong reasons - for meaning and fulfillment, for justification of my existence. But I remember the time in life when all of that truly changed. I was 25 years old, living overseas, had experienced heartbreak, and had not a single romantic prospect. It was the most single time of my life. I was single and more than any other time in my life, I knew that singleness was truly what the Lord had called me to that year. And I was deeply and richly fulfilled. I loved my life and for the first time ever, I understood what joy in work was. I found work pleasant and meaningful. It was hard, but it was fascinating and I simply enjoyed it like I had never enjoyed it before. Since that time, work is something I value. It's something that I like. I like my work. I don't need to run away from it into the fulfillment of a family. I don't need children and pregnancy to feel fulfilled. I am content and joyful now. This doesn't mean that I don't want a family, but it does mean that I don't feel the need to be a mother in order to find something that I enjoy doing. Once I did need that, now I don't. The truth is that people do change and it's not always a bad thing. Of course I want children and a family, but just because that desire has been complicated by the discovery of my identity professionally, it does not mean that the changes in my life are for the worst. No one is stagnant – God is constantly giving us new experiences and new things to ponder and discover. I found out that I actually enjoy work and can find it quite fulfilling. Just because other women don't have this experience, just because it complicates my life, just because it changes things about who I am, these do not make me a bad person. People change. That's not always a bad thing. At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
Last night, I made Trey a really nice dinner. I made Japanese pork and noodles. It's his favorite dish that I make and I finally perfected it, so it was quite lovely. It’s a little labor intensive to make, though, so I was pretty tired when we sat down to eat. Plus we split a large bottle of beer, so that added to the tiredness. We had a wonderful time talking and spent hours rehashing our college years at Covenant. We talked a lot about the dating world at Covenant and our experiences in it. It was funny and we laughed and enjoyed ourselves. We got into bed and the conversation kept going. Eventually I was so tired, though, that it became clear sex was not going to happen. We talked about it and decided what direction the few remaining minutes of the night would take (or not take) and kept talking. I don't remember how, but it wasn't long before I was expressing my fears about having kids and all of the dismay I feel about the world and bringing children into it. Our evening of fun quickly veered into a deep malaise as I expressed woe after woe related to mothering. Trey patiently responded to all of my fears, pushing back and refusing to let me wallow. I wasn't really listening to or embracing his counterarguments though. Finally, he bluntly stated, "I think you're just making up all of these woes because you feel guilty about not having sex tonight." I burst out laughing. I am so incredibly and deeply grateful for my husband. He understands me better at times than I can ever understand myself. I had been looking forward to the bedroom all day and when we finally got there and I was too tired from the week of work and cooking a complicated meal, my disappointment flowed through and became guilt and despair. When I'm disappointed about something, anything, in life, it often ends up being expressed in totally random ways. It's really hard for me to say that I'm just sad about something and that's ok. I project that sadness onto some big, important problem in the world because that seems a lot more justified than my small personal feelings. It's really good to have someone in your life who is close enough and loves you enough to see when your fears are legit and when they are the extrapolation of less significant, but more immediate disappointments. At Home, East Arlington, Massachusetts
The last week was weird. Really weird. Last weekend we got snowed in and didn't go anywhere. That was actually really nice. It was Valentine's Day on Saturday and Trey and I stayed in the whole day. He did a lot of homework, and I just totally relaxed. We had breakfast in bed and then made a yummy dinner. At the end of the evening, we randomly decided to watch Romeo + Juliet. It was really fun, but by the end of the movie, I was kind of a wreck. It brought back so many memories from my teen years that I just do not like to think about. And the result of that was really not wanting to have kids. It wasn't because I felt afraid of them having the same difficulties; rather it was some kind of deeper reaction. It brought back so many memories of feeling alienated. It brought back how much I sometimes wanted to hurt myself. It brought back so much shame. It brought back the desire to do something to be recognized, to be proud of myself. Mostly, it just reminded me of how much I still haven't addressed these things that seem so far away in the past. But I don't want to delve into these things. Thinking about doing so feels like taking my head and smashing it against the wall at full force. Things are so good now that I don't want to go back to the past. I feel like the issues of my teen years don't define me or my relationships today. I don't want to be sad or burdened by them, nor do I want others to be so. The older I get and the more I understand myself, the more I know that despite the brokenness, my teen years were full of so many good things. I don't want to doubt everything. And yet, my visceral reaction to thinking about all of this is still a strong aversion to wanting children. I guess it just seems like there is still so much inside of me that I'm afraid of – fear, anger, insecurity. It scares me to think about either addressing it, or ignoring it and having it eek out into the lives of my kids. But that wasn't the end of the strangeness of the week. After crying about it all for quite a while with Trey, things got back to normal. He truly is God's greatest blessing to me. I am so so deeply thankful for him. He, more than anything else, makes me want to have kids. That is until on Monday when I developed serious acid reflux. I have never in my life experienced indigestion the way I experienced it this week. I couldn't eat anything without turning into a giant ball of belching. By Thursday, I was convinced I was pregnant. There was no particular reason for this idea apart from the fact that my stomach was doing super weird things it had never done before. But the lead up to taking a pregnancy test after a week of suspecting pregnancy preceded by a meltdown over having kids the weekend before made the test quite ominous. It sucks being a woman in the 21st century. No, it doesn't suck. There are so many good things about it. But the conundrum of childbearing sucks. So many thoughts raced through my head. Relief at knowing I could get pregnant. Surrender to the inevitable. Anger that God would ordain this. Trust that what he wanted was best. Sorrow over lost opportunities to go back to school. Sorrow over my sorrow. Jealousy that other women get to do what they want. Acknowledgement that having children isn't the end of my life or personhood. Fear that Hannah as we know her will be gone forever once there is a baby around. Joy at the idea of a family. And so much confusion. Just so much confusion. In the end, I am not pregnant. The lack of that little blue line both made me incredibly happy and reintroduced so much of the fear about whether or not I'll be able to get pregnant. But the final take away is that I thought quite a lot about what kind of person I want to be. I have come across so many women who are truly lost to their motherhood. The woman I once knew is gone forever and all that remains is an obsession with her children. It's all she can talk about and it's the only thing she is interested in defining herself by. She is no longer primarily a friend or a wife. She is a mother. And the thing that drives me crazy and totally mystifies me is that they seem to do this to themselves willingly. They are their own agents of this change. Usually there is no lack of people willing to talk to them. I have sat with so many young mothers who have ceased to talk about anything except for their mothering. I have been a living, breathing person in their presence, willing and waiting to talk about anything we used to talk about and instead, we don't. The person I knew is gone. This terrifies me. I want more for myself, but mostly, I want more for my children. I want to be the person in their lives who opens the door to the world. I want them to feel like the world is a bigger place because I am their mother, not a small place centering only on our family’s lived reality. Today a picture popped up on Facebook of a mother and her children. I don't know this woman well, but for a long time she has symbolized to me much of what I want to be in motherhood. She is beautiful – not in some superficial or toned way, but she understands her own beauty and embraces it. She is engaged with the world and her mind is awake. And her smile is one of the most genuine motherly smiles I see in pictures on Facebook. She is a woman who has kept her personhood intact and it lets her love her kids ferociously. That is the person I want to be. And not just when I am a mother, but now. At Home, East Arlington, Massachusetts
We're in the middle of a snowstorm, again. Even though it's completely unnecessary, we took time to sleep in and cuddle this morning and now I'm giving myself part of the morning to enjoy a longer time in scripture and then read some of the book I'm trying to get through. It's absolutely delightful. Yesterday, I started having anxiety about the future again. What school should I pursue? Is it realistic to try to do all of these things? Is it selfish to try to finish a degree? Will I be a messenger of peace if I'm that busy or will I be an ogre among my loved ones? And ultimately, will we be able to have children? This morning, my reading plan had me in Genesis 17 and the passage of Sarah laughing at the Lord really struck home. I can see that all of my anxiety about the future and schooling really comes down to two questions. Is there a right or wrong decision for me to make? And do I actually believe that the Lord intends good, not evil, for me? Though I've never thought of it this way, I can look now and see all of my stress and anxiety about the future, about my life, about my purpose and meaning, as me laughing along with Sarah at the promises of God. The Lord told her he was going to do good to her and she laughed at him because it seemed too unbelievable. When I stress and worry it is because in my inner heart, I am also laughing at the idea that the Lord is going to do good to me. I just can't believe it, and therefore the weight of responsibility for figuring out how to have the good in life is on my own shoulders. My greatest desire for myself once I start having children is that I will not be stressed and anxious all of the time. I want to be a bearer of peace in the life of my family, not of worry and discontent. I want to be a mother who laughs and delights in life, laughing along with the Spirit about the things that are truly laughable, not laughing at the idea that God is good. If I want to be that mother, I need the Lord to start retuning my heart now. I can't wait for the crying and dirty diapers and sleepless nights to seek a peaceful heart. I need to seek it now, when my greatest anxiety in life is which blessings of the Lord's to accept. |
About the ProjectThis is a very personal project. It tracks my growth and development as I journeyed toward motherhood over the recent years. It doesn't document every experience I had, and probably neglects my more joyful and peaceful moments in the frenzy of trying to communicate my fears, anxieties, and doubts. If you are a friend or loved one, please do not let anything you read here overshadow what you know of me personally. If you are a stranger, please remember that a living and flawed person stands behind these words. To all my guests here, please understand these are not political statements and try to extend me grace, even as I share my failures and foibles - I have repented of much of what I share. I don't share this journal as an exemplar, but rather out of the desire to share my hope that entrance to motherhood does not need to be a fearful thing - despite the very real fears I have fought against. Motherhood is simply a part of life and one through which I am discovering more of myself and my God. Archives
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