atomic mama

My relatively new state of “mama-ness” is finally starting to feel like home. Notice I said Starting To. Those of you that know me well know that I come at everything with way more analysis than is necessary or advisable. That I’m generally found standing at the platform as the train leaves the station, biting my fingernails and comparing scenarios and wondering if perhaps the train is standing still and it’s just that everything else is moving and that maybe thinking about it that way will make me feel better about the whole thing. And then I get onto the already moving train, at the last minute, and then have to locate the correct car through a painful trial and error method. All this could have been avoided if I would have just gotten on the train at the right time, but I Wasn’t Ready. So there.

What this all means is that I’m slowly but surely forging a deep and meaningful relationship with my daughter in my own way. And in my own time. I’m trying to allow all the funky feelings to come and go, with as little judgment as possible. After spending the last ten years (and the next ten… let’s be real) in therapy to learn how to be who I want to be instead of who other people want me to be, I know that I need to approach motherhood in my own way. There’s no way in hell I’m regressing into being attached to other people’s expectations again. I’m too old to deal with the BS, and Lina deserves better than that. There are going to be plenty of times when she isn’t all that happy about who I am, but I want the child to know who I am. That means I need to know, too.

In the words of Audre Lorde… The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I can teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope he will learn from this not how to be me, which is impossible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive or threatening voices from the outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be.

I read this every day, because it is what I want for both Lina and for myself. When I feel myself struggling, flailing, failing… it’s usually because I’m too focused on some external idea of how I’m supposed to be a mother, instead of on my idea of what’s right for me. And what’s right for Lina.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 15:51 and is filed under stephanie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.