At the Intersection of Motherhood and Ambition
I was a person before I was a mother. I don't mean that I have somehow become something other than a person, or less than a person since becoming "mama." What is I mean is that motherhood has changed me just as it has changed my schedule, my social life, and pretty much everything else, and yet I am still me.
It still strikes me as strange that there are people who never knew me as a single person. We recently moved to a new city where we know almost no one, and nearly every time I meet someone new the kids are in tow. We have a few friends here who we knew from our time in New York, and even they knew me only after I had kids.
I recently read Celeste Ng's debut novel Everything I Never Told you. When I went to the library I had been hoping to find Little Fires Everywhere, but her debut novel was the only one on the shelf, so I picked that up instead. I'm glad I did. I really enjoyed it. It's about a multi-racial family living in Ohio in the 1970s and how they handle themselves when tragedy strikes close to home.
The story really got me thinking. While the main thread of the novel is trying to discover what led to the drowning of one of the children (Not a spoiler! The first line is "Lydia was already dead. But they don't know this yet."), a lot of time is spent filling in the histories of the parents Marilyn and James, and how their pasts affect their current lives and the way they parent.
It was Marilyn's story that haunted me. Marilyn had ambitions of her own that she put on hold when she unexpectedly became pregnant. She had never wanted to be a homemaker, and yet that is exactly what she became. And so she resented her circumstances, and her resentment suffocated both her and her children.
I can't say I had a specific ambition that I lay aside when my husband and I started having kids. I left college with no clear direction in life, and I worked all kinds of different jobs in the years between graduation and the birth of our daughter. It wasn't until we were already five years married before I started dabbling in writing a novel, and it was another three years until I realized I wanted to pursue publishing. By then I was already deep into motherhood.
I remember a day about twelve years ago, standing on the subway platform at 42nd St. waiting for the 4 train and talking with my then-fiancé about expectations. I remember telling him that I hoped to be able to stay home with any kids we might have (my mom was home with my sisters and me, and I always valued that and wanted to do that for my own kids), but I didn't want my life to become entirely about the kids. He assured me that if I wanted to work that I absolutely could; he wasn't expecting me to stay home.
I told him that it wasn't so much about having a career as it was retaining something of myself. I didn't want to one day wake up to an empty house and not know who I was now that the kids had moved out. Maybe that means a career, I told him, but it might not. I just wanted to be careful to not lose myself along the way.
I know that a person's true identity is not in their work. And my kids matter more to me than any career ever would, as I'm sure any mom would agree whether they work outside of the home or not. If push really came to shove I would choose my family every single time. And I do, which is part of why I have been working on the same novel for the last seven years. Progress is slow when writing happens ten stolen minutes at a time.
Still, my goal is to finish this book. And not only to finish it, but get it published. I am writing this book not only because I love storytelling and allowing my imagination to run wild, but because I want to share it with the world and I want other people to enjoy it with me. I have ambition.
But I also have two kids. They are young and have lots of needs. I set goals for my writing and they go unmet because of an ear infection or a tantrum that needs calming and a follow-up conversation about feelings. There is only so much time I can set aside for writing without regular childcare and a cleaning service. And since right now my writing doesn't make any money, it's place in the family's hierarchy of needs is not very high.
And yet it is not without value. Stories are self-care for me. It is important that I make space in my life for words. When I have the time and mental capacity, I sit down at my computer and do what I can. When I am too tired to be able to string together a complete sentence of my own, I pick up a book and drink deeply of a world someone else created.
The problem comes when my ambition tries to stage a coup in my mind. I often struggle with feeling like my work is not progressing as quickly as I want. I feel discouraged when weeks have passed and I haven't had a single chance to write. Should I take a nap while the kids are down so I won't be grouchy later? Or do I take this brief window to try and revise part of chapter six? When I do dig into my story for the slice of afternoon that my children are resting, it always feels like it wasn't enough. I needed another hour. And I'll need the same tomorrow or I'll lose momentum. And then another seven years will go by and I'll still be revising chapter 6! Then my two year old tugs on my leg and says, "Stop writing, mama," and I feel guilty when don't want to.
And then I see their littleness melting away with each new day. When my daughter bursts out of her room announcing that she spent her quiet time writing letters to friends and family and can I please give her stamps. When my son experiments with using a new word or phrase while he plays ("What has happened? This is a terrible mystery!"). When my husband offers for me to spend a morning by myself to write in a coffee shop, I worry that I am missing out on important moments and I'll wish I had just stayed home.
There is a tug-of-war in my head. One end of the rope is held by my ambition. The other is grasped by what I believe being a perfect mother looks like.
And the crowd cheers for both sides. Women need to have careers so we can reach our full potential and show our children women can do anything! We need to devote our time to our children so that they will be social and academic geniuses! We must be CEOs! We must throw Pinterest-Perfect birthday parties! We must do it all!
I think the reason Marilyn's story got to me so much was that I, like so many mothers, live in that constant tension. I want them to know that I will never love anything more than them and their father, but I also want them to see me set boundaries for myself. I want to both show my kids that being a woman and a mother doesn't mean that I stop pursuing things just for me. But I also want to be available to them and enjoy them while they are young and at home. (To ratchet up the tension, my daughter starts kindergarten in the fall, and even though it's still a summer away I'm already starting to feel myself get emotional about it. I'm sad about not having her with me all day, and at the same time I'm excited about the idea of more free time.)
The reality is that that tension is never going to go away. I will always love my children. I will always have things I want to pursue that are outside of motherhood. I will always be me, and that will include the mother part of me and the part of me that is for myself. The terrible mystery is to find contentment in the tension. In the wise words of Daniel Tiger, "Sometimes you feel two feelings at the same time, and that's okay."
My daughter has inherited a sense of ambition. She has decided she wants to be a doctor, and she takes this very seriously. A couple of years ago she saw someone holding a cigarette out of their car window, and it led to conversation about how cigarettes make your lungs sick. The next time we were at the library she wanted to check out a book about the lungs so she could learn more about them. Now she studies anatomy and probably knows more about the circulatory system than the average adult. She's awesome. I love that kid to death. As I tell her every night before bed, I'm glad she's mine.
I don't know if she will be a doctor. She's only five, and she might change her mind about what she wants to do a hundred times between now and the time she has to pick a major. And even then she still could change her mind and decide she wants to be a poet. Or she could stay the course and become a neurosurgeon or discover the cure for cancer. Really, anything is possible with her.
At the end of the day, what I want her - and my son - to know is that I am always here, loving them and cheering them on. That I enjoy them and delight in seeing the kinds of people they are growing up to be. And if something they want to do is hard and will take years of patience and discipline to make happen, that they have it in them to do it. I want them show them how to cherish those dear to them, and that dreams are worth fighting for.
Cover photo by Irina Iriser from Pexels