As we’re gearing up for Five for Ten, we’ve decided to repost some oldies this week. Need a refresher on Five for Ten? Just go hang out in the sidebar over there. You can find the rules and our topics and even link up! We’ll see you back here on the 10th, all fresh and new!
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Newly Mothering
(originally posted on August 5, 2009)
Yup, I’m on Facebook. Who isn’t? It’s kind of like Twitter…and sex…I go through phases. This week I am happy to announce that I’ve reconnected with an old high school friend. We’ve been Facebook “friends” for a little while but never really had much to say to one another. I don’t think either of us are particularly poised for rehashing our adolescent years at the all-girls’ boarding school we attended. Well, at least not without some margaritas in a dark mexican lounge with about 5 other post-boarding school babes surrounding us. (Hmm, that idea IS sounding a little fun right now though.)
On December 5th of our Junior year I was expelled from school. Yup, kicked out, tossed, banished. After finishing that year off at a public school and stepping foot into what would be a 5 year identity crisis situation (details not pertinent at this time) I did return to the boarding school as a day student. My connections to old friends changed. We’d grown distant. Or, I think, I was distant, they were them, I was somebody lost. In many ways.
Years went by. I stumbled. Much. I gained hope. I moved. I learned to live in the now without being so extreme. Things were good. I got pregnant. Big fat fucking oops!
But of all my oopses, it was the greatest one. And now here I am. A suburban Connecticut mom to three boys – someone who appears conservative-looking, I was told yesterday. After carrying, delivering and cursing out three children, it’s now fun for me to talk with new moms. There is something nostalgic about it already – which is ridiculous when you have a one year old at home – and I can remember the baby days of being a new mom and that fuzzy unknown feeling. A fullness I didn’t know how to categorize. Now I know what it is. Motherhood. And, simply, Family. My Family. A family birthed, quite literally, by me. But 7 years ago I didn’t know what motherhood meant. Who I was. What was going to happen to me. How I would change. How I would stay the same. What I would love, and loathe, and miss about myself. It was an entirely new kind of identity crisis. I wasn’t lost. I was found. I just had to move in, get comfortable, settle down with a new me.
It all came back to me yesterday. Enter: Facebook. Lily and I most recently spoke when Jamis was a baby and I was on a getaway weekend to NYC. We hugged and laughed and drank a bit. It went by too fast. We were so different. I was a new mom living in Florida. She was brilliant and living in the city. Years have passed like lightning. I’m still a mom. Lily’s still brilliant. But now she’s a mom, too. Our chit chat can now surpass our memories of yesteryear. Those people we were. Because it’s an even smaller part of who we truly are once we become somebody’s mother. Once there are little toes and fingers, little eyes, little mouths, little teeny tiny sighs and sneezes and smiles.
It’s wonderful to feel this unity of motherhood. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s not celebrated enough.
me: How’s motherhood going for you so far? It’s crazy, isn’t it???
Lily: Oh man it’s indescribable. I did luck out with a baby who started sleeping through the night at 6 weeks, and is now logging 10 hours every night. I don’t know how that happened but I’m grateful. It’s funny, I almost feel guilty about it, like I should be suffering more, putting in dues, or something.
But there’s craziness nonetheless. More worry than I ever thought I could produce, more love than I ever thought I could handle, more laughter than I ever expected, and more wonder and confidence and curiosity than I’ve felt since I was a kid. Since high school really. It’s like I got a part of myself back, a part I didn’t really know I lost. And I also lost a part of myself, that I truly miss sometimes, the part that stays out until 5am and has drunken conversations with strangers about ridiculous things. But now those are replaced with babbly conversations with a smiling baby, and I don’t think I really lost out on this one.
She said it perfect. Honest. Just Right.
Lily and Penny
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“But of all my oopses, it was the greatest one. ” I feel the same way. Going from not thinking about being a mother yet to waxing poetics about motherhood. Funny where life takes you.
But with motherhood – oh what an amazing journey!
Don’t you love when a *mistake* turns out to be anything but?
You’re right, motherhood puts us all on an even playing field, emotionally. It’s a beautiful thing.
.-= TheKitchenWitch´s last blog ..A Spinach Tale =-.
I feel like I never fully inhabited my potential (my brilliance?) until I was a mom. It was like I finally ripened and felt my own worth and value without comparing it to everyone else’s.
Yes, it’s a very beautiful thing.
I love this idea, Kelly. Your brilliance. Yes.
My brilliance has a platform as a mother. Or, more simply, as a mom I shine!
Love reading these moments.
And thrilled to be able to! (Thank you again, Super Hero Sarah, for coming to the rescue!)
Looking forward to Five for Ten.
.-= BigLittleWolf´s last blog ..Reading Between the Lines =-.
I just love this. It’s the perfect compliment to my most recent posts – I am where Lily was when you originally posted this, and I am having the very same identity crisis you describe having when Janis was born. “I am not lost. I am found.” Exactly right. I love how Lily equates who she is now to who she WAS, long ago. It’s as if we journey away from ourselves in our post-adolescent, pre-baby years and then we come back to ourselves. The hi-def version of ourselves. Such a cool effing experience, this motherhood thing. :)
seems to me bad girls tend to make the best sort of mamas! or is that tooting my own horn a bit too loudly? i think that walking the edge in our former lives has the ability to give such an insight into our new (or not-so-new anymore) lives–add that with a human being that is capable of turning your world upside down and there can’t help but be a period of wondering, ‘where did i go’. i remember feeling soverylost after the birth of my first and i became someone who i wasn’t because i needed so desperately to fit in somewhere and not feel so alone. luckily, i found some great moms and i could undo that fake me and remember who i was and figure out who i was becoming as a mama…but it took awhile.
Yes! perfectly. She said it perfectly. And so did you.
.-= Heather of the EO´s last blog ..Ruby Red =-.
The metaphor about motherhood being a house, comfy, cozy, and just right, that you have to just move into and settle down in already?? Right on. I sometimes marvel at how long it took me to just move in already and sit down on the couch. Now, my feet are grooved into the coffee table. =>
.-= Stacia´s last blog ..Splitting Heirs =-.
I just had to move in , get comfortable, settle down with a new me. – How do you do that? Four years in, two little boys, they are the loves of my life and yet I still haven’t moved in and gotten comfortable. So much of this post I could say YES! to, and yet I haven’t settled in. How is that possible?
.-= Christine LaRocque´s last blog ..I’m spoiled =-.
I love that motherhood can create unity too… that people who I have nothing in common with are actually people that I share this extraordinary bond.
Although I did have to get a piece or two of me back after that first year of motherhood or I would’ve lost myself. But perhaps I went to an extreme with mommy-ing (NOT a shocker — the extreme part that is)
.-= Alex @ LateEnough´s last blog ..My Son Guest Blogs But I Refuse To Rename The Website I Eat Sand =-.
I often feel as though there is nothing I am better at than being a mother, and yet, there are days when I feel that I am the worst mother ever.
Leveling the playing field, yes. No matter how brilliant we may be at anything else, nothing knocks the rug out from under you than finding out that a tiny person is now solely dependent on you…
Great post…
.-= Maria´s last blog ..On being the baby… =-.
I am with you on loving to talk with brand new moms. I am DRAWN to them. To pregnant women. Not to tell them what I know now that I didn’t know then. But because there is something exciting to watch someone embark on a journey — especially when I have an idea of what lies around the bend, and they don’t even see the bend because they are so very much right there in the thick of the trailhead.
This Greetings From Motherland project I’m part of — it’s almost all moms in the first year to year and a half with their first child. It is so interesting to be part of the group, to listen to them talk. I sit and listen a lot. I don’t like to be the one giving away the spoilers. ;)
I love everyone’s motherhood posts this week. They’re popping up everywhere with all sorts of great nostalgia and thoughtfulness.
xo e.
.-= Elizabeth (@claritychaos)´s last blog ..Indulge me. =-.
She really did say it perfectly. It’s funny, now, how those 5 AM drunken conversations have even lost the appeal they once had. The other night two of my best girlfriends and I went out to celebrate a birthday. We are 33, 33, and 32. The night was our oyster. We had free reign to be out as late as we wished, doing whatever we liked. We had dinner and Sangria and great conversation, and that was fantastic. Then we went to a club, with grand intentions of living it up like the olden days, dancing and drinking or whatever it is we once did (it’s hard to remember, sometimes…). And about twenty minutes later we all agreed that we should just go home, split a bottle of wine and stay up late talking, since that’s all we wanted to do anyway. There was a time I would have found it really depressing to admit that I would rather sit at home and gab with two people than be out on the dance floor with dozens. But now I think it’s just that I’m growing up and realizing what’s important in life. My kids have helped me do that.
I usually find that it’s not really my old self that I miss, but the *idea* of my old self. The reality was never as great as I make it out to be on the bad days. On the other hand, just having the option of staying up all night partying made me feel a little younger, a little more free. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll actually go for it. But I don’t feel like I’m missing it much in my regular life.