This post is not safe for the grieving childless.*
Having a young child sucks the You out of you. This is my impression from listening to parents (particularly women) talk and reading their words. It's also my impression from conversations with the childless and childfree people, of whom I was one a short time ago. When you have a baby, I figured, your own life is over. You become a moo cow in the Joycean sense and the nearly literal sense. You can't talk about anything but poop. You bore everyone with ceaseless chatter about preschools, or daycare, not that I know what the difference is. You stop doing the things you always loved.
Have you lost your Self yet? This was the first question I got in email from one of my readers after having Gustav last September. I got asked it again recently. I suppose it says something about my new life, that it took me half a year to answer a question, but I'm not sure it says anything too awful.
I'm not that far into the process of parenting a baby, though I've got ten years and counting as a half-time stepmama of a girl now 14 years old. Neither experience has sucked the Me out of me, at least not yet. Adjusting to family life did change my identity, but then again, most people have major identity changes during their thirties. Maybe the difference with parenting an infant is that the change is so abrupt and so intense.
One day you're a hip young thing traveling the world and going out all night. You have a band or a theatre group or a cool job that defines you. You have a hot sex life and spend loads of time skiing or writing or collecting stamps. Next thing you know, you're saddled with an enormous belly or a crazed toddler, home early every evening. For me personally, though? The change was gradual.
That's because step-parenting is a gateway drug. It's not like mainlining heroin and becoming instantly addicted, your life changing nearly overnight. Meeting your future stepchild is more like being offered your first cigarette. Maybe you think it tastes good, maybe it makes you barf, but you still come back for more. In my case, within a year of meeting my future stepdaughter I was definitely hooked, ready to buy a vintage Zippo and a cigarette case.
And so the Self and my identity had a chance to change slowly. Was I the sort of person who had deeply moving, thrilling times scrabbling in the sand with a little kid at the Oregon Coast or holding a five-year-old's hand while we try to find the restrooms at Mt. Tabor park? I wouldn't have thought so. Turned out I was wrong: those were wonderful, rich experiences, funny ones too. What did it mean that I'd rather stay in, have dinner at 6 pm on the dot, sing a lullaby, and watch a movie with my boyfriend than go to Karaoke from Hell or drink too much wine whilst watching other people get coked out at an after-hours aging Goth party? Did it mean I was hideously boring? Or was I finally growing up like a normal person?
I had to start integrating this weird new version of me with the version I already knew: the obsessive writer, zinester, improv musician, longtime Net nerd, political arguer and activist, bloodletting performance artist, traveling chick. Could all these identities coexist in me? I wasn't sure. It seemed possible, though. I'd always had a strong domestic side, one that liked to come out and play in untraditional venues, like cooking a classic Thanksgiving dinner in a rundown warehouse. I loved cooking, geeking out, sitting around writing, and hanging out with friends, all of which seemed compatible with my new stepmotherly life. I still had the freedom to head off to Southeast Asia for a while or do an artist's residency in the woods, and when my stepdaughter stayed with her mom every other week, my then-boyfriend and I could go on dates or I could run off with my friends.
The real test came at her first soccer game. She was going to meet the team she hoped to join, and the other parents were busy, so I volunteered to take her. We walked uncomfortably across the wet grass, me thinking of Talking Heads lyrics—"and you may ask yourself, how did I get here?"—while she was thinking, "I don't know anyone here! This sucks!" We shambled up to the sidelines, she in her funky spec frames and pink striped hair, me in fire engine red hair under a black hoodie, like two misfits going to a preppie party. I had to laugh, had to acknowledge that I related to my eight-year-old girl more than to what I imagined "real" parents must feel. Surely they would recognize me for the impostor I was.
But as we approached, my stepdaughter recognized a girl from her summer art camp, and off they went, squealing happily. I met the other girl's mom, who was really cool, and shook hands with the coaches. I didn't feel like that much of an alien, and to my surprise, the "real" parents didn't seem like aliens to me, either. They were just people. People with children, like the Free To Be song says.
My stepdaughter was this incredible little person who added to my life and identity, rather than chipping away at the Me in me. She augmented it, like any good friend would, and I hope I augmented hers. Having to look at myself as a Soccer Stepmom freaked the hell out of me, but letting that self-image change do its thing was a tiny, tiny price to pay for this creative and adventurous life with my new family. Plus, my friend Richard deemed me a "SMILF," which cracked me up.
I've had a whole decade of sliding into familyness and altered identity. Even without my husband and stepdaughter, I'd have changed during that long ten years; I'd have struggled with some other identity transition. And now there is the baby. My person and my time are overtaken by intense baby-raising, make no mistake. Somehow, though, I'm still writing for money, editing a magazine, and preparing an art show that goes up at Cooley Gallery later in the year. While I'm blissing out with a little baby sleepily feeding in my arms, I gaze out the window and think big ol' deep thoughts—which is truly wonderful, being forced to slow down, and to me, enforced slowing down is essential to writing and thinking. Other times, I'm devouring the New Yorker or reading a fabulous book, like Lidia Yuknavitch's new memoir. All day, I'm making up wacky-ass songs for someone who doesn't speak English; frankly, it doesn't seem all that different from singing with a band.
In some ways, this newish, baby-mama me is less a new identity than a return to an older one. I feel deeply and solidly like Me, not just the adult Me I determinedly turned myself into, but the vanilla Me I knew when I was a child. The Me who spent hours in nature every day, often alone, playing with animals and picking flowers and walking, walking, walking. The Me who read a shit-ton of books and sometimes had to be forced to go outside for the nature and walking and stuff. The Me who felt a shimmering energy in every tree, every person, every gust of wind. The Me who began to understand how dark and inconsolable the world was, but who consistently dragged herself out of melancholia's mire and cynicism's dry well. The Me who was very sentimental, very sappy, cried easily, cared too much rather than too little. Plain old Me, no more interesting or boring than anyone else, just a small person wandering a large planet.
Of course, I'm experiencing this new/old Me a mere seven months after Gustav's birth. The baby's recent sleep problems aremmaking me stupid and nutty; I begin to understand why parents bitch so much about raising their babies. They've completely lost their minds. Sleep deprivation is a torture device, after all (and I have no idea why evolution or God or nature or whatever would come up with this whole "human parents won't sleep for three years!" idea...). Apparently things get much more exhausting when the kids start walking and talking, too. Maybe I will be a Mommy Zombie with nothing else to discuss or care about in two years. I'm willing to take that chance.
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*And another disclaimer: All my posts here are about my personal experience unless otherwise indicated. In other words, if I were to say, "Getting a new kitten is so delightful, even though she won't stop yowling," it would NOT be a judgement against anyone who hadn't gotten a new cat lately, or didn't plan to, or who really doesn't care for felines. It would not be a condemnation against owners of yowling cats, nor an implication that all cats are hideous yowlers. Readers are responsible for their own cats. Thank you.
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