Motherhood

One day in 2018 I decided I am ready to be a mom. Well, not exactly. I decided I wanted to have a child, the fact that it would entail me becoming a mother didn’t hit me until later. The fact what it actually means to be a mom even later. But let’s head back to the beginning. After months and months of trying and ending up with disappointment, we decided to give up for a while and not think about it. My friends were telling me “ Did you know that an average time to get pregnant is a year?” No, I didn’t. “Did you start tracking your ovulation days” No, I didn’t. “So, what are you doing?” I was kind of expecting it to happen without really thinking about the process of it too much, much like I do with other things in my life – I just kind of take it as it goes. But then one day it happened, the pregnancy test showed two lines and I realized that I was pregnant. A strange mix of feelings overwhelmed me, happiness, excitement, worry, sadness, maybe even a tiny bit of mourning, but overall, I felt that it’s all normal. Plenty of women feel this way, nothing to worry about.  

During the course of my pregnancy, I have resolved these issues and was ready to welcome a baby into my life. Until he arrived. After giving birth, coming home exhausted and in pain I suddenly realized I don’t have time to rest and get better, someone is waiting for me, and not just waiting to hang out, laugh or fight, someone was dependent on me for survival. The urgency of it all was felt in every breath I took, the responsibility as well, the importance, but the love and the excitement were drifting away questioning every choice I ever made. Was it the infamous postpartum depression crawling behind my back to take over? Or was I just learning what it takes to be a mom? I don’t think I have an answer to that even 4 years later.  

I have stumbled upon a quote of an artist

“Becoming a mother is like discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live”

and I realized that this is maybe the closest to how I felt. In this house of mine, I had many rooms, reading room, working room, room for love, egocentric room, family room, and I would always be in one of them decorating them, cleaning them up, dusting – but this new room was a mystery. It felt like it takes up so much more space in the house compared to the other rooms and requires so much more maintenance. It almost felt like every room in my house suddenly had a motherhood corner. I would go to my relaxation room and I would see it there, I would go to my working room and there it was, I would even go to my sexual room and I would see the motherhood cloud lingering above my head.  

It does require a lot of time, effort and hard work to have this corner properly integrated in all the rooms. Over time, and plenty of decoration conversations with my husband, my sister, my friends and my therapist I began to integrate this motherhood corner in every room of my house. I even managed to kick it out of a few rooms for brief period of time. I would do something similar a child would do when parents tell them to tidy their room quickly, I would push the whole corner in a wardrobe and pretend it’s not there until I was ready to face it.  

Elif Shafak in her incredibly insightful novel “Black Milk” talks about different aspects of herself and refers to these as Thumbelinas, who live in her mini harem. Through the book, we encounter different Thumbelinas, the practical one, the religious one, the intellectual, the mothering one and others that ultimately either integrate, or one of them takes over the identity of her life. It mostly certainly is one of the better portrayals of our need for integration and fear of disintegration of our identity. They all function in (dis)harmony and she always has this annoying feeling of them fighting and competing with each other, contradicting each other but at the end of the day they are what make her what she is, until one day a couple of months after childbirth “ the Djinni of Postpartum Depression” announces his arrival and tells her he is here to fulfil his wishes and his first wish is to arrest all the Thumbelinas as they “have tired her out with their quarrels over the years”. He takes them under arrest one by one leaving her haunted, overwhelmed, unable to see different perspectives.

It takes time to get used to being a mother, to get used to the urgency, responsibility, sense of (in)competence, sleeping patterns, eating patterns, the changes are countless... We are not born mothers, one might argue we are not even socially moulded to be mothers, it takes hard work to integrate this new identity into yourself, a lot of introspection to understand what kind of mother you want to be. When Elif was getting rid of the Djinni she says:  

“ … I thought I couldn’t deal with my contradictory voices anymore… If I agreed with one Thumbelina, I could never make it up to the others. If I loved one a little more, the others would begin to complain. It was always that way. I had been making do by leaning a little bit on one and then a little bit on another. But after I gave birth, the system stopped functioning. I couldn’t bear the plurality inside of me. Motherhood requires oneness, steadiness and completeness, while I was split into six voices, if not more. I cracked under pressure. That’s when I called you…”

Whether they are rooms or Thumbelinas, we all know what different parts of our identity mean to us and how painful it is to feel we have lost one to the other.

Do we agree with Karen Horney and her theory of “womb envy”, that the feeling of creating life is so great and powerful that having a womb makes you superior to the mankind? Or do we agree with Simon de Beauvoir that the repetitiveness of our life and chores and all motherhood entails equals to being enslaved in your own mind or body? Well, I would probably agree with both, depending on the day and the amount of sleep I got.

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