Childrearing challenges

Due to Mother's Day among other things, I have been thinking a lot about the difficulties of childrearing. Two of my favorite commedians Mike Birgiblia and Tom Papa do funny bits about child rearing. Both have said that having babies holds women back. It is true. I was thinking about it just a few minutes ago because I had a cat on my arm (he is obsessed with embracing and sitting on my arm, my right arm, and a cat on my lap and the dog was lying on my feet. I wanted to get up and I wanted to type. It reminded me of my early days of motherhood when my child needed attention.

I am a solitry person by nature and a writer and painter by avocation, neither of which go very comfortably with the demandes of child rearing and 'demands' is the right word. I don't think anyone realizes until they are in it the relentlessness of the demands of small children. They want attention! They want food and comfort, play and diapers, bathroom, food, attention, they want all their needs met all the time. I remember how har it was to carve out a little time to read.

I didn't want my daughter's father to have weekends visittion but he took me to court and I couldn't fight it. For my child's sake, I thought she was too young - she was in the midst of toilet training and I didn't trust him to be careful enough of her safety - he didn't pay attention! There was an old Spencer Tracy movie where he is watching his daughter's baby (Elizabeth Taylor is is daughter) and he begins to watch a baseball game in the park. He leaves the baby in the coach in a shady shrub and goes over to have a better look. When e returns the baby is GONE! Eventually he finds the baby at the police station. Once when Karl was watching the baby at the Seaport in PHiladelphia, I went to the bathroom and came back to find him toaking to a buddy and Lavinia walking along the restrining wall beside the Delaware River. She was a toddler!

Nonetheless, for better or worse, I was forced to hadn her over to fate and in the end she survived, and after the first few months, I began to relax into my newfound vacation! I could read! I could sit in peace and quiet and think without constant demands. I could go off on foot or by car at will and drive around or go to a museum or a hike. It was wonderful.

When they are babies the demands are even more intense. I remember walking around my apartment at 7 pm with Lavinia in her fussy period shrieking in my ear. She was fed, she was burped, her diaper was changed and it was time to sleep but before she slept, most evenings through the mystry of baby processes, she had to go thorugh some kind of cranky period.

Relentless is the word I would use and Mike Birbiglia used that word too about his fatherhood experience with their new baby. The demands change over time and the spaces between demands may alter but the relentlessness remains until - as in my case - they leave home.

The blessing in all of this is the LOVE which is a love that is infinite and indescribable. It is an evoluti9onary, profoundly physical and emotional bond that is as old as mammalian life on the planet. The mystery of a person growing adn developing inside your body is too vast to comprehend - the creation of a new human being inside your own body! What a power. It is Godlike. But these are abstractions. The physical facts are that when a baby is born, you are enslaved to that baby's needs. It is hard.

I was blessed with patience and tolerance so I only had one or two ruptures in my equanimity. One was in West Virginia when Lavinia was in later toddler, perhaps 3 or so. She had still napped up to that period and I can tell you, sometimes I held on by a thread to that hour of two of peace when she napped. That one afternoon, though, in West Virginia, the day the napping ended, she was all wound up and didn't want to nap and I was making her stay in bed and trying to make her go to sleep, reading her a story. My mother said "Oh Jo Ann, let her go, she doesn't need her nap." And I yelled at my Mother "You don't understand, I need her to nap!" That said it all. I needed that hour in the day to drop my vigilance and let my attention rest. She didn't nap that day or any other. It was over.

I can remember, too, one night kneeling on the bathroom floor while she had her evening bath, thinking, when is she going to be able to shower! I was so tired, so tired. I was working full time and by evening, I was spent. My job took a lot of energy - teaching, and a lot of patience. At night I was exhausted but every night I had to make the bathk kneel on the floor, pick up the child, dress her in pajamas, read her a story, empty the bath, all before I could sit on the sofa for an hour before I had to go to bed.

It is odd how these drains and strains stand out so much now when I think on the past - where are the joys and delights? They were there, just like in love, but somehow we remember the break-ups.

My daughter was out on her own by 18, as was I in my youth. It broke my heart and took a year or two or more to get over but I did. And in the next few years, I got over more. And when she untied the strings one by one over the following years, it was painful, but as I realized and said to myself many times, "Her freedom is my freedom." And in time, I got my life back. I have had twenty years of retirement and those twenty years my child has been grown and on her own, so my retirment included from parenting. I all worked out. And her father's involvement and his wife's involvement, eventually also contributed to my return to freedom, like a whale released from Sea World, I was free in the ocean.

Happy Trails

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