Becoming a mom is a different journey for different people. I love the African proverb that says a child is born the moment the mother conceives of that child in her heart. I have friends who have families through surrogacy, through adoption, through intense pregnancies and through some compilation of all of the above. Getting the label "mother" can sometimes feel like graduating from university. You have the logical and very rigorous steps to becoming a parent behind you. Now you have the kid. Diploma in hand. Then comes that moment when you meet an old friend or worse, a friend of your parents', at the local grocery store after graduation. Because the inevitable question happens: What's next?
I used to think that everything was BC (Before Children) and AC (After Children). More often than not, these days, I'm beginning to come around to this idea that parenthood, and in my case specifically motherhood, is much more grey than one side of the other. I had friends who were pregnant, had a baby, but have never fully lived into motherhood. Yes, they are mothers in the strict definition. But the idea that parenting, motherhood is a craft to be fine-tuned, with skills that require maintenance and training... I think that's a concept that might never have been, or at the least, is slowing dying away.
Daily, I craft the skills of knowledge and bonding with my child so that in the moments when she is going to break, the world as she sees it has fallen short of her every expectation, I have the words and the touch that can resonate with her soul when her brain is just overloaded. Some days are better than others, but I don't go without. There's no 'walking away' for a break.
Chef David Chan was doing a series on how a chef thinks and he went into a factory that processes fish in Japan. He watched a man, a line worker, break down a tuna: "Here's a guy who has done this a million times. For me, whenever I watch someone that butchers anything and it's so clean and so fast, it's like... it's watching art, it's watching somebody that has mastered their craft."
As my third gets ready to don the preverbal backpack for kindergarten, as I struggle with the full mother's intuition that she's not ready for OUR particular, American, highly-driven elementary school setting, I keep running into people asking the question, like when I left university: What's next?
I haven't been biding my time between a career that I was passionate about but set aside for diapers and midnight feeds. I haven't made all the financial and personal sacrifices to hygiene and individual toilet time for designated amount of time. I set aside a particular set of knowledge and craft, (teaching) so that I could develop, hone, and creatively embrace another craft, motherhood. I want to mother the way that line worker was able to break down that huge fish- effortlessly. I don't think my skills are so strong that I can walk away for a week, a month, a few years, and pick right back up. I'm not sure my kids need me any less now that they sleep through the night, are toilet trained, or can put their own pants on. Not as a chauffeur, but as a mediator, between the world and their hearts, giving them lessons and language on life and love and beauty and tragedy. All the things that make up their world are still just as new and scary but full of wonderful potential, in the same way that my first learning to walk faced a world of obstacles and dangers, but it was a wonderful, beautiful world full of discoveries to be made.
In Judaism, the home is called a mikdash ma'at, a little sanctuary and the goal is to try and emphasize not what each family member does but who they are. The house then, is a sacred space for being and practicing who you are at your deepest levels.
Being a mother of four, which is generally considered a lot of kids in the States, I realize that my skill in navigating grocery stores, banks, airports and playdates with all my children in tow has made me acutely away of a sort of "mommy-math" I didn't know existed a few years back. There are values placed on personalities, daily dispositions, time of day dispositions, and the amount of energy expenditure to do a particular activity, and factoring in the physical need of the proposed activity. So going to the grocery store first thing in the morning for the week's food, right after breakfast, even with all four kids, is simple. Kids are good, not grumpy, no naps needed, fed, and we need food. More value on need, less value taken from capacity. But that exact same scenario, at 12:30pm when naps and lunch and grump have set in, and the math doesn't add up, the capacity to accomplish the shopping versus the need is too great. Thus, we get pizza for dinner and call it done.
I know the math, because I practice it. Every. Single. Day. It's good math, sturdy math. Math that lets me know when I've pushed too hard, demanded too much.
For me, that kind of knowledge comes from intimacy, proximity, daily flexing muscles to practice all the aspects of that equation. I LOVE my job. I love trying my best to make my house a sanctuary, both in body and soul. I get frustrated with my kids, like everyone else, because just when I think I have my times tables memorized, they change the figures, but I love the discovery of the new (usually from hindsight in fairness though). I'm not ready to say my craft is as good as it's going to get. Many folks, male and female, are better parents when they are focused, through constraints like time and physical space. I'm not one of them. I feel like my heart and my brain work more slowly, like a long cure or a slow marinade. I'm honing my craft, and just as in cooking and liquor and wood working, this craft takes effort, space, so I'll put in the time to master my beautiful craft. The craft of Emme Capri, and Monkey; Cooper Nash and Snugaboo... because they are as much a part of me as any master's prized piece. The symphony of their lives sings back the rhythm and rhyme of mine.
So nothing. Nothing new is next. Just them, just this, just me.
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