A taste of motherhood

There are very few blogs that I actually read, but this week the one I read most regularly has been chronicling the writer's recent labor and delivery of a new little daughter. This morning I sat down and read about the actual birth.

I was taken totally off guard by the power of my own emotions as I read. Maybe it is a tribute to this woman's ability to write that her story of a natural, at-home birth carried in it the eternal, an archetype of this stunning aspect of womanhood. I sat and cried as I read, both because it was beautiful and because I can't have it and I want it so bad.

I wanted this experience that spans the gap of centuries, continents, and cultures to unite my gender. I craved this initiation into the most complex and mercurial role of a woman.

I wanted to have this experience as a beautiful reminder of the reality of this earth life: wearying but profoundly meaningful, painful but bringing forth unlimited joy. I wanted that rich opposition, that biting, concentrated morsel of life tasted even as I brought forth life.

Most importantly, I wanted to begin my motherhood by surrendering myself to something bigger, a foreshadowing of what it continues to be, a precedent for the day to day. I wanted to make the choice of swallowing motherhood whole, the good and the bad in one jaw-splitting mouthful, and making it part of me.

Despite much preparation, it didn't happen that way for me, and it won't.

I don't feel robbed or cheated: I'm too grateful for my two beautiful children to feel that way. But I do feel...sterilized. This is the only word that comes into my head as I sit here trying to place it. I feel as scrubbed down metaphorically as I was literally on the operating table for the births of both of my children. Not in a beautiful, cleansed way, but in a yellow, iodine, latex way...artificial and inert.

Every time I feel that my experience has been less than it might have been, I remind myself that while those two half hours of my life may feel comparitively lacking, Rylan and Evie are fresh, authentic and alive, as unique and wonderful as any two children that ever came. However trite it may sound, all of my heart is wrapped up in those two, and no matter how they got here, I am grateful for it. As a matter of fact, I am intensely grateful for it, because without this option, either I or them (or both) would not be here, and no mothering would be happening at all. How petty of me to mourn such a tiny aspect of motherhood when I'm up to my armpits in motherhood every day of my life.

I will not to cry foul because I didn't get the concentrated tidbit I wanted: my challenge, rather than to manage the sudden overflowing mouthful, is to catch every single stream in my mouth as it falls and savor it as it slides down.

And there is absolutely nothing artificial or inert about that.

Reading another crazy, life changing book.

John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Agenda of Compulsory Schooling.

Not done with it yet, but I AGREE SO MUCH WITH WITH SO MUCH OF WHAT IS BEING SAID!!!!!!!

Our public schools are "preparing" our children for real life by disengaging them from their real motivations for learning and in their place creating false external motivators, obliterating any hope of a real community and setting up a false, oft times cruel social system, laying the student's well being on the sacrificial altar of teachers' job security and unions, and constantly trying to convince us that the only way to fix this fundamentally deranged system is to pour more money into it.

The sad thing is, for the most part we believe it and have responded readily with constant cries to the government for more money. As a matter of fact, they have convinced us so fully that we need to fund their failing system that we give politicians the rotten tomato treatment if they don't seem sufficiently concerned about taking money out of our pockets to give to this whacked system.

We're being hoodwinked, mega.



In addition: This is a note to myself to start buying amazing books in triplicate. Actually just in double so I always have one to give way if I need to, but I wanted to say triplicate.

Lessons from Amy

How can it be that I talked so much when I find you so interesting?

I think I heard you call about two dozen people "completely fascinating" tonight. Some of them I know, some of them I don't but if I know them and don't think they're fascinating I know you're right and not me. You find gold everywhere, lifting and building.

You see the light in my eyes because you know God so well you can see even the faintest spark of divinity in each of his children.

You "edify, that is to lift and build up, to make those around you feel better".


I am grateful for how you make me feel and what you teach me. It is easy to learn from you because of how you make me feel. I want to do that for those around me-- especially for my children.

Thank you for teaching me until 10:40 tonight. I didn't know how long I had stayed, but I'm glad you let me. Being with you tonight made me a better person.