OPEN YOUR MIND AND STEP FREE
Right before your eyes, it has always been there. Facing the situation, why don’t you speak? If you don’t know it in your daily life, where then will you look for it? Better find out.
—Yuanwu
There we were, a bedraggled threesome in a coffee-fumed kitchen. I jostled baby Georgia on my lap as I sat at the table, skipping another breakfast because I was too full, too full already, with the burdens that bloated up out of bed every morning. My husband set his cup down and stood briskly to leave. I jerked awake. “Where are you going?” I demanded. “To the bathroom.” He shrugged innocently, stunned at another of my sudden drifts onto the jagged edge.
I was jealous. I was jealous that he could respond, so agile and free, to his own urge. I was jealous that he could walk even one foot in any direction without dragging a chain. I was jealous that he could begin the day, eat a meal, leave a room, have a plan, and mind his own business. But mostly, I was jealous that he could go to the bathroom whenever he wanted.
It seems to me that a huge part of motherhood is spent looking for a parking space. Not a parking space for the car. For the kid. Let me just find a place to put this, you say to yourself, as though lugging one too many grocery sacks. Only it’s not a sack, and there’s no place else to put it. But still you look. You look for the clear counter space. You look for other arms, wind-up swings and rocking contraptions. You look for other rooms and altogether other houses. The search propels you to the park, playgroups, and preschool. Where is the spot, other than here, that I can stow this child?
When my daughter reached the miracle three-month mark (when everything does miraculously seem to settle), a filthy secret formed in my head. I know why mothers go back to work. It was callous, I confess. It was a cynical revelation sprung from the immense good fortune of having a choice. But the appeal was so sweet, the escape loomed so neat, that I romanced it.
I was at the health club one day (how imprisoned is that?) whining about all the obstacles in my path. I need to work, I half lied, since my need was primarily manufactured. But finding good help is so hard, I complained. Day care is good for kids, I hyped. But they get sick so much, I griped. Fed up, an onlooker cut me to the quick with: “You can wait a year to get rich.”
Ow! So true. I was willing to pay almost any price just to get some green-backed gratification. How convenient that the greater share of this price would be paid by the child I would leave behind.
In the end, I did not go anywhere. I hired a part-time nanny. I felt good and I also felt guilty, and I legitimized both feelings by using the liberation to work, writing for others and for myself. Was I free? No, not often. Hour by hour, I was merely exchanging one higher value for another, one imprisoning ethic for the next. I had joined the generations of women zagging between the either and the or. Being with my child is so important. Working is so important. Taking care of my family is so meaningful. My work is so meaningful. I should be here. I should be over there. I need to do this. I must do that. This is the right choice. No, that is the right choice. On and on, picking, choosing, evaluating, rationalizing, and often regretting.
Remember the time you joined the health club, flush with an extra layer of resolve and motivation? I’ll be in here three times a week, you assured yourself. Your discipline ebbs and flows until it flows all the way out to the Adriatic Sea. Much later you face the facts, pick up the phone, call the front office, and tell them to please stop charging your card for monthly dues; you haven’t been there for more than a year.
Then there’s the book group that lets you in. You’re invigorated and titillated by the mere invitation to read, meet, and talk. Read, meet, and talk. After a time, you fall slack in your reading, and the talk becomes tiresome. You skip meetings. Lose my address, you wish, and the group discharges you.
There are many, many things in life that you start and then stop. Nearly everything, in fact, but this. Motherhood is a club that you cannot quit, a job you cannot shove, a prize that is nontransferable. I know that, you think. But then you come to know it, the inexhaustible dailiness, the every-nightliness. You’re looking into the shadowy edges of the limitless span called “forever.” You’re in it, and you can’t get out.
You might call a place you can’t leave a prison. Is it? It is if you let it imprison you. If you dwell on what isn’t. If you yearn for the halcyon past or an imagined future. Otherwise, this view right here—the droopy-eyed view from the cluttered kitchen table—is enlightenment, a glimpse at reality. This is your leaping-off point for living life as it is. Not yet ready to vault over the whys, the what-ifs, the how comes, the better offs, the remember whens? Take comfort: it is the farthest leap that a human being can make.
Today’s assignment is to drop the woebegone wishes and daydreams, the ruinous comparisons to the paradise lost or aspirations unfulfilled. Tomorrow, drop them again. When you need a change, make one. When you need a break, take one. When you need help, get it. When it’s time to work, work. When you need to go to the bathroom, lay your baby gently on the floor beside you, give a coo and a smile, and let ’er rip. Ah! Free at last.