I wrote this last week and have debated posting it, but I think the point of the whole thing is that I need to stop being afraid of speaking out, so for the ten people who might still read this blog, I will publish it.
I know most of you are probably laughing inside; could a voice as loud as mine really be lost? But I feel it has, over the past couple years dwindled down at least. While it still carries across a room, the things that carry are less interesting and less honest than they used to be. I have felt that unshakable funk, pulling me down into slothfulness and boredom.. Chalk it up to turning 22, but I'm having a sort of mini-life crisis that has lead to to do some serious soul searching. And I've realized that my voice really has more to do with my self-confidence than anything else, and area of my life I have been faltering in ever since I stumbled into this labyrinth called parenthood and even before then. I used to have a lot of trust in myself, perhaps to a fault. But anyone who went to high school with me will attest, I never let any one tell me what to believe or how to act.Though my father instilled a great conservative spirit in me, I think even he was a tad apprehensive when I related my head-to-head arguments with government and history teachers. My naivete shines through now, but I am still proud of that stalwart girl, who knew with certainty that I WAS right.
Perhaps the hardest thing of all is coming to terms with that fact that things aren't always black and white. I was sure at 18, when I got engaged, that everyone who dismissed me as another one of those girls was wrong. I was intelligent and free-thinking and I would prove the stereotype wrong. If you swear you've heard me say, "I'm just a few credits away from graduating," for two years now, its because you have. I morphed into a 19-year old bride/mother stereotype faster than you can repeat the overused Breed-Em-Young University. Here I sit, just shy of my college degree, unable to get myself to commit the time and patience to getting a couple online credits done. Currently, I'm enrolled in a Food Prep in the home class. One of the questions on each assignment is, "Did you sweep the floors and take out the trash?" Another reads, "Did you wash and replace your linens?" Still more, "Did you eat at a set table?" It does stop short of asking whether I went to the powder room to freshen up my bouffant hair before my spouse got home... Needless to say, it hasn't been the most intellectually stimulating, and I have shirked at the menial, and in my humble, not-much-of-a-feminist opinion, demeaning requirements. So instead of completing a quite simple two credit course, I let it and my education, sit and fester.
For the last year or so, I've shrunk down in embarrassment about these things. Perhaps I should have waited longer to have kids. This is absolutely exhausting. Perhaps I should have known myself better before I got married, figured out what I wanted to BE in life and how to get there. So oftentimes I feel like a failure, because I think often in our culture, we start to believe that we should be completely fulfilled in being wives and mothers, but that isn't the case (for me at least.) I married Chris because I loved him, because he loved me (so unconditionally, I might add, that he puts up with the kind of crap over and over) and because I knew he would hard and take care of me and be exactly the kind of husband that most women can only dream of having as a spouse. I had Claire because we wanted to, and I believed it was a righteous desire and thus pursued it. Those were two decisions that completely embodied that spirit I used to have-- this is me, take it or leave it. And while those remain two of the best decisions of my life, I have started to realize that those decisions did have some of the negative consequences of which I had been warned, and I think I've lost my footing a bit. What I'm trying to come to terms with is that I can be both right and wrong about the decisions of my past, and that doesn't mean I have to give up my good judgment to admit it.
Parenting is hard because I have no idea what I am doing. Right now, Claire is up in her crib talking and banging and in general, just giving me an ulcer. I hate these moments. I hate them more than I imagine most people ever hate them. I just want so badly for her to take a nap and leave me alone for a few minutes, but I don't know how to achieve that. She is tired, right? I think she is tired. But then why is she still talking? Is there too much light in her room? Can she hear the clitter clatter of keys as I type? What will happen when Chris gets home soon? I feel like I am constantly stumbling through the dark, grasping at anything, praying for help. I know this is a huge part of having lost my self-assurance. I have no idea what I am doing.
And so I want to share a little experience, if only to further engrave it in my memory, that I had last week. I'd been doing a lot of studying, something I haven't done in so long, I forgot how incredibly enthralling it could be. Perhaps I would have been better off at a university other than BYU, because I think most of the time I found it too intimidating to voice my opinion and thus just existed in quiet mediocrity. Anyway, I had been reading and studying, and I was feeling, if not enlightened, at least challenged. It was a feeling I hadn't had in so long, and it was empowering. I headed to Wal-Mart with Claire in tow. Now I have one rule with Claire at the grocery store. She can sit in the cart, or she can walk alongside me. The only place I don't want her is in my arms while I struggle with a cart. Of course that often doesn't work, and I am left feeling like a walking stereotype, unable to keep a hold on a kid, flustered, buying a schizophrenic mix of fresh vegetables and preservative laden convenience products. We were in the baking aisle when she decided she wanted to eat the bananas that were in the cart (of course, the one thing I can't prematurely open and feed her, because bananas happen to be charged by weight.) This resulted on her standing awkwardly on the cart while I pushed it. (She's still making a fuss upstairs. Should I go get her? Could she be pookie? Or is she just about ready to give up the fight and checking on her will only disturb the process? See- I'm lost.)
Anyway, as I pushed the cart past the chocolate chips and pre-chopped walnuts, an older man watched us knowingly as only a 65 year old man in a red tank top could. He then leaned down real close to Claire and said, "All you're doing there is making yourself red." First off, I'm not even sure what he meant by this, because it contradicts what he said later, but I assume he meant that her fussing and screaming to get to the bananas was counter-productive. I ignored his insight and went on my way.
Come the next aisle, there is creepy man again. At this point I am gratefully relieved because Claire has allowed me to put her in the cart's seat, and we are moving quickly and efficiently. So red-tank top man says, "I see who is in charge there." Now, Taylor V 2.0 would have walked away, ashamed and embarrassed, but I had just started running a beta copy of V 3.0 and I wasn't going to put up with it.
"What do you mean?" I snapped back.
"Well she got her way, didn't she? She's sitting in the cart."
"Not exactly, that cart is where I want her, so she actually got exactly the opposite."
"Oh, well, I, Um..."
And so with one last push out of the aisle I persisted, "Yeah, I'm the one in charge here."
Now, this isn't groundbreaking to most of you, but it was to me. Because I feel like I've spent a lot of time beating myself up for not being in charge of my life, and yet, in that aisle, while accusing me of being taken by a 19 month old, Creepy Old Man tried to let me be taken by him. And he didn't win. I was in charge.
I don't suppose most of this makes much sense, but perhaps you can glean a thing or two from it. I guess what is is important to me is that it is okay to be a bit of a stereotype. I did get married at 19, have a kid at 20, and leave college just a little too early, but that doesn't make my opinion worthless. It doesn't make me less of a person. I have an amazing husband, a pretty remarkable daughter, and I can still be an educated person even if I did rush it a bit. I'd say compared to most, my life isn't too shabby. Most importantly, being a partial stereotype doesn't mean I have to buy into the whole thing. I will finish school, and soon, Dad. And if I choose to keep going, I hope that circumstances will allow. Above all, I don't have to lose my voice just because it may have been wrong a couple times, or just because I'm not quite sure all the time. Things are not black and white, there are many different shades of gray in between, and it is entirely up to me to replace those monochromatic moments with bright and vivid colors.
(Okay she wins, I got her out of the crib. Shoot, forgot to turn the movement monitor off...)
7 comments:
So I read your post a little while ago and can't stop thinking about it...I'm hoping that commenting will help?!?
Anyway, I know EXACTLY how you feel. I find myself thinking all of those things ALL the time. Where is the old me? Where did my ambition go? And what the heck am I doing? I have no clue how to be a mom. So many of my old friends are just barely starting to think about getting married, and here I am, with almost 3 kids. What the heck?!?
Maybe we did it all a little fast. And it probably would be a lot easier if we had been on the slower, steadier track. But would you trade it? I wouldn't. Eventually we all end up in the same place, so whatever. I just wish that in the fastness of growing up these last few years, that I had held onto a little more of myself. I miss the old, ambitious me.
Glad you posted this.
Bravo for telling old man river where to go and how to get there! You know I've liked getting older and realizing that I don't have to take crap from old people anymore. They want to give me an ear full? I'll give one right back! Anyway, good post.
-Mark
Taylor, little Claire is so lucky to have you as a mother. You are doing a fabulous job as both a wife and mother. Glad you feel free to express yourself...you should.
thank you, taylor.
i married at 23, after a broken engagement, a study abroad and a mission, and i still feel the way you're describing.
thank you for talking me through it, in a sense.
i think you're brilliant.
"We are meant to be all things to small people, surrounded by bromides and soppy verse and smiling strangers who talk about how lucky we are. And we are lucky. My children have been the making of me as a human being, which does not mean they have not sometimes been an overwhelming and mind-boggling responsibility. That last is the love that dare not speak its name, the love that is fraught with fear and fatigue and inevitable resentment. But between the women who cannot have children and sometimes stare at our double strollers grief-stricken, and the grandmothers who make raising eight or 10 sound like a snap and insist we micromanage and overanalyze, there is no leave to talk about the dark side of being a surrogate deity, omniscient and out of milk all at the same time.
"The weight was not always so heavy. Once the responsibility was spread around extended families, even entire towns. The sociologist Jessie Bernard has this to say: 'The way we institutionalize motherhood in our society--assigning sole responsibility for child care to the mother, cutting her off from the easy help of others in an isolated household, requiring round-the clock tender, loving care, and making such care her exclusive activity--is not only new and unique, but not even a good way for either women or--if we accept as a criterion the amount of maternal warmth shown--for children. It may, in fact, be the worst.'
"It has gotten no better since
those words were written 25 years ago. Worse, perhaps, with all the competing messages about what women should do and be and feel at this particular moment in time. Women not working outside their homes feel compelled to make their job inside it seem both weighty and joyful; women who work outside their homes for pay feel no freedom to be ambivalent because of the sub rosa sense that they are cutting parenting corners. All of us are caught up in a conspiracy in which we are both the conspirators and the victims of the plot. In the face of all this "M is for the million things she gave me" mythology it becomes difficult to admit that occasionally you lock yourself in the bathroom just to be alone.
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which women can admit this quietly to one another, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilt apple juice and littered with markers without tops."
-Anna Quindlen
For the record, you're three days younger than me and I still haven't graduated from college either. But I also don't have a husband, a child, or a mortgage. You're doing just fine, as you well know. Besides, when you're 40 and have already raised your kids, you can run for senate, anchor abc news, learn to swim and pull a dana torres, host a cooking show, or just crochet all day. You're 22. I shouldn't be telling you this because I can never convince myself of it, but you've got the whole world ahead of you.
THANK YOU TAYLOR! We (mom's) feel the exact same things! I often think back on the past...did I rush things? did I get married too young? was i ready to give everything up to become a mother? Etc...the list just goes on. We are all in the same boat. We don't have to drop who we were...although it is much easier said than done. I struggle daily with "who am I? where did I go?" but the matter of the fact is that you are NOT alone!!! We have so many friends that are going through the exact same things!!! :) Thank you for this post! :)
Hopefully it's ok that I comment on this. First off, you're a great writer Taylor! I wish I could write well but eventually everything just turns into a jumbled mess of misspelled words.
I often look at my life and wonder how different it would have been if I had gone on a mission and got married already and started school when I was younger. And nearly every time I sincerely wish that I was in a position like you (not married to a guy, but with my family). Everybody feels lost in life. Those who don't, perhaps have something to reach for and learned how to be wise I guess. I finally started school last year and it's been nice to have direction again but I'm sure there comes a time for everyone when they wonder what the heck they're doing.
Don't take for granted what you have because there are plenty of us who are jealous of it.
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