Expectations - Introduction

During my seventh month of pregnancy, my husband Mark suggested that I write my next book about motherhood. I rolled my eyes. "That's the last thing I want to write about!" I replied with a sneer. Of course he thought it would be a perfectly natural subject for me, what with my impending motherhood. Wouldn't I be curious about the world I was about to land in?

Well, sort of. It wasn't that I didn't want to write about motherhood, but it wasn't exactly a world I wanted to identify with, either.

Mentally, I'd always pushed mothers aside. Their lives seemed so routine, and so much about children, home, meals, car pools, and laundry. I'd see them in the market, lugging their kids around, and it was so easy to veer away from them, especially when they were looking ragged and mean because the kids were acting up. On the contrary, when things looked beautiful and in control, I'd sneak extra glances, fantasizing about my own future family.

In general, I wasn't especially interested in talking to that bunch. Of course I wanted to be a mother one day, but I would be so different from any other mother because I WAS A BOOMING METEOR OF A WOMAN WITH A LIFE FOR GOD'S SAKE! I had energy! Ideas! Plans! No child was going to crash-land my party. You wouldn't find me slaving over laundry or wiping sticky green stuff off refrigerator doors. I wasn't going to be like those other mothers who whined, "Oh! I cannot get a single thing done all day!" "You wimp," I'd think. Not me, I had it all planned out: I'd birth Ruby, bond with her, and then resume life as I knew it, writing, working, reading, going to movies and restaurants. Ruby would be nearby, strapped on to me like some exotic appendage, delightful, lovely, and obedient, living my life with me. "Wow!" people would exclaim, "and you're a mother, too!" "Yep," I'd grin, "Ain't I amazing?"

At the same time, I had grown up in a family, so I wasn't totally in the dark about a mother's life. My mother, Suzanne, was the force in our family, the major dude, the maypole around which we four children swung. Her life was a flurry of car pools and food fights, telephone calls, trips to the market, little yellow raincoats hanging from hooks, packets of lunch meat, and Kool-Aid. She cooked practically every meal we ever ate, she cleaned, drove us to every conceivable after-school activity, tucked us in at night, applied bandages to hurts, drank, yelled, slammed her fists down on kitchen tables, baked birthday cakes, and took us to Dodger baseball games. We loved her, we were scared of her, and we idolized her.

I'll never forget those weekend nights when she and my dad, Wally, were on their way out to a party. The four of us would be sitting at the kitchen table delicately picking at our turkey TV dinners. My hungry father, dressed and ready to go, would be scrupulously tasting all of our food to make sure that nothing was poisonous.

We'd smell her first, her ArpŽge perfume wafting into the kitchen. Then the bedroom door would be flung open and there she'd be: Miss America! Beautiful, fully made-up with red lipstick and false lashes. Her hair was piled high, and she'd be dressed in something beaded and magical. She'd descend on us with big smiles and arms open wide, like a queen greeting her peasants. We were swept away. "Oh, Mom. You're so beautiful. You smell so good. We love you so much. Can we have that dress when you're done with it?"

I guess I imagined that my life would resemble hers to some extent, though of course I'd be so much better than she was. I wouldn't talk on the phone all day, wouldn't pick my kids up late from school, wouldn't grit my teeth, lose my cool, or slam my fists down on kitchen tables. I'd be the perfect fairy mom, so sweet and gooey with love and understanding that you could spread me over a muffin.

And then, one June, Ruby came.

Applause, curtain down.

Now it's November. It's cold and rainy outside and Ruby is five months old. She and I are sitting on the couch nursing-again-for the kizillionth time. The beautiful child and me, hair askew and still wearing the same baggy clothes I've been wearing for months, just sitting there, staring out the window into my untended garden.

"My God! What is this?" I gritted to myself. "I've been sitting on this couch for five months. I smell bad, I can't fit into my jeans, and I haven't showered for days. It's too much of a hassle to leave the house with her because all she wants to do is poop, pee, and eat, and every time I do leave I feel compelled to spend money that I don't have because I'm not working! Aaackk! What the hell is going on here?"

I couldn't remember spending this much time sitting still in my whole life. Anchored to the couch, I thought back to the many times I'd tried to meditate and how, after about two minutes, I would invariably start wondering whether the mail was in or what I might fix for dinner. But as I gazed out into the cosmic fog of my motherhood, I began to wonder if maybe there wasn't a lesson in this for me. Maybe motherhood was an opportunity to face certain things that, under normal circumstances, I'd want to avoid. Like sitting. And just being. With no agenda and no get up and go. I always knew I'd be a workaholic if given half the chance, but I didn't realize how completely my work had defined my sense of self. Sitting on the couch in sweats, with my hair askew, I felt like nobody.

And yet, here was this beautiful child nursing at my breast. This darling, tender, sweet girl who had come out of my belly, whom I had nurtured and loved all those nine months, whom I had gone through the excruciating birthing process for. I loved her more than anything I had ever loved, and yet I wasn't so sure how much I actually loved motherhood. Friends envied my picture-perfect family, but I would have given anything to be dashing down some city street, manuscript in hand, ready to meet my editor with another brilliant work of art. Success, completion, productivity were like some rare air to me. I wanted them so badly.

Sitting there, day after day, nursing Ruby, I began to understand the complexity that is motherhood. It was more than shiny little raincoats hanging on hooks, more than sweet kisses and night-night stories. And as beautiful as it could be, it was also demanding, tiring, and frustrating. But unlike the other commitments in my life, like my work and even my marriage, which were things I could walk away from if they got too difficult and painful, I was never going to walk away from Ruby. I had to stay put and nurse and pump and change diapers, again and again, day after day, and I realized that motherhood's commitment, was an opportunity for me to peel back some of my life's more surfacy layers and have a peek at what I was really made of.

At the same time, I began to reconsider my husband's suggestion that I write a book about motherhood. In fact I had a lot of questions for other mothers, and suddenly I wanted to meet other mothers very much. So, tape recorder in hand, I traveled to various parts of the country, seeking them out. I met as many kinds of mothers as I could: gay, straight, Black, White, teenage, over forty, single, rich, poor, happy, frustrated, content, and confused. I spoke to more than seventy women before I selected the thirty who appear in this book.

I wasn't as curious about their various mothering methods as I was about their personal challenges and how they attempted to find balance in their lives. I wanted to hear about the complexity of their own mother-love and I wanted to try to understand the paradox of wanting desperately to be with their children and as far away from them as possible in the same moment, which was a sentiment shared by almost everyone I met.

My first question was "If your child is a gift from God, what lesson was he or she sent here to teach you?" Then we took it from there.

Some women talked about self-esteem, some about leaving or staying at their jobs. Some talked about their relationships and how they handled their anger and frustration. Some women spoke of their own mothers and the emotional inheritance that they brought into their new families. The subjects of drugs, death, divorce, and sexuality all came up. We also talked about love, the very particular, full-bodied, heart-wrenching, breath-stopping kind of love that a mother feels for her baby. Many of us agreed that the word love doesn't do justice to this feeling. It isn't that the word itself isn't strong enough, but that it wasn't complex enough to contain all the myriad feelings we have about our children.

If I came away with anything, it was a deep affinity for mothers, an incredibly underestimated bunch of warriors, who are, as one woman in this book says, like saints walking on water. I agree.

Twenty months into Ruby Grace's life, I'm still understanding my own lessons. I know I've learned something about patience and letting go, but I'm learning something about humility, too. I am beginning to accept the fact that I am not a METEOR OF A WOMAN anymore, and that I do spend a lot of time wiping gooey green stuff off refrigerator doors, that I'm exhausted at the end of the day, and that sometimes I lose my cool and am far from perfect. Most importantly, Ruby Grace is not an item to be checked off my list; she is a child, and she needs me to leave my adult pleasures and neuroses behind a lot of the time. And as hard as that can be, there's some relief in it, too. The air isn't as rare, but there's nothing like the feeling I get when she shouts "Mama!" and grins when she sees me first thing in the morning. I'd trade all the success I've ever known for that. Almost.

These stories are about a complicated kind of love. They're about the good, the bad, and the ugly that is motherhood. And they're about a full-bodied bond that takes you to a place called motherland, a place from which you will never return.

Laurie Wagner, February 1997