PREFACE: ONE SIZE FITS ALL?

(or Look Back in Anguish)

in which Linda opens Pandoras mothers box

FASCINATING MOTHERHOOD PRE-TEST

 PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING:

1. How could I be so self-centered to even consider

 _____________________________________!

2. Why would anybody (except me) let their child

 _____________________________________?

3. What kind of a mother am I anyway?

a. irresponsible

b. over-controlling

c. insane

Now for Part 2.

FASCINATING GIRLFRIEND PRE-TEST

1. Now that she has a child, shes so

(circle one) sensitive, distant, judgmental.

2. Why does she have to prove how superior she is

by ________________________________?

3. What kind of a mother is she anyway?

a. irresponsible

b. over-controlling

c. insane

     Time's up. Pencils down.

     Don't worry about grading. The answers don't matter. It's the anxiety that counts.

Eight years ago, I had no idea how many petals of angst motherhood could unfold. I was simply thrilled about the idea of having a child and joining that special community of women, of which my best friend, Joan, was already a two-generation card-carrying member. I was certain that Joan and I would become even closer than we were, which was pretty darn close.

     Yet when our babies, Jack and Graham, came along, we found ourselves polar opposites on the spectrum of mothering. Joan wanted to mother her very needy child more than she felt society would approve of, and I longed for more freedom than seemed "acceptable." I couldn't fully comprehend her difficulties, and she seemed unable to understand mine.

     Joan was dealing with the lonely life of an overwhelmed stay-at-home single mom in a remote mountain community. I was facing my own conflicts as a married working mother and unpublished writer in Los Angeles, bombarded by incessant reminders of everybody else's Hollywood success. But underneath all that we were so alike! How could motherhood be pulling us apart? Wasn't it supposed to unite us in a tribal bond of sisterhood?

     Becoming a mother may be idealized as a fulfilling journey guided by ancestral instincts, modern science and a supportive community. But in Motherland nothing is as it "should be." The science of child-rearing can be overbearing, the community unsympathetic, and instincts virtually nonexistent. A whole village of alienation. The sisterhood of motherhood can feel more like a nasty seventh grade clique than a comforting Old Girls' Network.

     If living up to a standard of perfection is the goal, it just might be that the true measure of a mother is her capacity for guilt and repression. Guilt to keep her from doing what's "not right," and repression to keep all those "not right" feelings in the closet.

     But it's like trying to wear the Perfection Suit. It looks good and gets a lot of outside approval, but you can't breathe. You can't even squeeze into it unless you do some radical psychological liposuction. If you're handy with the power tools of sublimation surgery you can shed those "ugly" pounds of selfhood, wisdom, and authenticity you've put on over the years. For a while anyway.

      Maybe there are some mothers who can repress their way to sainthood. But those of us less well-endowed in that area (probably a lot of us) always seem to wind up straddling the dark chasm of self-doubt between whats supposed to be right and what deep down secretly feels right. The blowhole of maternal conflict.

The problem for me has been that were more than just caretakers of our childrenwere also women with different personalities, distinct histories and inner lives, each in the process of her own unique evolution. Who among us is "normal?" And, oh--all those dark emotions we're not supposed to have! And if we have them, we certainly shouldn't complain. Right? Just ship them off to the seedy back-alleys of Motherhood Noir.

     My trials in that forbidden territory began as soon as I became pregnant. Was I supposed to pretend my inner conflicts didn't exist, or accept them as evidence that I was immature or unfit? What I needed was the kind of reassurance and empathy only a close girlfriend could give!

     Joan and I first met when we were cast as best friends in a theatre production in Santa Cruz, California. During "Make It Like the Movies," life imitated art and we became best friends in real life, working together on film and writing projects. But a few years later, we suddenly found ourselves living on opposite sides of the country--she with her husband and two-month old baby in California, and I in New York, about to be married.

     When I became pregnant, I felt isolated in my new city and anxious in my new condition. The two people I needed the most were my mother and Joan. But unfortunately, my mother had been dead for thirteen years, and Joan was on another coast. Long distance phone service was an extravagant luxury for me back then, and even when I did splurge I seemed to be too busy or too sleepy to experience the kind of closeness I really needed. So I turned to the parenting books I'd bought but never opened.

     Joan had warned me to touch them only with lead-lined gloves. "Don't let them sink into you. They'll trivialize you. They want mothers to think that all the deep turmoil they're going through is insignificant, when it's really the heart of the whole human predicament.

     "I mean, really--if engineers had to read this sort of condescending glop that dismissed all their silly design problems with some cutesy list of Dos and Donts, theyd be jumping off bridges instead of building them."

     There was always a grain of truth in Joan's conspiracy theories but that wasn't why my books were still in mint condition. It was because I'd been afraid to find out more than I wanted to know about childbirth. But wait--couldnt a crumb of sympathy be wedged in somewhere between the gory details and finger-pointing advice? Come on, Joan!

     Well, not only did that crumb evade me, but most of the books seemed to be talking to some generic woman with generic concerns, offering one-size-fits-all advice.

     I imagined I'd find far more comfort in asking Joan to write me about what she'd been through during her three pregnancies. She had two grown children and now a baby. I wanted to hear her singularly interesting, often wacky, and always compassionate take on things.

     Before I moved to New York, Joan and I had enjoyed a long and fruitful history of complaining to each other. Of course, some people would have said, "Stop your belly-aching! Get on with it!" But belly-aching can be the first step toward change, can't it? If our forebears had politely swallowed their umbrage, there would have been no Revolutionary War, no United States and no Constitution to protect our rights to, well, among other things, belly-ache!

     We felt that sometimes you had to muck through the bad to unearth the good. But as soon as Joan gave birth to Graham, there was no more kvetching between us. In fact, pretty soon there were no phone calls at all. She was drifting so far out into her isolated, organic world, I almost didn't know her anymore! She seemed so depressed, overwhelmed, and alienated I wondered if she belonged at the Betty Ford Clinic.

     But where did I belong I had to ask myself. Certainly not here on planet earth where a normal mother wouldn't act or think the way I did!  Despite our apparent polarities, Joan and I were both in the same boat, even if it would take us eight more years to recognize this. We were both plagued with feelings of self-doubt, shame, and alienation, as we struggled  to claim individual answers from a sea of competing expectations, pressures, guilt, fears, and "good" advice. A sea of choices unknown to our more constrained and doctrinaire ancestors. This new freedom to personalize our mothering felt both wonderful and terrifying. Especially when it came to untangling the double bind of cultural contradictions!

     If you put your child in daycare, you're abnegating your responsibility. If you keep her at home, youre depriving her of social experiences.

     If you give in to him, you'll spoil him. If you don't play with him enough, he'll grow up sociopathic.

     The Doublespeak of Big Mother.

     Self-doubt oozed from underneath every parenting choice we made, as if someone somewhere, either alive or in a book were always judging us. But most of all, we were  judging ourselves.

     Eventually, after almost a decade of estrangement, Joan and I stumbled onto our new common ground. Apparently, all this parenting turmoil erupted from the same source: that deep and pervasive arch-conflict between what we thought we should be and who we really were. Underneath our disparate external dilemmas was a deeper and more universal challenge. The parenthood/personhood gap.

     In spite of the 3,000 miles longitude and 180 degrees attitude that separated us, there was hope. We'd both taken a detour off the superhighway of convention to bounce down the potholed frontage road of individuation.          

     Could there be asylum for the parentally-incorrect?

     Maybe all of us really do want the same thing. And maybe we all want it because we are so different. Married parents, single parents, adoptive parents, grandparent guardians, older, younger, blind, gay, poor, rich, Asian, Apache, polygamist, circus folk and everything in between. Each one of us is an individual.

     It took King Arthur's most dedicated knight to discover what a woman really wants. And that was, of course, to have her own way. Maybe mothers need it most of all. But who can have her own way until she knows her own way? I know for me, it took a lot of trying on and weeding out what didn't fit before I found what did.

     Writing this book helped Joan and I see our own struggles, each other, and other people with more compassion. We hope Motherhood Confidential will help inspire other mothers to honor their own growth as much as they do their children's, and to find and embrace their own unique answers in their continuing quests for self-acceptance.