For the longest time, my parents had begged me for grandchildren. The first one pleased them greatly, but the announcement nine months later that a second one was on its way made my mother blanch.
My husband and I were sitting on their porch. My dad hopped up to embrace me, but from under his arms I saw the pall of Mom’s face. “I’m worried for you,” she admitted, with a little laugh.
I bristled. I had juggled my first baby and a New York City job; I could handle hard. Now, I’d given that job up to be a stay-at-home-mother in North Carolina, a few hours down the road from my parents’ home. “I’ll be fine,” I said.
But two was different from one. They tell you this — your relatives, the internet, strangers — but it goes way over your head, the way teenagers can’t hear career advice. Here was the thing I hadn’t understood: When one of them didn’t need me, the other one would. I would always be needed.
After the second baby came, I drove the two of them back to my parents’ house for long visits, desperate for help, but it was no different from at home: They were hungry but threw food on the floor, they were tired but couldn’t nap, they were upset but inconsolable, they were constipated and had infections, they banged their heads purposefully on the hardwood floors and smeared yogurt through their clean hair. There was no day care, no night nurse, no weekend. I could get them weeks, months, older. They still needed me.
In the few quiet moments, sometimes an hour a day when the children’s naps overlapped and no one needed me, I went to my parents’ guest room and lay on top of the bedspread. The beds in my mother’s house were covered in thin white blankets, crocheted by great-great-grandmothers; my husband was always whining about missing his comforter. Lying there, I would rub my fingers across the little pills that made up designs and look out the window. I could see the huge sky above the golf course next door and the colors that passed through it before sunset. Sometimes I came close to sleep, but better were the stretches of time that I was conscious but not needed, awake but not being woken, touching parts of the bedding but not being touched. I was a kid again, a person, a mind.
My lying on the bedspread was a great disappointment to everyone. “Go take a golf lesson!” My parents said this as a command but looked at me beseechingly as I lumbered up the stairs toward the bed. My husband would ask how I’d “spent the nap,” as if it were money, and I would have to confess that I’d wasted it on mindless, sleepless rest.
A year or two passed. My mother became the president of a volunteer organization. She competed at bridge, excelled in the Ladies Nine-Hole League, became a deacon at her church. I tried to be supportive when she called to update me, but I was usually holding one or two humans in distress and it was hard to keep up.
“I read a book you might like,” she tried, on speaker phone while I was changing a poop explosion that had ruined my daughter’s best dress. I wanted to want the book, but I didn’t want it. I wanted her to be O.K. with me not reading the book.
I was not depressed. But people were careful with me, stepping around me like a bomb that might go off. At his own breaking point, my husband would say, “You need to go back to work.” Sometimes he said it icily, his best weapon in a bedtime fight. But it was worse when he said it gently, cautiously, in the middle of the afternoon, like a stranger asking another stranger to back away from a ledge.
When we’d agreed I’d stay home for a while, we had thought it would be special to have the babies learn love and language from their own flesh and blood, but now I felt mean and mute. We had agreed it would be wonderful to have kids close together (they’ll be friends!) but we hadn’t considered our own friendship, which was now rapidly fraying.
The truth was, becoming a stay-at-home mother was not unlike experiencing the death of a loved one, but the loved one I’d lost was myself. I couldn’t believe that the outside world still spun — that people kept watching the news and shopping at Banana Republic and sitting at little high-top tables in takeout salad places. Swivel chairs and miniature bottled waters on a boardroom table were just relics of a play world that was so much smaller than my new, raw, unfiltered one. The “working world” was a toy version of mine, a dollhouse in which some larger hand was there to place everything in order, clean up messes, cover bases. Anyone in it was a cheater. And I was a self-satisfied, miserable martyr. I was not likable. Least of all to myself.
“You could afford a nanny, right?” I was on the phone with a friend in New York. She was drinking coffee from a paper cup. Going to an exercise class.
Yes, and for that I was very lucky, but how could I describe it? “It’s like I’m taking a sabbatical. A sabbatical in which I learn what it’s like to be a human mother.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I want to really know that one when my time comes.”
Hearing the taxis in the background reminded me of the years I’d spent in an office building. There were meetings to prepare for and banquets that didn’t end until after midnight in hotel ballrooms. But I had been single, and the weekends stretched out before me like marathons. One Saturday afternoon, when I was 27 and feeling bored after a boozy brunch with friends and a walk around the reservoir with my headphones in, I called my older brother one too many times to talk. He said, “You’re always alone, aren’t you?”
Now I was needed. I was never alone. Maybe there would come another stage of my life, some magical equilibrium in which I would be sometimes needed and sometimes not. In which I would laugh with my husband in a dimly lit restaurant and chat about books with my sweet mother. Maybe the old me was not really dead, just changed, and the reward of my choice to stay home would not be better-off kids but a better-off self. I would return from my sabbatical with a broader perspective and a bigger heart, knowing something of the world that I hadn’t before.
In the meantime, when the babies slept, I lay on the bedspread. I didn’t move until I had to.
Caroline Hamilton Langerman is a writer in Charlotte, N.C.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | I Didn’t Become a Stay-at-Home Mother for My Kids. I Did It for Me.
Opinion | I Didn’t Become a Stay-at-Home Mother for My Kids. I Did It for Me.
For the longest time, my parents had begged me for grandchildren. The first one pleased them greatly, but the announcement nine months later that a second one was on its way made my mother blanch.
My husband and I were sitting on their porch. My dad hopped up to embrace me, but from under his arms I saw the pall of Mom’s face. “I’m worried for you,” she admitted, with a little laugh.
I bristled. I had juggled my first baby and a New York City job; I could handle hard. Now, I’d given that job up to be a stay-at-home-mother in North Carolina, a few hours down the road from my parents’ home. “I’ll be fine,” I said.
But two was different from one. They tell you this — your relatives, the internet, strangers — but it goes way over your head, the way teenagers can’t hear career advice. Here was the thing I hadn’t understood: When one of them didn’t need me, the other one would. I would always be needed.
After the second baby came, I drove the two of them back to my parents’ house for long visits, desperate for help, but it was no different from at home: They were hungry but threw food on the floor, they were tired but couldn’t nap, they were upset but inconsolable, they were constipated and had infections, they banged their heads purposefully on the hardwood floors and smeared yogurt through their clean hair. There was no day care, no night nurse, no weekend. I could get them weeks, months, older. They still needed me.
In the few quiet moments, sometimes an hour a day when the children’s naps overlapped and no one needed me, I went to my parents’ guest room and lay on top of the bedspread. The beds in my mother’s house were covered in thin white blankets, crocheted by great-great-grandmothers; my husband was always whining about missing his comforter. Lying there, I would rub my fingers across the little pills that made up designs and look out the window. I could see the huge sky above the golf course next door and the colors that passed through it before sunset. Sometimes I came close to sleep, but better were the stretches of time that I was conscious but not needed, awake but not being woken, touching parts of the bedding but not being touched. I was a kid again, a person, a mind.
My lying on the bedspread was a great disappointment to everyone. “Go take a golf lesson!” My parents said this as a command but looked at me beseechingly as I lumbered up the stairs toward the bed. My husband would ask how I’d “spent the nap,” as if it were money, and I would have to confess that I’d wasted it on mindless, sleepless rest.
A year or two passed. My mother became the president of a volunteer organization. She competed at bridge, excelled in the Ladies Nine-Hole League, became a deacon at her church. I tried to be supportive when she called to update me, but I was usually holding one or two humans in distress and it was hard to keep up.
“I read a book you might like,” she tried, on speaker phone while I was changing a poop explosion that had ruined my daughter’s best dress. I wanted to want the book, but I didn’t want it. I wanted her to be O.K. with me not reading the book.
I was not depressed. But people were careful with me, stepping around me like a bomb that might go off. At his own breaking point, my husband would say, “You need to go back to work.” Sometimes he said it icily, his best weapon in a bedtime fight. But it was worse when he said it gently, cautiously, in the middle of the afternoon, like a stranger asking another stranger to back away from a ledge.
When we’d agreed I’d stay home for a while, we had thought it would be special to have the babies learn love and language from their own flesh and blood, but now I felt mean and mute. We had agreed it would be wonderful to have kids close together (they’ll be friends!) but we hadn’t considered our own friendship, which was now rapidly fraying.
The truth was, becoming a stay-at-home mother was not unlike experiencing the death of a loved one, but the loved one I’d lost was myself. I couldn’t believe that the outside world still spun — that people kept watching the news and shopping at Banana Republic and sitting at little high-top tables in takeout salad places. Swivel chairs and miniature bottled waters on a boardroom table were just relics of a play world that was so much smaller than my new, raw, unfiltered one. The “working world” was a toy version of mine, a dollhouse in which some larger hand was there to place everything in order, clean up messes, cover bases. Anyone in it was a cheater. And I was a self-satisfied, miserable martyr. I was not likable. Least of all to myself.
“You could afford a nanny, right?” I was on the phone with a friend in New York. She was drinking coffee from a paper cup. Going to an exercise class.
Yes, and for that I was very lucky, but how could I describe it? “It’s like I’m taking a sabbatical. A sabbatical in which I learn what it’s like to be a human mother.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I want to really know that one when my time comes.”
Hearing the taxis in the background reminded me of the years I’d spent in an office building. There were meetings to prepare for and banquets that didn’t end until after midnight in hotel ballrooms. But I had been single, and the weekends stretched out before me like marathons. One Saturday afternoon, when I was 27 and feeling bored after a boozy brunch with friends and a walk around the reservoir with my headphones in, I called my older brother one too many times to talk. He said, “You’re always alone, aren’t you?”
Now I was needed. I was never alone. Maybe there would come another stage of my life, some magical equilibrium in which I would be sometimes needed and sometimes not. In which I would laugh with my husband in a dimly lit restaurant and chat about books with my sweet mother. Maybe the old me was not really dead, just changed, and the reward of my choice to stay home would not be better-off kids but a better-off self. I would return from my sabbatical with a broader perspective and a bigger heart, knowing something of the world that I hadn’t before.
In the meantime, when the babies slept, I lay on the bedspread. I didn’t move until I had to.
Caroline Hamilton Langerman is a writer in Charlotte, N.C.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article