Several months ago, my nine month old bit me on the shoulder. Hard. Having gone
through three toddlers before her, I expected a biting phase. Just not quite yet. It
was past her bedtime, she was extremely tired and fussy, and I had the nerve to try
to finish a conversation with her dad before I took her up for her nightly nursing.
When pitching and keening in my arms failed to work, she cried insistently,
progressively escalating the volume. As for me, I was bound and determined to finish
an adult conversation, dammit, and she’d just have to wait. Beside herself and
determined to be noticed, she bit me. Stunned, I looked at my husband, then very
nearly threw the child at him. I tried to stem the tears, but to no avail. “Well, if that
isn’t just fucking symbolic,” I spat out. “I try to be a self, to make adult conversation,
and I get bitten for it.” I believed then and I do now, that I might have to run the risk of
bite wounds simply to avoid losing myself completely to motherhood.
I’m tired of who I become when I drown in my family’s insatiable needs and ignore my
own.
Mothering young children is the mental, emotional and oftentimes physical equivalent
of being in a sold-out crowd for a rock concert. Everywhere you look are waving
limbs, sweaty, screaming heads, bodies encroaching on one’s personal space, and
heat. So much heat it’s hard to breathe. As the crowd presses closer, anxiety builds,
panic ensues and people flee, fearful of imagined danger. Being immersed in young
motherhood has the same claustrophobic effect on me. I can’t finish a thought or a
sentence without being interrupted. When a child asks “Why?” she doesn’t wait for
my answer before she has asked another question, cutting short the very answer she
initially requested. Attempted conversations with other adults are routinely aborted
by my kid’s relentless badgering. When I read to one child, another climbs on top of
and over me, grabbing the book, disrupting what could be a quiet, stolen
opportunity. While a toddler hangs on one hand, an infant is cradled in the other,
sucking at my nipple. Sometimes the stimulus is so overwhelming my mind simply
checks out, numbed from sheer overload. Being backed into this corner makes me
feel frazzled at my edges, perpetually out-of-breath, in a never-ending anxiety attack.
I’ve begun to refer to this hot, cornered feeling as being on the margins of my own
emotional resources.
I first recognized this panicky feeling during my first two forays into motherhood. My
children came back to back and motherhood, like marriage itself, caught me
completely off guard. It wasn’t at all what I expected, and I found myself increasingly
resentful at the intrusion that my children personified rather than wholeheartedly
delighted at the role of their mother. I would wake up early, reasoning that if I could
steal a few moments before they awoke, then I wouldn’t resent their presence so
deeply. Motherhood exhausted me both physically and emotionally: not only were my
children’s needs constant and relentless, I felt inadequate to meet the needs at the
rate that they seemed to require.
This emotionally bereft margin-living left me in a helpless space. I remember one
terrifying moment, holding my infant at the top of the stairs, my toddler at my feet. I
thought, through the haze of my exhaustion and subsequent rage at being so
constantly at everyone’s beck and call but my own, that I could easily just kick my foot
out and send her down the stairs. I immediately felt deep shame that I’d even had
such a thought. In fact, it was extremely difficult for me to even admit its presence.
But something in me knew I had to, if I were to have a snowball’s chance in hell at
never acting on such an urge.
I discovered that my thought was deeply tied to my sense of loss of control over
every area of my life. The kids invaded my space, my thoughts, my body. I felt self-
less in the most literal sense: without a self. In those early days, a brand new
marriage with two young children hard on my naïve heels, I felt powerless to imagine
motherhood as anything other than completely overwhelming. Perhaps that is why,
when I hear of horrid cases of child abuse, I no longer stand in too much judgment.
When my personal life felt so far out of my control, my children were often are the
only “thing” I felt I had control over. It was a false perception, to be sure, but not
entirely unfounded, nor isolated only to me. Looking back on that day, I don’t think
my imagination was entertaining the idea of hurting my child so much as a
misdirected attempt to take back some of the space I craved to be a self, to not be so
relentlessly needed.
A friend once told me similar story. She had buckled her toddler in her car seat and
hadn’t yet opened the garage to leave. The thought occurred to her, much as it had
to me, that she had the power to turn the car on and kill them both. She didn’t want
to, and of course she didn’t act on it, but the fact that she had the power to didn’t
escape her. Another friend once told me of living in a townhouse with a balcony, and
that it became frightening for her to live there when her infant would cry
inconsolably. She had to put her in the crib and close the door, pacing back and
forth to talk herself down, horrified at her own images of tossing the baby off the
balcony.
After scaring myself silly with violent thoughts, I realized that I needed to change.
Unfortunately, I had to come face to face with an unthinkable reality—hurting my
children—before I was willing or ready to live more realistically within my emotional
margin. I weighed the potential guilt of taking time away from the girls with the
probability of my ensuing insanity if I didn’t; suddenly “taking care of myself,” a
phrase I’d heard but failed to comprehend, went from luxury to necessity, especially
as two more daughters were added to our family, taking the chaos up several
notches. Before they came, however, I attempted to incorporate more space into my
day-to-day reality so I didn’t have to live in fear. I went to therapy, I enlisted more
help, I got temporary housekeeping. I started to meditate and I learned to let go.
The violent thoughts subsided. I’m not as much of a perfectionist. My children take
progressively more responsibility for their own care. The house stays messy and I
leave the house more often.
While the physical demands seem more manageable, I’ve yet to master the skill of
quieting the frantic, catastrophizing voice that judges me, that persistently tells me
how miserably I fall short. But I’m improving. Tuning out this accusatory voice takes
practice, and when I regress, I live in the emotional margins, tired, frazzled and fearful
that one more mistake will cause the whole thing to unravel before my eyes. I turn
back in the right direction when I hear another mother’s truth and remember that I am
not alone. Or when I remember by chance the sage advice a wise woman once gave
me, that sometimes the best we can do is “muddle through,” and that this is enough.
Recently, after having done other-work outside of mothering for the better part of a
day, I was facilitating a room clean up with my daughters. We chatted amiably about
how it’s difficult to keep one’s space neat when there’s three to a room. Attempting
empathy, I joked with them, “Well, you know, it’s hard, too for me to keep my room
clean because of someone who doesn’t pick up his clothes. But we won’t mention
any names.” My seven-year-old, chuckling, responded, “Yeah, you’re talking about
Dad, but we won’t say his name.” I laughed, delighted that she understood the
attempt at humor—a welcome deviation for my frazzled, margin-living self. A moment
passed, and then she said, “I like laughing with you, Mom.” All of a sudden, I realized
that she’d caught a glimpse of the self I am deep inside when I don’t have to be
Mommy; that she’d seen a part of me I so dearly want her to remember, to know.
The woman I am well within the margins.
A line in a song my daughter often sings gives me great pause: “Though hope is
frail, it’s hard to kill.” Hope is knowing that there are spaces both dark and light that
make up my whole, where I am my worst nightmare, and where I am my own savior,
moving beyond my nightmares to a more generous space. I still have countless days
of feeling hot, squished and cramped, when I lose my temper because, like a
pressure cooker, one can only take so much. I don’t have endless patience, and I’m
not a saint. I am a good mother who also needs space to breathe, to think, to be
alone. Remarkably, it feels really good to assert that I need some space. I feel
incredibly powerful knowing when I’m about to break, because then I can do
something about it. I am learning that my best is good enough, that being human
and embracing that fact is one of the most valuable lessons I can teach my
daughters. I am mercifully flawed in a place or two or twelve, to serve as reminders
that I am human and fallible. I am both: human and enough.
Heather Janssen thought she was doing well managing her emotional margins. Then
summer came. Now the children are everywhere, and the only space available is th
outer kind. She thinks it would be really groovy to be suspended in space, with no
gravity to muddle in. And be inside a soundproof space suit. For those interested,
she offers this sage summer advice (the only advice you'll find in get born): try to
eat as many meals as possible outside ("Hey, kids, it's a picnic!") where a hose is
available and crumbs are your compassionate provision for the insect kingdom rather
than the proverbial straw breaking the mother's back.
through three toddlers before her, I expected a biting phase. Just not quite yet. It
was past her bedtime, she was extremely tired and fussy, and I had the nerve to try
to finish a conversation with her dad before I took her up for her nightly nursing.
When pitching and keening in my arms failed to work, she cried insistently,
progressively escalating the volume. As for me, I was bound and determined to finish
an adult conversation, dammit, and she’d just have to wait. Beside herself and
determined to be noticed, she bit me. Stunned, I looked at my husband, then very
nearly threw the child at him. I tried to stem the tears, but to no avail. “Well, if that
isn’t just fucking symbolic,” I spat out. “I try to be a self, to make adult conversation,
and I get bitten for it.” I believed then and I do now, that I might have to run the risk of
bite wounds simply to avoid losing myself completely to motherhood.
I’m tired of who I become when I drown in my family’s insatiable needs and ignore my
own.
Mothering young children is the mental, emotional and oftentimes physical equivalent
of being in a sold-out crowd for a rock concert. Everywhere you look are waving
limbs, sweaty, screaming heads, bodies encroaching on one’s personal space, and
heat. So much heat it’s hard to breathe. As the crowd presses closer, anxiety builds,
panic ensues and people flee, fearful of imagined danger. Being immersed in young
motherhood has the same claustrophobic effect on me. I can’t finish a thought or a
sentence without being interrupted. When a child asks “Why?” she doesn’t wait for
my answer before she has asked another question, cutting short the very answer she
initially requested. Attempted conversations with other adults are routinely aborted
by my kid’s relentless badgering. When I read to one child, another climbs on top of
and over me, grabbing the book, disrupting what could be a quiet, stolen
opportunity. While a toddler hangs on one hand, an infant is cradled in the other,
sucking at my nipple. Sometimes the stimulus is so overwhelming my mind simply
checks out, numbed from sheer overload. Being backed into this corner makes me
feel frazzled at my edges, perpetually out-of-breath, in a never-ending anxiety attack.
I’ve begun to refer to this hot, cornered feeling as being on the margins of my own
emotional resources.
I first recognized this panicky feeling during my first two forays into motherhood. My
children came back to back and motherhood, like marriage itself, caught me
completely off guard. It wasn’t at all what I expected, and I found myself increasingly
resentful at the intrusion that my children personified rather than wholeheartedly
delighted at the role of their mother. I would wake up early, reasoning that if I could
steal a few moments before they awoke, then I wouldn’t resent their presence so
deeply. Motherhood exhausted me both physically and emotionally: not only were my
children’s needs constant and relentless, I felt inadequate to meet the needs at the
rate that they seemed to require.
This emotionally bereft margin-living left me in a helpless space. I remember one
terrifying moment, holding my infant at the top of the stairs, my toddler at my feet. I
thought, through the haze of my exhaustion and subsequent rage at being so
constantly at everyone’s beck and call but my own, that I could easily just kick my foot
out and send her down the stairs. I immediately felt deep shame that I’d even had
such a thought. In fact, it was extremely difficult for me to even admit its presence.
But something in me knew I had to, if I were to have a snowball’s chance in hell at
never acting on such an urge.
I discovered that my thought was deeply tied to my sense of loss of control over
every area of my life. The kids invaded my space, my thoughts, my body. I felt self-
less in the most literal sense: without a self. In those early days, a brand new
marriage with two young children hard on my naïve heels, I felt powerless to imagine
motherhood as anything other than completely overwhelming. Perhaps that is why,
when I hear of horrid cases of child abuse, I no longer stand in too much judgment.
When my personal life felt so far out of my control, my children were often are the
only “thing” I felt I had control over. It was a false perception, to be sure, but not
entirely unfounded, nor isolated only to me. Looking back on that day, I don’t think
my imagination was entertaining the idea of hurting my child so much as a
misdirected attempt to take back some of the space I craved to be a self, to not be so
relentlessly needed.
A friend once told me similar story. She had buckled her toddler in her car seat and
hadn’t yet opened the garage to leave. The thought occurred to her, much as it had
to me, that she had the power to turn the car on and kill them both. She didn’t want
to, and of course she didn’t act on it, but the fact that she had the power to didn’t
escape her. Another friend once told me of living in a townhouse with a balcony, and
that it became frightening for her to live there when her infant would cry
inconsolably. She had to put her in the crib and close the door, pacing back and
forth to talk herself down, horrified at her own images of tossing the baby off the
balcony.
After scaring myself silly with violent thoughts, I realized that I needed to change.
Unfortunately, I had to come face to face with an unthinkable reality—hurting my
children—before I was willing or ready to live more realistically within my emotional
margin. I weighed the potential guilt of taking time away from the girls with the
probability of my ensuing insanity if I didn’t; suddenly “taking care of myself,” a
phrase I’d heard but failed to comprehend, went from luxury to necessity, especially
as two more daughters were added to our family, taking the chaos up several
notches. Before they came, however, I attempted to incorporate more space into my
day-to-day reality so I didn’t have to live in fear. I went to therapy, I enlisted more
help, I got temporary housekeeping. I started to meditate and I learned to let go.
The violent thoughts subsided. I’m not as much of a perfectionist. My children take
progressively more responsibility for their own care. The house stays messy and I
leave the house more often.
While the physical demands seem more manageable, I’ve yet to master the skill of
quieting the frantic, catastrophizing voice that judges me, that persistently tells me
how miserably I fall short. But I’m improving. Tuning out this accusatory voice takes
practice, and when I regress, I live in the emotional margins, tired, frazzled and fearful
that one more mistake will cause the whole thing to unravel before my eyes. I turn
back in the right direction when I hear another mother’s truth and remember that I am
not alone. Or when I remember by chance the sage advice a wise woman once gave
me, that sometimes the best we can do is “muddle through,” and that this is enough.
Recently, after having done other-work outside of mothering for the better part of a
day, I was facilitating a room clean up with my daughters. We chatted amiably about
how it’s difficult to keep one’s space neat when there’s three to a room. Attempting
empathy, I joked with them, “Well, you know, it’s hard, too for me to keep my room
clean because of someone who doesn’t pick up his clothes. But we won’t mention
any names.” My seven-year-old, chuckling, responded, “Yeah, you’re talking about
Dad, but we won’t say his name.” I laughed, delighted that she understood the
attempt at humor—a welcome deviation for my frazzled, margin-living self. A moment
passed, and then she said, “I like laughing with you, Mom.” All of a sudden, I realized
that she’d caught a glimpse of the self I am deep inside when I don’t have to be
Mommy; that she’d seen a part of me I so dearly want her to remember, to know.
The woman I am well within the margins.
A line in a song my daughter often sings gives me great pause: “Though hope is
frail, it’s hard to kill.” Hope is knowing that there are spaces both dark and light that
make up my whole, where I am my worst nightmare, and where I am my own savior,
moving beyond my nightmares to a more generous space. I still have countless days
of feeling hot, squished and cramped, when I lose my temper because, like a
pressure cooker, one can only take so much. I don’t have endless patience, and I’m
not a saint. I am a good mother who also needs space to breathe, to think, to be
alone. Remarkably, it feels really good to assert that I need some space. I feel
incredibly powerful knowing when I’m about to break, because then I can do
something about it. I am learning that my best is good enough, that being human
and embracing that fact is one of the most valuable lessons I can teach my
daughters. I am mercifully flawed in a place or two or twelve, to serve as reminders
that I am human and fallible. I am both: human and enough.
Heather Janssen thought she was doing well managing her emotional margins. Then
summer came. Now the children are everywhere, and the only space available is th
outer kind. She thinks it would be really groovy to be suspended in space, with no
gravity to muddle in. And be inside a soundproof space suit. For those interested,
she offers this sage summer advice (the only advice you'll find in get born): try to
eat as many meals as possible outside ("Hey, kids, it's a picnic!") where a hose is
available and crumbs are your compassionate provision for the insect kingdom rather
than the proverbial straw breaking the mother's back.
| All rights reserved. |
| The Spaces By Heather Janssen Summer ©2007 |
