A Sham of a SAHM

Recently, I read an article. It was called "Why Mothers are Still Lonely", and you can read it here, and I related to it. Not all of it, certainly, especially not the parts about being shunned by my well-to-do society friends at cocktail parties (if you're at a cocktail party with your well-to-do society friends, how lonely can you BE, really?). But it did capture a little of the difficult-to-put-a-finger-on feeling I've been having lately.

I posted this article to Facebook, and I have to say, I was a little taken aback by the responses I got. There were supportive and helpful replies, of course, but there were also several SAHMs indignantly responding that they certainly never felt lonely, and didn't know any moms who did. There was also, of course, the inevitable comment that stay-at-homes don't know how good they have it, and being a  working mom is the only REAL hard work. I found this alienating, and it certainly didn't make me feel any less lonely.

This is clearly an area of much disagreement. I recently read an article, Dear Stay-At-Home Moms, Shut the Eff Up, and agreed with most of it. Then I read a rebuttal, here, and agreed with that, too. There's no doubt, it's a complex issue.

Here's the thing, though. I don't want to fight in the Mommy Wars. I don't want to have a big discussion of whether it's harder/better to be a working mom or a SAHM, or who should shut up or suck it up. I just want to talk about what it's like, for me. If in return, you want to tell me what it's like for you, I am all about that. I'll crack out the pink wine and we will make an afternoon of it, even if your experience is COMPLETELY opposite to mine. But don't, as some try to, refute my experience with yours, as if it negates it. Don't do that to anyone, ever, about anything, actually, because that's terrible listening.

Here, on my blog, this is my platform. So I'm going to tell you what it's like for me.

Since I can remember, there has been one job I've always wanted, one career I knew I would pursue: the lifelong calling of being a stay-at-home Mom. I pictured idyllic days of snuggling babies, helping pre-schoolers with perfectly-planned educational crafts, supervising school-age kiddos in loosely-structured imaginative play. Children would laugh blithely over my homemade chocolate chip cookies as we arranged hand-picked flowers from my perfect garden in the immaculately clean kitchen of my immaculately clean townhouse.

This ideal seemed a bit elusive, even back then, given that achieving it would require changing the majority of my personality. Short of giving myself a lobotomy with the kitchen scissors, I don't see  myself transforming into a perfectly patient, impeccably tidy, painted-nail-yoga-Mom. I'm more the barely-controlled-chaos, mac & cheese, fishing-around-in-a-laundry-basket-of-dubious-cleanliness-for-another-sock Mom.

And then a short lifetime of dreams, ambition, and education, shaped me into even less of a June Cleaver type. I'm prickly, prone to debate, a people pleaser with a limited supply of patience. Sometimes this makes me come across a little disingenuous, from time to time, I will just make nice because I'm too tired to handle a fight, debate, or awkward silence. And then I'll complain about it later, because... I'm a bad person, I guess? I don't know why, but complaining is my bread and butter. Scratch that, it's my chocolate. A good long complain at the end of the day, for me, is better than Ibuprofen. The voice of my mother that lives in my head is scolding me for this right now. "Gratitude is the key to a happy life," she's saying. "Complaining only reinforces your problems in your mind." And she's right, of course. My mother is a saint. I am not. Unless...

Saint Weenie, Patron Saint of Complainers?

Has a certain ring to it, you have to admit.

My point is, I turned out to be much more complicated than I originally planned. My vision for motherhood didn't include nights when I would burn with a writerly insomnia, or afternoons where I would pine with moony eyes for my husband and couldn't wait for my blessed offspring to GO THE EFF TO SLEEP so Mama can have a hug in peace. I didn't anticipate that I would wash the same sinkload of dirty dishes day after day after day and find, at the bottom of the sink, not enlightenment, but the kind of anger I thought I'd left behind in adolescence.

I don't know what it is. Is it the feeling of economic inadequacy? I'm not bringing any money in, and Lord knows we could use it. Not that we could afford for me to work, anyway, since preschools/ daycare in this area are ridiculously expensive and hard to get into. Maybe it's ennui, or the simple boredom of not having any adult people to talk to for the majority of my day, or maybe I need to up my Vitamin D. Betty Friedan famously called it "the problem that has no name." I get the sense from reading her that she thought the problem was a lack of ambition and hobbies/work. The French feminist Simone de Beauvoir thought "no woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children," because of the toll to the economy. A lot has changed since the 1960s, though. As Fran Drescher's character in the Oscar-winning classic "The Beautician and the Beast," says, "I've got goals! I've got dreams! I've got ambition!"

I love you Fran.

I've got a dream (and now I've got a song stuck in my head...)

I'm working towards that dream. I have concrete goals. (Step one: come up with a wickedawesomecool pen name. Step two: plan acceptance speech for world's first Nobel prize for really good YA fiction.)

I've got this blog, and a few other irons in the fire.

What I don't have is recognition. Appreciation. A sense that what I'm doing is truly valued. Prince Charming the Butthead would object here, because he really does a fantastic job of appreciating me (mostly). But I live every day with the knowledge that a large portion of the society I live in views me as a lazy freeloader. A good-for-nothing whiner who uses her baby as an excuse to get out of work. 

I always thought this wouldn't bother me, because I'd know I'm doing what's best for my baby. EEERRRH. Wrong. I don't know anything anymore. The last time I "knew" something was after I got 14 hours of sleep without a tiny creature inside/beside/on top of me. Maybe Poopy would be better off spending her days in the company of professionals who know how to teach her better than I do. Maybe she's suffering from a lack of peer socialization. Maybe if she was in preschool, she'd be babbling more/crawling/feeding herself spaghetti with a long fork by now. I don't know. Maybe our relationship would be better if I wasn't so tired and frustrated all the time. Sainted though she is, I remember spending a lot of my childhood wishing my mom wasn't so tired and frustrated. I don't know.

What I do know is that I cry almost every day. I know that I feel worthless, overworked, tired, understimulated, too needed, not wanted enough, lonely, and adrift. I am what I was raised to shun: a woman who doesn't appreciate what she has. A complainer. An ungrateful pessimist who doesn't deserve the privilege of this specific brand of servitude.

But here's the thing. I am grateful. I feel blessed, happy, excited, confident, and loved, every day. Tonight, as I soothed my daughter to sleep without nursing for maybe the second time ever, I felt triumphant. Yesterday, between boughts of soul-wracking self-doubt, I was laughing until my muscles ached because Poopy was being so sweet and funny. When I close my eyes, I see her newly-toothy grin, and it makes me smile down to my core. I have a husband who not only supports me and loves me, he likes me. And I like him. We're best friends. When I snuggle in next to him at night, it feels like Christmas.

And then the next minute he's snoring and I realize he never changed the sheets like I asked and I want to pick up a pair of dirty underwear from the floor where he left them six inches from the hamper and stuff them up one of his nostrils. And then Poopy wakes up and screams and when she nurses she bites me with that sharp new tooth and I momentarily consider selling her to the gypsies. And then the next day comes and the same 73 dishes need to be washed and my life is 90% doing housework one-handed, and sometimes I fantasize about selling myself to the gypsies.

Maybe I am ungrateful. Maybe I am a burden on the economy. I don't know. Motherhood is a series of contradictions. It's hard to pin down. It's sweat and blood and glory and a thousand tiny, seemingly meaningless repetitious tasks. It's pointillism: millions of tiny, seemingly unconnected points, that don't feel like they add up to anything when you're up close. It's only later, when you move back and see the whole picture, that it looks like anything at all. Right now I have a hand cramp and drawing dots seems monotonous. But I get the picture. It's Poopy, all grown up. It's giving her a foundation of love, trust, and knowing she is not alone. It's that smile that haunts my eyelids, all grown up and full of adult teeth. It's getting to the end of the drawing and knowing I did something worth seeing. One dot at a time.