Things I Know About Motherhood

Motherhood is an enigma to me. For a long time, it was an enigma because of its distance, but now as I have entered the final year of my 20s it has come more sharply into relief. Two of my friends recently had children, one of them a newly minted mom, the other a seasoned pro of a mom, and although none of it is surprising I find myself disoriented. Where will motherhood lead them? How will they change and grow? Listening in on the zoom conversations about strollers and breastfeeding and amniotic fluid levels I realized how little I ever knew about the endeavor of motherhood.

Of course, I am led to wonder: when will I have kids? I have always asserted that I want them, but for most of my adult life, my biggest fear was to accidentally get pregnant and have to decide what to do. In the past year, that fear has subsided with the rest of my 20s, and now at 29, I am financially stable, I have a wonderful partner, I am near my family, but still young enough that fertility problems are less of a concern, all conditions I wanted to be met before I embarked on that quest. But I’m still on birth control, and if you ask me when I plan to have a child, I would say a few years from now. So what am I waiting for? Of course, there are practical considerations, but in truth, how will I know when I’m ready? What do I know about motherhood?

(1) Motherhood is obsession. My mom had me when she was 23 years old. I was her first child, and she was a natural at it. When she saw that I could put jigsaw puzzles together at 1 year old, that I could pick out Pepsi from Coke by reading handwritten labels on cups at 2, she took out all the books from the library to learn about gifted children and got me in school as soon as possible. She spent years negotiating with schools, providing test results to prove my IQ, eventually landing me in middle school at the age of 8.

I didn’t know how improbable this all was until I was older. Black girls aren’t typically perceived to be geniuses, and Black women aren’t typically successful in fighting for their needs from any institution. My mom is savvy and stubborn, and when she sets her mind on something, whether it is learning the intricate lore behind Lord of the Rings or coaching a girl to win a pageant, she latches on hard. She gets tunnel vision, she has no other topic of conversation to offer. She dives in deep and emerges an expert.

(2) Motherhood changes your life in ways you can’t imagine. I am not a mother, and I’d like to be one day. But like most privileged millennials, the idea of having children is vaguely overwhelming, something you have no idea how to be ready for emotionally. I always worry, will I lose my freedom? I hear the stories about the physical tolls of childbirth, about the countless nights of poor sleep, about how expensive child care is. And of course, you’re the steward of a new human life, what a responsibility!

On the other hand, I want to take a leap into that unknown vortex of change. As an atheist, I think of meaning as this construct that humans invented to make it easier to move through life, sure-footed and at-ease. I believe we’re hard-wired to crave meaning like sugar and sex. But the modern world is running dry on the meaning-making mechanisms that existed in the past, like Religion and Community. I feel that void often in myself. I’m hoping that when I become a mother, maybe I’ll get my fix.

(3) Your children are not your children. When I was seventeen, during the summer I spent in Cameroon, I read “The Prophet” by Khalil Gibran. To this day, the part I remember and think of most is the poem, “On Children”.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.

My mom loves to say she raised my brother and me to be free-thinkers. As I get older, I think she is right. We’ve always debated each other in my family, sparring ideas and words in a playful volley. We used to watch Real Time with Bill Maher at my paternal grandparent’s house and argue about politics with my grandfather, a Fox conservative Vietnam Vet who never voted. To this day, my mom expects me to challenge her on her ideas, our conversations become her whetting stone.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

My mom was raised Seventh-day Adventist, my grandparents and extended family still are. But our family is very accepting nonetheless. My mom and grandma were always close, and although my grandma desperately wished my mom would take me to church so our souls would be saved, she never disparaged or shunned us. My mom would have happily taken me to church if I had wanted to go, would have encouraged me to explore any religious belief system that interested me, but none ever did, and that was that.

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I started at the University of Pennsylvania at 15. I lived in Philadelphia, without any family nearby, for four years. It was everything I had wanted and needed at the time: to live independently in a real city. Not many parents would have let their 15-year-olds do that, and seeing 15-year-olds I know today, their parents are probably right not to. But I am thankful to my parents for letting me go because they knew it was right for me.

(4) Motherhood isn’t (and arguably shouldn’t be) for everyone. My friend Christine always insisted that she did not want to have children because she wouldn’t want to give anyone the burden of life. She was visiting me in Boston once, interviewing for a job. We were watching the episode of Game of Thrones where Jon Snow is brought back to life by the Red Lady’s magic. Christine said, “Why did they do that? That’s so cruel… who would want to come back to life?” Jon Snow agreed with her. I disagree, but I have to admit the world does sometimes feel like a den of insanity that could implode at any moment. Is it even ethical to bring a child into the world today? Something about it feels selfish and indulgent. Nevertheless, I want to. Life is too captivating to not continue creating it.

(5) Not all moms are created equal. My mom is the youngest of six children, so I have many cousins. I was never close to any of them, but I have always paid some attention to their lives despite the emotional distance because they are my family. Also, my mom’s family does not keep secrets, so I will inevitably find everything out in time.

I could see the disparities between our lives when I encountered them. I always felt guilty about it. Some of my cousins have endured unbelievable hardship: jail, drugs, abuse. This knowledge humbles me, gives me immense gratitude for my luck in this life to date. I always wonder what would have happened to me if I had been born to a more volatile member of my family. Would I have had the same opportunities? Would I have felt confident in my striving? Would I have lost the freedom of youth to children long before now?

(6) Motherhood is worth dreaming of. Despite all the ways I was socialized to be a good girl, I never really fantasized about being a mother when I was a kid. I remember thinking that women undergoing pregnancy may as well have been going through an alien invasion, Predator style. I did not believe pregnancy was beautiful, did not understand the desire to gush over pregnant bellies and feel the being inside kick some poor woman’s uterine wall.

When I met one of my best friends, Natalie, in college, all of this was challenged. She was a Ukrainian born nursing student who was obsessed with pregnancy. She would prance around our room with a pillow under her dress, pretending to be pregnant. Our sophomore year, she dressed up as a “pregnant Swedish milkmaid”, while I was a robot, and we went out to dance at a frat party like that. She was always hatching schemes to get pregnant in a way that would be somehow acceptable to her, like being a surrogate mother; the logic of this acceptability escaped me. Me and our friends always pushed back with common sense. As a nursing student, she could study pregnancy in yet another way and would tell us all about the importance of breastfeeding, or that it could be a good idea to eat your placenta after giving birth. Natalie truly did not want anything more in life than to be a mother to five children, something she holds fast to this day. Though I was incredulous in college, now I admire her unwaning desire.

(7) Win your battles early. I can’t recall a time I was ever truly in trouble. Neither can my mom if you asked her. She attributes it to winning disciplinary battles early, specifically to this one time when I was three or four and wouldn’t apologize, who knows what for. I was rude at this age; one time at the mall, a woman came up to me to tell me how pretty I was, and I turned to my mom and asked if she could tell the woman to stop talking to me. Whatever the infraction, she sat with me in the hallway, keeping me awake until I said the magic words. This exercise took until morning when I finally gave in and we could both sleep.

I don’t remember this of course, but I believe it because my mom would never let me quit anything. If you asked me why I didn’t misbehave (in her presence), I think it’s because, like any child, I wanted to please her, and I was well suited to do so. Why would I give up my position as the golden child, when it required mere maintenance of the status quo?

(8) Rebellion is inevitable. I was no model of angelic behavior once I got to college. I went to frat parties and drank just like any college student, I smoked weed, I did shrooms. I’d like to think I was relatively responsible about this because I never got in too deep for it to impact my performance at such a cutthroat and competitive college campus like Penn. Of course, if I heard that my teenage daughter was doing these things, I’d be appalled and concerned. In retrospect, it’s likely that someone was keeping an eye on me and telling my parents if I was ok, they have even alluded to this. Yet they have never confronted me if they ever knew, and now it is sufficiently in the past that I am willing to admit to it. I was not “Little Miss Perfect”.

This rebellion was driven by exploration and curiosity, which is why I took such pains to hide it. The rebellion that was meant to lash out, to lacerate, was cutting my hair, only just above my shoulders, which I did my first semester of college. My mom shows displeasure in such a mild-mannered and muted way. She doesn’t yell, she’s not prone to histrionics, she just whines and says a few words about how she doesn’t like it. She knows it is absurd to assert control over the hair on my head, so being a reasonable person, she can’t make such a big deal about it, but I know it hurt her. I cut my hair again last year, and she had a similar reaction. This time I felt less triumphant than I had as a teenager, but I still did it because I felt that need to establish my sovereignty, even as an adult.

(9) Your mom is your model for womanhood. One thing I always found odd about my mom was the fact that she never curses. My dad would hurl curse words into the air out of frustration, especially while driving, but my mom never even came close to uttering a bad word. It was always “heck” over “hell”, “dang” or “darn” over “damn”. During my 28th birthday, we were playing Bananagrams and she asked, embarrassed, if “fuck” counted as a valid word, without saying it aloud of course. She does this because she thinks it is un-ladylike to curse.

Perhaps this is what draws her to pageantry. She entered me in pageants as a young girl and I competed all my life, until recently. She became a pageant coach when I was 13. She loves doing makeup and hair and wardrobing, teaching girls how to move and speak with grace. But my mom is also a non-conformist and fiercely independent. On her second date with my dad, she was dressed as a Klingon for a Halloween contest at a club. She bemoans when girls she coaches only aspire to be trophy wives.

I have never been able to square this seeming contradiction, but I see it in myself. I have the comportment of a debutante, but I feel quite comfortable working with mostly men as a software engineer. I dress in a feminine way, but with a tinge of subversion, like my mom likely did at my age. Being in ballet and pageants all my life is apparent in the way I move across the room. I also unconsciously avoid cursing, unless I’m with friends or alone. I have spent a good portion of my life, unwittingly, mastering the art(ifice) of seeming like “Little Miss Perfect”. I only wish I didn’t have to keep it up, but again: why would I give up my position when it requires mere maintenance of the status quo?

(10) There is always something your child will vow to do differently. Since my mom is a pageant coach, and I have a lot of pageant experience, and she values my opinions, she often enlists my help with her coaching. Sometimes I dread it, but almost always when I show up, I am inspired by how my mom works with her clients. It also makes me appreciate her when I can see a diverse set of mother/daughter dynamics playing out in the wild.

Those who did not know us well while I was growing up probably believed that my mother had put an inordinate amount of pressure on me to be successful. I know this is false by seeing her clients. Moms no more than ten years older than myself will constantly prick their daughters with corrections and commands. They will openly compare their daughters with another girl, implying that they are not as good and should try to be more like them. I can see this haunting their futures from here, and I’m grateful that my mom didn’t do this to me.

Of course, there were high expectations placed on me, and I still feel their weight, although it is all self-imposed now. My mom didn’t let us quit anything until the commitment was over, or if it was an ongoing commitment, when all options were exhausted for staying. My parents certainly embody this - they are committers, and so am I. For the most part, this has served me well, and I will pass down that ethos to my children. There was only one thing I wish I didn’t have to work so hard to quit, the thing that I knew meant so much to my mom, and that was competing in pageants. I wonder what will capture my heart so much that I would rather my child continue with it grudgingly instead of letting them go?

(11) Your mom should be your biggest fan. I realize this isn’t true for everyone, but it is for me, and sometimes it’s a bit extra. I spent much of my life in the spotlight, between dance, choir, pageantry, and random run-ins with the media for being a girl genius (as they say). As my dad likes to joke, my mom is my manager. She, above all, relished any opportunity that came my way, and every time she was more enthusiastic about it than I was, especially if it focused on my intellectual accomplishments.

To this day, she runs a Facebook page named after me, implying that I am a “Motivational Speaker”. In contrast, my personal account has the highest privacy settings and has been since hundreds of people sent me friend requests after a national story broke about me entering college at 15. I am embarrassed by its existence, but I have trouble demanding that it be taken down.

First of all, I have benefited by having this page, or at least it hasn’t harmed me. Occasionally there is an opportunity for me to speak publicly or do an interview, and I guess that makes me a “Motivational Speaker”.

Second of all, I don’t want to take that away from my mom. I have always viewed my academic accomplishments as hers; I just showed up wherever she sent me. My mom’s retort is that I still had to do the work, and that others have tried and failed to skip multiple grades. But what’s harder: convincing an American school system as a black woman to skip your daughter three grades, or going to a school teaching you material that you are capable of handling because you have a great support system? I don’t plan to take that page away from my mom, she has earned the right to it.

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What have I learned from compiling this list? I suspect I’m closer to being “ready” than I think, though I haven’t changed my mind about waiting a few years. I want to be a mom because I have such an excellent mom, but I fear that I would fall short of excellence. Do I have the gumption to do what she did for me? Do I have the wisdom and self-restraint to avoid the pitfalls I know of and those I don’t? Maybe not, but neither did my mom at 23. And what of my friends who do or will have children, how do they know when they’re ready for it? I can’t answer that, but I think my friends will be excellent moms, and I’m excited to see them do it.

For most things I do, I find that putting excess pressure on myself becomes counterproductive very quickly. When I just do what I can, without punishing myself for what I should have done, I am able to do more. My mom always said that her process of raising us was to follow her intuition and listen to us, then act. When the time comes, I’ll follow my mom’s lead: get to know the familiar stranger that I introduced to the world, and guide her with unconditional love.