Denial Is In the Details

The women in my family are obsessed with cleanliness. Their homes always seem spotless with everything in its place. No dishes left on the counter, no spots on the furniture or the floors, no animal hair waiting to attach itself to your pants. Everything appears to be under control.

My home has never been like this, and is even less like this now that I have two small children. According to what appears to be the family standard, I generally live in filth. And I'm not saying someone needs to call Child Protective Services or anything. I just tend to let a lot of things go that others in my family wouldn't dream of releasing.

I'm not free of the obsession, though. I'm hyper-aware of this state of things, and often when I am feeling out of control about some other aspect of my life, I obsessively clean. And it isn't pretty to behold. My partner is greatly disturbed by my manic cleaning. He knows it is a warning sign of some other emotional upset that I am not dealing with in the moment. For me, Denial leads to Detailing. The worst moments of this were immediately following the birth of our daughter 4 1/2 months ago. I was supposed to be recovering from birth, nesting with my new family, but every day around 5 pm I would go berserk. I would hop out of bed and start randomly roaming the house, picking up everything in sight. He would stop me. I would flip out. I had to clean or die! People were coming by to see the baby, and they were going to see that I was a failure already as a mother of two, unable to handle the normal functions of a "homemaker."

I've had many conversations with him - and myself - about just what the expectations are for a Stay-at-Home-Mom. Finding myself in this very traditional role has been extremely confusing. On the one hand, I am so grateful that I can care for my children myself. I cannot personally imagine working full time, not being their primary caretaker. But, on the other hand, I feel guilt that their father has to go out into the world and make enough money for all of us, when he would prefer to be home and working on his very promising writing career.

Add in another hand, and I'll tell you about the shame and dread I feel when I tell a woman of my mother's generation (the founders of Feminism) that I have chosen to stay at home, to be what they called a housewife.  The ones who know me well think I'm wasting my talent/intelligence/education - this appears to be my mother's view. The ones who've just met me assume I don't have the above-mentioned talent/intelligence/education. I don't know which is worse.

Which brings me back to cleanliness. Upon reflection, I think my refusal to keep things clean may be an insistence that "I'm not one of those stay at home mothers. I'm free to live any way I see fit, even under this towering mountain of laundry." But I think all that becomes is Shame masquerading as Defiance. And, as the ants partying in my kitchen can tell you, it has not been serving me.

So, over the past week or so, as I've been actively letting go of the various flavors of my shame, I've decided to become better at this. Better at keeping house, less ashamed of a possible genetic mutation that makes me a wee bit obsessive about it.  And, while it's not House Beautiful (yet,) there is an order and baseline neatness around here that is allowing me the mental clarity to do other things - like writing a soon-to-be-award-winning blog.

If you're looking for some advice on cleaning, these sites were a good jumping-off point for me:

http://www.mothering.com/discussions/forumdisplay.php?f=311
http://www.flylady.net/pages/begin_babysteps.asp
http://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/cleaning/daily-cleaning-checklist-00000000000953/index.html#password_action=confirm
 

Finally Shameless After All These Years (sort of)

I'm thinking quite a bit about "Just remember to take care of yourself" this week.

Most days that means remembering to eat enough. A couple times a month, lately, it's deciding to go out for a Mommy-only activity. Once or twice a year it means I get a massage. But, on a technicality, that doesn't count as taking care of myself. Someone else almost always insists on it. Mommy Martyrdom strikes again.

What did "take care of yourself" used to mean? Regular haircuts, buying new makeup, facials, massages, shaving my legs, sleep, sleep and more sleep. Most of this has gone completely out the window now that I'm a mom. Part of it is just not having the time anymore to make grooming a priority. Part of it is having a partner who sees the make-up and hair and all the rest as an armor I used to wear, a mask that kept him from truly seeing Me.

Most of the time I'm ok with the crunchy natural girl I've become. I can shave my legs a couple times a month for that special night out. I wear my hair long so I don't have to worry about haircuts quite so much, and it's often easier to just let it dry and put it in braids or a ponytail. And I'm finally starting to realize that I look a lot better without makeup, after years of hiding my so-called imperfections behind a layer of foundation.

Most of the time I've been ok with it. This week has not been one of those times. Tonight I am coming face to face with my past masked self in the form of an event for my 20 year high school reunion. I've kind of lost my mind about the whole thing, too. I slept all night with stinky henna in my hair to cover up the abundant gray. I've been wondering if I'll have enough time to shower, shave, pluck, make up and find just the right thing to wear. I have even considered leaving my glasses at home, all in the name of vanity. And fear.

And shame.
What?! I'm striving for Shameless Imperfection here, aren't I?
So, fuck it.  I'm 38, not 18, and there's no reason to be ashamed of anything that has changed (inside or out) in twenty years. Here I come Class of 1990. My hair won't be as high, but my sense of self-worth will be through the roof!

1990 in all my school spirit glory.

                                                           2010 in wisdom and love.

Yep, Motherhood is Effin Hard!

Have you seen Sex and the City 2 yet?
What a horrible way to start my very first blog posting...oh well, I said I'd live shamelessly, and that's what I'm gonna do!

So, seriously, have you seen it? More specifically have you seen the motherhood scene? If you have, you know the scene I'm talking about. The scene where Miranda and Charlotte sit down over a couple of double cosmos (I assume) and talk with gut-wrenching honesty about how hard it is to be a mother.

I cried through the entire scene - big, wet, messy tears with snot coming out of my nose. "Finally!" I thought, "Finally someone is saying it! And in a mainstream movie that a lot of women will go see, no less! Yay!" Miranda and Charlotte, with much help from some Grey Goose vodka (ok, I don't know that part, but that's what I would have if I wasn't breastfeeding) say right out loud that, no matter how much you love your kids, sometimes being a mother really, really REALLY sucks!
Sometimes you even - gasp! - hate it.

Why is it no one prepares us for this? What if, at every baby shower, there came a point when all the shades were drawn, the childless were ushered from the room, a few black candles were lit, and the pregnant guest of honor was initiated into The Truth of Motherhood? There you sit with your mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, and friends and they all, one-by-one, tell you their war stories, their moments of chaos, their ugly and shameful secrets. Now that's a useful baby shower activity!

But that doesn't happen. You might have that one family friend - you know the one - who winks and says "Well, good luck!" Or the cousin who tells you how horrible natural childbirth was for her, but tells you nothing about what happens A.B. (After Baby, afterbirth is something different.) Or someone, a distant aunt maybe, tells you in the only acceptable code we have: "Just remember to take care of yourself first." And you sit there in your blissed-out hormone cocktail of pregnancy and think "Take care of myself? They have to tell me that? How hard can that be?"

Let me tell ya - pretty effin' hard! And no one wants to admit it. Mothers want to seem like they have it all together. If you, as a mother, ask a new mother how it's going, chances are she will say "Good!" without even thinking about it. From prenatal yoga class to library storyhour to mom and baby playgroups to online forums, we all seem out to prove that we are Good Moms. No, not good enough, we want to be Perfect Mothers. And I've had enough of it. So I am here to declare "I am a Shamelessly Imperfect Mother!" I'm done apologizing and I'm done competing for the Perfect Mother tiara. My two year old son would probably wear it in the bathtub and ruin it anyway.