Six kids and a minivan
True story: I once wanted six kids and a house big enough to hold them all. I was young and in love and I needed to surround myself with friends, with relatives, with extensions of myself who might love me or accept me. I was young enough to not worry about the fuck-ups and the way we mold our children accidentally or the way we try to mold them one way and they come out another. I thought it would be easy, because I was a child and I knew what children needed and I often sat in judgment of my own mother, who was clearly clueless about it, not self-sacrificing enough and too angry and sometimes barely there.
I was going to have these children with a man who grew up in a house of kids, was the youngest in a large family, and his extended family was big, too, with these fabulous dinners for twenty or more in his parents’ expansive dining room. You could get lost in the crowd at those dinners and you could observe at those dinners and everybody drank and sometimes I wish I had been there earlier for the really crazy family parties, when all the kids were living at home and the mom (a young mom, she started at 18) was flush with alcohol and a bit of anger, just enough to make it interesting.
But it was not meant to be. Here I am with the one kid and I love the one kid and I am trying my best to do my best. But I worry about family, about the comforting (and sometimes manipulative) group, the acceptance (or sometimes rejection) of many, the safety in numbers. When I was younger, I was willing to take on someone else’s family, at least for a time, but my own? No way. Kindly people, yes, but with weak arms, weak constitutions, so that when I needed them they couldn’t hold me up or they didn’t even see that I needed holding. Who wants to be supported by that, by nothingness? So I withdrew, from them, from the larger world.
This is not what I want for the boy, whose extended family is even smaller than mine was. In the therapist’s office yesterday, I talked about that a bit, about friends that become family, about my own connection reticence. I don’t want the boy to learn to be afraid. I don’t want him to make his slow to warmness into a fetish. I want his family, his small family, to be a comfort no matter how we arrange our lives.
Part of this is just being there for him, being supportive and firm, with boundaries and warmth and connection. OK. I can do that. I am, and the therapy is helping. The other part is living the sort of life that I would like him to live, to being an example of living life in the world. With other people. This is much, much harder, but it is doable, right?
I enter the world with my pained heart, with my eyes open. I don’t have to hand over my heart, but I do have to risk it sometimes, or understand that the risks are small, that I am me and no one can take that away, that my heart is mine no matter what. It’s been with me through the worst. It comforts me when it can, purrs to me at night and tells me that despite all my flaws, the occasional awkwardness, the generosity that I need to regain, the messes I’ve made, despite all of it, I am ok. I’ve got something to offer, just like the boy, and I can stand on my own two feet.
From the prompt "Motherhood."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by D Sharon Pruitt.