Motherhood is learned patience.
For negotiating each moment with small, unwilling beings, you are a surfer waiting for the wave of capitulation, the majority of your time spent stalled on still water, watching the horizon of your child’s mood with hope.
You quickly pass through anger, frustration, self-pity and then you settle in. You have no choice. You lay down on that surf board and breathe. You stare at the sky. You think, “Who the fuck cares if we’re late for summer camp?”
Then there it is. The wave. And things are in motion once more.
Day after day, this is our practice and almost against our very will, patience is slowly born out to mothers. But if motherhood teaches us patience with our children, by that same token, patience with ourselves is diminished.
In those first few years – the Baby Years, the Thick Of It, the Bermuda Triangle of Me Years – we are taught that we can have it all. Children AND! Family AND! Right now I have no time for AND but I’m consumed with impatience for it. I can taste it as I fall asleep at night, running for it the moment the babysitter walks through the door, never quite attaining it, mourning the near-miss, always the near-miss.
Impatience, of course, is a breeding ground for jealousies and resentments: she has AND why don’t I have AND? She looks so great with AND – would I look that good with AND? Why does AND pass my by? Will I ever have AND? The ultimate fear: maybe I don’t have enough talent for AND.
Of course while self-patience seems impossible, guilt is ever at the ready: ”Be in the moment! Enjoy this time! It passes all too quickly! You will look back with such longing!” True. And ever the nostalgic, I look back with longing at a great many things already. Except 8th grade. And culottes.
As with my toddler, I work myself up into such a state – calling my mother and saying maudlin things like, “What happens to a dream deferred?” – that the only recourse is surrender. Let it all go. If only for an hour. A day. My mother says, “Be the stone and let it wash over you.” Aside from the fact that I hate that meditational shit, I am calmed by the very phrase.
And so I’m the Storm and the Calm, the Storm and the Calm, running myself ragged to write three sentences, beating myself up and bringing myself down until I’m the lowest and that’s when the Calm hits.
Then I’m lying on the surfboard, just breathing and thinking, “Who the fuck cares if I have the muscle tone of James Gandolfini? If my writing is not where it should be?” It’s all washing over me. Allow for the possibility that dreams deferred can be long-planned realities. Breathe. Surrender. Wait for the wave of movement to carry you forward.
Suddenly, your son throws his unfinished puzzle across the room, weeping and indignant.
“Patience,” you tell him.
Patience, you tell yourself.
I’m going to try to heap on some faux-Buddhism now. Let’s call it Buddhizzle. I lifted it from Melody Beattie and Pema Chodron and Deb Rox and some therapists and of course Creflo Dollar.
You are exactly where you’re supposed to be. It’s true.
It’s all happening (it is. already!)
Trust Your Path.
Stop striving and forcing outcomes, just do your work/your part, and leave room for something greater.
And be gentle with yourself. Like I haven’t been at all the past week with me, but am returning there. Let’s both let go and unclench and meet at the swim-up bar.
Okay I’ll stop now before I start singing you Roll With It Baby.
Oh, I gave you another award. I know I already gave you one…but you’re just so good….;) Come & get it!
Brilliant. It’s the “AND” that’s the real bitch in the whole operation, all the worse b/c it comes from somewhere inside (along with, at least in my head, a little voice that says “why are you happy with what you’ve got? a job, reasonable-ish partner, healthy kids, health insurance…and you’re gobbling after AND?”). I tell myself it’s a long life; I tell myself that writers can write forever and who cares if that girl you knew in grad school just published her THIRD NOVEL THATS FINE YOU’RE NOT JEALOUS NO YOU’RE HAPPY FOR HER…breathe breathe breathe. Motherhood is indeed a lesson in patience, you’re so right. I just wish I would hurry up and learn how it’s done.
You’re doing great if you can find the time and calm to write such a beautiful post!
That was so beautifully written! It is tough some times to be patient, but in retrospect, the wait is not really that long. You’ll see.
Dreams and talent as big as yours are not so easily dismissed. You’re doing great…keep going, one step at a time!
This was beautiful. And as one who is now safely on shore with a great 12 year old boy… hang on to the surf board. It gets better. In fact it gets great.
All moms know this.
It’s hard.
Know that I’m rooting for you on the shore ready to throw in a life saver thingy…what do they call those? I really don’t know.
This is beautiful. Keep floating on that board.
All I know is you had me at “the muscle tone of James Gandolfini”
Also, you surf?
Patience… that elusive, necessary tool of mommas world wide.
Hey, girl, I am now beginning to get it. I got it from time to time but now it looks like a lock. A couple of years ago, when I was a casually observant kid, the very few women who seemed to indicate a life outside the immediate family were considered “different.” Somehow odd. Some were actors, some were wealthy, a few came out of WW II with a couple of ideas, and, according to my mom, all were alcholic. Know what I’m saying? But now, whoa, expectations are OK, and boy-types better be on that train because it has left the station.
There’s a proverb that says something like, “Hope deferred makes the heart go sick, but a longing fulfilled is the tree of life.” A friend spoke of it when she had been single for so long (now happily married with 2 kids).
It’s hard. I’m working on contentment myself these days.
I am in an epic battle with the AND! I have four kids ages 2-9, and I dream, dream, dream of achieving my goals as a writer. But where is the time? I have an idea and it flakes away like dead skin, because I simply can’t nourish it at that aha! moment. Never mind the marketing and technology stuff I should have learned ages ago.
My poor husband, instead of my mother, has had to deal with my emotion, my feelings of defeat. But what can I do? It’s not an option to give up the fight in motherhood or writing. That’s why this post resonated so powerfully with me. Your website and your writing have inspired me, because to me it appears you are doing so many things right.
Oh my dear, how beautifully expressed. And I swear, promise, pledge, that it gets better. Have faith, you woman of talent (one AND you never have to worry about).
The AND and me… we have a rocky relationschip.
I do believe that it would be easier to draw blood from a stone than to teach a toddler patience.
And teaching a toddler patience would, likely, be easier than me accepting that shit happens around me.
My kids are older now, 11 and almost 14….it unfortunately never gets easier. Just as they age and you age, the level of patience that you need to have changes!!
Chalupa.
Chalupa.
I wish I were close enough to come running over and hold your hand.
Listen, beautiful woman, listen:
My boy is now 17.
Leaving for college next year.
I’m barely making it with the thought of it.
And when he’s gone? I’ll be wondering why I wished for all that time.
To do, what? What, exactly.
Miss him and walk around with a lump the size of a peach pit in my throat every time I pass his room?
You are in heaven right now.
HEAVEN.
“The ultimate fear: maybe I don’t have enough talent for AND.”
As for this: never say this. Never think this.
I can do this for you today: cross that one off your list.
You have enough talent, Chalupa.
You have such talent that I’m standing down here looking up at you ten stories over me.
Cross that one off your list of worries, girl.
The rest you’ve got written there: they’re real.
I loved it – wish I had access to your posts when the kids were little.
I’ve been away from the blog world for over a week.
And this? Makes coming back worth every minute…
Truly.
I’m not sure that even made sense.
What I meant was “this post is good.”
There. I said it.
Awesome post. Just what I needed today, too. Beautifully expressed. Why do we all do this to ourselves? At least through blogging we know we have company in the crazyboat. Once again, The Empress steers me to where I need to go.
This is just so beautifully written. I don’t know where you want to be with your writing, but I think you’re already there. How perfectly you’ve captured what it is to be a mother striving for patience and struggling with those inner voices that tell us there should be more, always more. When really, we’re in it – day after day – we’re in it and living it, it’s all happening and really it’s enough. And that we’ll look back all too soon and realize it. I needed to be reminded of all these things – especially during summer vacation! Thank you for this amazing reminder!
James Gandolfini may not have much muscle tone, but that fucker is badass.
You could do worse, is all I’m saying.
Waiting for you on the other side!
Brilliantly described. I get SO worked up over the simplest, stupidest things.
I have spent a huge chunk of my life being impatient over inconsequential things.
I’m done. I will be the stone.
Yeah. Just yeah.
Also, I want to ask all the buddhists: this stone thing? at what point do we become sand and wash away?
Sorry, that wasn’t helpful.
And also, I’m with Ann… lets meet at the swim up bar.
I just moved in with Kiefer a month ago…I’m totally working on my patience and stone skills. Solidarity, sister!
Beautiful.
Patience is the hard part, but there’s a deliciousness in the wait…
Pearl
Oh dear Tarja whom I’ve never even met. I want to come running with Alexandra and hold your other hand. Your honesty and your writing are delicious.
Reading this post takes me back — right back– to the days when I thought I’d die of frustration, rage and disappointment, to the confusion, the thwarted desire to be heard and recognized, the poisonous envy and jealousy. I know I thought I felt worse than that Edvard Munch painting The Scream.
The best advice I ever got was to try to do (something you’re already doing) ONE THING a day. Even if it’s only looking around and seeing sunlight shining through an old glass doorknob … (That may have been the only time I ever followed the advice…but the 10 second observation really stuck…) Except for the free-writing… which I did when I was ready to murder or off myself, when I could squeeze it in.
You’ve probably already Had it with the Artist’s Way but if you keep up with the free writing, it produces specific details of the (horror and the joy of) motherhood which will definitely serve you in years to come.
And humbling as this is to admit: what I had to say as an artist was not worth that much pre-motherhood. It’s shocking to realize that I actually needed exactly this experience of being dragged (by motherhood) out into the world, up to and beyond my limits emotionally, physically and spiritually. Every aspect of it. The exhaustion, the mind-numbing playground days, the excruciating parent-teacher (or worse: Guidance Counselor) conferences, the horrible playdates.
The whole surrender thing is so horrible and so fruitful. And for me, it was EXACTly what I needed to chip away at my armor and make a hole for the work to flow out.
Can’t wait to read the next chapter. You’re obviously already doing your life’s work and making your name.
As the mom of two teenagers I have to echo what some of the others have said, you will get through and will look back with joy on the toddler years (especially with teenagers). That doesnt mean this isn’t a maddening and crazy time in your life, because it is. Every phase of mothering is. But life without it once you’re there, is unimaginable.
Thank you for the great post.