Being a liberal, fulltime student and part time worker and
pregnant woman has me in a bit of a conundrum. I want to love being pregnant
and hold onto my feminist ideals. I want to be able to love my career and love
being pregnant. I want to have this child but I don’t want this child to become
the best thing in my life. I want it to be ONE of the best things but not the
best things.
I don’t want to love my kid more than my husband. I don’t
want to love this kid more than my own joys of life- like studying ancient
language and how culture influences relgion. I mean, my kid will be the cutest
on the planet and will challenge me in some amazing new ways but that kid will
never be an ancient foreign language.
So anyway, I’ve been dealing with a huge identity crisis as
my bump extends. My culture tells
me my kid should be the most important thing in my life, possibly, that my
child should be my biggest accomplishment. Yet, for me, I don’t want it to be.
I want to get a Phd and teach and be a badass academic and do some pretty
amazing stuff- but I don’t want my child or children to become my focus. I want
them to be IN focus but not my focus.
It’s hard to explain because I feel like I’ll have this
onslaught of crazy judgment from other mothers out there. Or other mothers who
do make their children their focus will feel judged by me. But I don’t judge
them- I get why kids become the focus and why this is all-important for some.
That’s all well and good and awesome but it is not my jam.
I like being pregnant now that I don’t have insane hormones
and bladder infections. I kind of love being a woman and creating life and I’m
really looking forward to homebirth and being a badass holistic mama. It’s
gonna be incredible. I’m also glad that I’ll have the summer off with the
behbeh and that I’m part of an astounding community where a small nanny share
is possible and I can breastfeed the kid as long as I want or need to. I’m also
glad that after three months I can go back to school and study and be close to
baby and balance all my foci. I
want to concentrate on my relationship with my husband, my new role as a mom
and my joy of academics.
When I look back at the last three years I seem so effin’
domesticated. We bought a house,
got married and got knocked up (one each year for the last three) and it
overwhelms my liberal sensibilities. I have evened the score by moving my
husband and myself out of the country, renting out the house, starting graduate
school and convincing my crunchy redneck of a man that a homebirth would be a
good idea.
Sometimes I find myself resisting being all googly over baby
clothes and being home with baby for a few months, as though enjoying these
things means I’m less of a liberal or less of a feminist for loving those
things. I know, I know- that’s not rational but there’s very little about being
pregnant that is rational (hormones much?). So I’m going through the motions,
being okay with my need to rearrange furniture and giving myself a break. I’m
allowed to be goooogly over baby and I’m allowed to be a liberal academic at
the same time. These things are not mutually exclusive and it doesn’t make me
less of a mom or less of a career minded mom. I can have both worlds, I just
gotta find the balance in those worlds… it’ll take some time.
