Making of a Mom: Stirring Jam and Reading Shakespeare
I became a mom in my early twenties, brimming with confidence garnered from years of babysitting, watching siblings, and interacting with cousins. The feedback was universally positive: I was good with kids, and I was going to make an awesome mom.
When my first child was born seven weeks prematurely and had to spend a month in the neonatal intensive care unit, I tailored my expectations and did what I thought a good mom would do: pumped breastmilk around the clock and held my baby-doll-sized daughter from when visiting hours started in the morning until the nurses kicked me out at night. I sometimes sat for ten hours in the darkened room, shrouded in silence broken only by regular bells and whistles from machines that go bing! of which there are many in the average NICU.
Despite comments from nurses saying I didn’t have to hold my baby all the time and concerns from my mother that I appeared to be experiencing postpartum depression, I stuck doggedly to this new normal, no matter how exhausting it was. I felt guilty if I took time for a full meal before heading to the hospital or left to eat before visiting hours were over, so I wolfed down tiny hotel-sized boxes of cereal and often skipped supper altogether, then felt like a failure as my milk supply dwindled.
I cried during overnight pumping sessions as I’d only ever seen tuckered-out toddlers cry, tired in my very bones but unwilling to give up. The nurses assured me that cracked and sore nipples were common and blood in the breast milk would not harm the baby. My sole activity outside of sitting in the hospital was doing my laundry in the basement of the Ronald McDonald House where I was staying (alone, because my husband had to report to his new naval duty station ten days after our daughter was born). Even though I hadn’t brought my baby home yet, I was doing my best to lose myself in motherhood. Wasn’t that what good moms did?
What got me through that time was a friend coming to see me and forcibly dragging me out to dinner. Afterwards, he loaded my arms with a stack of movies and a stack of books to borrow, urging me to do something for myself each day besides the limited mothering I could achieve in a hospital room.
At night, when visiting hours were over and my conscience couldn’t accuse me of not doing more, I started working my way through each stack. I watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the first time and remembered how much I love Jimmy Stewart. Here was familiar ground in the increasingly alien landscape of my present life. I read The Sandman comics until I fell asleep and remembered how much of a mythology nerd I was. I lifted my head and looked around for the first time while doing laundry and discovered Little House in the Highlands, a delightful book from the prequel series to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I had known and loved all my life. I wrote a poem right in the busy hospital cafeteria. I began to feel a bit like my old self again, the girl who was curious and loved a good story.
Yet when my daughter was finally released from the hospital and we moved across the country to my husband’s duty station, my routine quickly conformed to the baby’s schedule. When my husband deployed soon afterwards, my tiny world got even smaller. I knew no one within 1,500 miles and only left the house for groceries, doctor appointments, and church, where I spent most of the time pacing in the back with a fussy infant and leaving with my cup even emptier than when I’d arrived.
My life revolved around this newcomer, but there’s really only so much you can do with a young baby. No one had prepared me for how utterly dull and boring childcare with just one child could be. You can only sing so many nursery rhymes. You can only push the stroller so far. You can only provide so much environmental sensory enrichment before looking up and realizing it’s 9 a.m. and you might be going insane.
I began to resent little things that had never bothered me before. All I did anymore was wash bottles, make baby food, and do laundry, all with a baby on my hip. I mastered the three-minute shower while the baby sat in her tub. I couldn’t resist the urge to catch up on chores while she napped. I felt like a servant. What was I doing at home that was so irreplaceable that hired help couldn’t do it? And I, like a complete dummy, was doing it all for free. It felt like an inhuman fate. I spent one particularly dark day covering a notebook page with the question: What are you doing with your life, Danielle? I was miserable, cranky, and my attitude was seriously affecting the quality of my family’s home life.
Stories saved me again. I made it a goal to read every book in the house I hadn’t yet read before my husband returned from deployment, a modest 50,000-page total. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot not only gave me something besides complaints to email my husband about, but it drew me out of myself and back into a larger world I’d nearly forgotten.
After the birth of my second child, I watched all eleven seasons of Cheers in the wee hours of the night, while endlessly walking up and down with my inconsolable daughter. I started finishing needlework projects that had been laid aside years before, while my girls played happily with crochet hooks and knitting needles. I deboned chickens and made my own broth. I tried balcony gardening and accidentally cross-bred zucchini and ornamental gourds, resulting in an inedible but hilarious hybrid.
For the birth of my third child, I brought my accounting homework for the degree I was finishing to the hospital. I started bringing novels with me for each child after that. Once, I traveled two hours (an unheard-of distance for a mother of littles) to listen literally spellbound to Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf performance. While nursing my youngest, I read Gone with the Wind for the first time, and neglected house and home shamefully in order to “nurse” for hours at a time. Again, I was taking an interest in things outside of my narrow definition of motherhood and childcare.
I didn’t realize it fully till years later, but I had instinctively figured out that my stay-at-home role was what I made of it. I could spend that time in abject servitude to my children’s every whim and need—real or imaginary—or I could make time for what interested me, make my work meaningful, and bring them along for the ride. I was going to get out what I put into it. The culture might insist that stay-at-home motherhood was drudgery, but it didn’t have to be that way. The problem wasn’t with motherhood; it was with the modern idea of over-specialization. Real home economics is and has always been an intensely interesting and challenging art. I could be an automaton, or I could learn all the ins and outs of baking sourdough. The choice was mine.
It was during this time I stumbled across a Tasha Tudor quote I’d written down even before becoming a mother: “I enjoy doing housework, ironing, washing, cooking, dishwashing. Whenever I get one of those questionnaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It’s an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren’t stupid because you're a housewife. When you’re stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare.”
I had a hearty (if wry) laugh at myself. At the time, I was processing a huge box of homegrown tomatoes for canning, reading The Kalevala while they simmered on the stove. Who else but a stay-at-home mom had time for that? I got to pursue so many fascinating things now: gardening, food preservation, sewing, educational theory, literature, music, woodworking, art. My kids didn’t need me to be some paragon of 1950s self-sacrificing housewifery; they needed me to be myself, to be curious and exploring and doing things I was interested in, not things I did out of a begrudging sense of duty.
I know the secret now: Motherhood is not losing yourself for the sake of your kids, it’s teaching your kids how to be fully human. And the only way to do that is by example.
Editor’s note: Making of a Mom features stories about the ways motherhood transforms a woman. If you’d like to share your story, review our Readers Write guidelines here.
