early days of becoming, being a mother

Have certainly cranked up this journal writing business. Realised that I would like someone (ie someone like me, but with more time and chutzpah) to go around and profile/interview all the cool baristas in town-the tattoed, vegetarian cycle loving musos, the baristas with degrees and fair trade friendly businesses. Realised I would like someone (ie someone like me, etc) to go back and map the social connections that existed in a pre-Facebook era amongst my friends/acquaintances of the mid 90s. To see what sorts of dinner parties/camping trips/house sharing anecdotes good enough to make a film script better than Reality Bites existed (apologies for the grammar of that sentence!). Last night I was befriended, on social media, by my husband's friends partner, who is a year older than me and who I kind of look up to. Or as Nora, in Monkey Grip, writes: "something about Claire always made me want to work hard in conversation". 

When I say admire, I don't mean that I have her on a pedestal or think I am unworthy etc; just that her social ease and life achievements are significantly more mature than mine, considering she only has 12 months on me (I know the age gap because I saw it on her son's framed birth certificate; which I was admiring as part of her overall mature home decor aesthetic). Anyhow, this friend has 2 children that she sends to public school; works for a socially just organisation; has a beautifully decorated inner city home and throws fantastically catered parties. But I know there is always another side-she has family stresses that exceed mine-and so I was touched to have an email conversation with her and have her confess that motherhood was at times lonely for her and it took a long time to find a motherhood posse. I felt good that 3 months along, and I'd made some good progress. First I'd worked out how to dissipate the grief and anxiety from the pregnancy testing, so that it was longer crumbling me to pieces (in my 20s, I let the distressing events in my life gain an embarrassing amount of emotional power over me; nice to know I can let it go; even if I can't do anything about how easily I cry at the time!). 

That was good, now I sleep soundly at night and enjoy the days with Lu. Secondly, I worked out that the world of motherhood, the stay-at-home-with-your-baby-and-your-new-best-mother-friends, can be a fantasy illusion. Motherhood is  different for everyworn women. It's just like the fantasy that you'll travel overseas and make fabulous life changing friends-you might; but the friends that stick, that really change your life, tend to be people you meet in the trenches. And I decided that any new mothers/friends that I made, really have to be my peeps. They have to be people who approach parenting as they do life: with an open heart, a social conscience, a willingness to learn and be changed. I'm not interested in spending time with mothers who treat a newborn as an inconvenience to be managed and rushed through the breastfeeding/night wakeups (though I admit that night wakeups do suck). I don't want to spend time with mothers who want to foist a routine on their child that contradicts what well-known and diseminated development theory about how children form attachments and what is required for their mental health.  I don't want to spend time with mothers who are already showering their infants with material possessions; who confuse wants with needs; who misunderstand the difference between being able to afford things and having the judgement to know if they are necessary. I don't want to spend time with mothers who, by virtue of living in Adelaide (voted most livable city), will be able to provide their child with access to the best of everything: medical services, education, transport, culture, parks; yet are already fretting that their child doesn't have enough of a perfectly curated life.  These are the people that will have trouble seeing or noticing other children in our society. 

And so, that is me complaining but the good news is that there are still so many other people out there that are worth meeting. I met 2 mothers in a postnatal yoga class, who swapped notes about the return to work, types of carriers, types of labour pain. It was good. One said she'd climbed a mountain when she was 8 months pregnant, hoping it would prepare her for the pain of childbirth (it didn't). I said when climbing the Freycinet Peninsula that I had more stamina than my then unfit husband; now that I've gone through childbirth I've had 2 opportunities to prove my superior physical stamina! They were normal women, both educated, enthusing about events such as Womadelaide, speculating about how to get a toy library going in their neighbourhood, discussing community work. The toys their kids played with were handmedown/mother of invention type toys (a basket filled with scarves for a boy to empty; a handmedown Lamaze stand that Lu grunted at enjoyably). Then I met A at the pool, grabbed "save our pool" surveys and after spending some enjoyable time in the water, relocated to the supermarket, where I saw another mother also carrying her child in a carrier. This is like seeing someone wearing a band tshirt; a beacon that alerts you. Talked to her briefly, and then left with strongly observant eyes, noticing all the new parents in the mall and compared the stages they were at to my own stage.