The Handmaid's Tale, Motherhood, and Waiting
I am not one of those people who believes everyone should have children. Quite the opposite, in fact. I fully support women who choose a different path, who know they are not suited to parenting, who do not want kids, who are infertile. I know people with kids who should not be parents. I've heard and seen some stupid and rude opinions about parenting, most of them from other women: "I'm going to have lots of energy to get up in the middle of the night with my kids and you won't." "I have to have all my kids before age thirty." "I'm not a fan of only/too far apart/more than two children," etc.
The internet has taken away everyone's ability to mind their own business.
When I was twenty, I remember being on vacation with my family and seeing a young mom in a park chasing her toddler and thinking, "That's my worst nightmare."
At the time, it was. At the time I wasn't willing to give up that much of my freedom or self-absorption. I was young and having fun, but I was also questioning a lot of things like faith, romantic and platonic relationships, and my chosen career path. (At the time, missions was on the table. Thankfully, I smartened up and realized I was too anxious and family-oriented to run off to Cambodia.) I didn't know that motherhood could also be fun, or fulfilling, or meaningful, and if I'd become a mom at the time I don't think it would have been.
I chose to become a mom at 28 instead. I was married, had a stable job (which I later lost but that's another story), had nearly completed my first novel, and had gone through my fun and fancy free partying stage. Now, running after my toddler is one of the greatest joys of my life. Yes, there are times where I'm bored or exhausted or just want some time to myself, but my greatest fear now is not being a soccer mom in a park. It's not being with her, or not giving her the best life and upbringing I possibly can. My writing and my identity are very important to me, but I'd be lying if I said she wasn't the most important thing, the end all be all, my crowning achievement, the apple of my eye, and so on.
I've been reading The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel about a theocratic society with declining birth rates where women are separated into different classes intended to serve men. Handmaids are the fertile women who are used for reproduction, bearing children for those in power. The main character, Offred, struggles to maintain her identity through recalled memories from her past. She was once married to a man she loved, the mother of a little girl, like I am. Her daughter has been taken away, and she thinks about her all the time, her birth, her babyhood, her childhood. Reading that now, I think, "That's my worst nightmare." This story represents such a stark contrast between a life of chosen motherhood and the danger of a society where women are seen merely as vessels for fetuses, with no names, no identities, no freedom.
It's easy, reading a novel like this, to think, "Well, I should be thankful, it could always be worse," but I think it's important to remember what a slippery slope the loss of freedom is. Offred's existence is one of isolation, and our society is one that isolates women once they become mothers. She says, "I remember walking in art galleries, through the nineteenth century: the obsession they had then with harems... Studies of sedentary flesh, painted by men who'd never been there. These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”
I too, get tired of waiting.
We live with my spouse's parents, so I spend a lot of time in my third story bedroom overlooking the field and swamp, watching tv, writing, waiting for my daughter to wake up, waiting for him to get home. It feels like limbo sometimes, or an ivory tower; a waiting room. An in-between place, not enough to contain all of our things, or all of me, but impossible to escape from. I'm thinking about going back to work so we can rent a house, lease a new more environmentally friendly car. I'd have to put my daughter in preschool. I miss my freedom, making my own money, but it's not being home that I mind, it's the feeling of trespassing, of having nothing that is truly mine. And am I still a good mother if she's being taken care of by someone else, and not with me every day? No one would ever ask my husband that same question about being a father.
Still, I'm not sure what to do. But the choice is the important part, even if you never know whether or not you chose wrong.
