23 august 2006
Why I Do This
By Nanci Olesen
Listen to an audio version of this commentary
Every person invents for themselves how to be a parent. Every child provides the unique materials for that invention. It's a curious sort of give and take about where's my shoe and I need something to EAT and "you guys we've got to get going". Somewhere in the midst of that is a woman who used to not be a mom who has put a lot of things on hold in order to have and to hold these babies that grow like birch trees in the sun. Just when you've begun to make sense of a particular time in their precarious lives, they change and move into another stage.
Old as the hills, these stories of trying to keep up and manage their souls and your own and the way they collide and collaborate and complete themselves, tumbling out onto the rug all the blocks, we just put them away for crying out loud. Okay, yes, let's get them out again.
My mother in law is trying to figure out why I would want to spend my time talking about these things. She just "did it" as they like to say, those of the Greatest Generation. And with all due respect, I have to insist that because I am just DOING IT, I need to hear about it. Way more than I need to hear about the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I need to know what it's like for the woman whose baby died in infancy to be pregnant again. I want to hear her whole story on the radio. I want to hear a professional basketball player mom tell about being on the court again just 2 months after her baby was born and how she felt completely different and yet how determined she was to keep playing and how she figured out how to do it. And I want to hear the report from Northeast Minneapolis where another mom has just succeeded in getting her baby, who’s in an infant seat, her toddler who’s still learning to walk, and her preschooler who wants to sit on the curb and pick clover, out of the car and into the house in a calm and gentle manner. This is news. This is the world where many people live each day. And in this country, you can open the door for the census guy and look him right in the face and you can be watching your friend's kids while she teaches violin lessons and you can have supper on the stove for 10 people, three of whom need it to be spooned into their mouths, two of whom need to get back to rehearsal, and one who needs to be walked to her piano lesson and ONLY WANTS YOGURT and you can have a load of laundry on the couch and a computer humming away with three different writing projects and their deadlines staring you in the face while you help with the bodily functions of 3 small living breathing humans who without you would be in grave danger and that VERY SAME CENSUS man can look you in the eye and say "do you work?" And your answer, IN U.S. CENSUS TERMS, would have to be "no". Although if you had a stand in, a babysitter, her answer would be "yes". And that census guy would record HER and not you. For real.
I think we’ve got to change that. We can’t just stand by while that Census guy writes down “no” while standing in our kitchens.
One night about eight years ago in the after supper swamp of dirty dishes I was on the floor picking up bread and little pieces of meat and pasta that had been flung around by my toddlers. I looked up and I could see the night sky out the window. I thought maybe I should go out there and see what the night felt like. Then suddenly in my head we ALL went out there, doors opened up and down my street, and all the moms were stepping out, freehanded, walking under the night sky, lurching down the sidewalks. I can’t remember how far we all walked. It was just the different sizes and shapes and colors and ages of all the moms that caught my attention. I suppose we went back home not too long after, I mean you don’t just go walking out into the night and leave them, do you?
The ferocious love for all of our babies would have certainly driven us back inside. A mother pines over her babies and drops tears onto them and yet she hits the wall with her fist at 3 a.m. to be woken again, to be needed again. She gently releases them to grow as they must into the kooky toddlers they have to be and the messy gradeschoolers and the unpredictable and confusing teenagers who wring her dry and bring her back to that kitchen, wailing, with her head on the table, once again at 3 a.m.
Praying at the faces of my own children at the breakfast table, hanging on to the existence we love and trying my best to go gracefully into the world as a mom, following the myriad of examples of parents I know, I hang on to the hope that if a teenage single mom can hear from others like her or add her voice to the moms who have adopted their babies from Vietnam or the lesbian couple who have three kids and live in rural Minnesota, then, if we keep listening and keep telling, we can all find a place to keep going on.
—Nanci Olesen
producer and host, MOMbo: 1990-2007 |
