not another mommy blog

let's just say this right now. i do not like mommy blogs as a general rule. it's the feminist in me i believe that you have to have more of an identity outside of being a mother. if that is all you ever freaking talk about..... there's a problem. i mean, if you talk about it interestingly and intelligently, i guess that's a different story. but i still don't like to see women whose soul source of identity is their child. it's not good for them and it's not good for the child, either.

Becoming a mother is a complicated thing. Not only am I trying to negotiate a relationship with my child, a relationship that defines itself as it becomes defined, I am trying to negotiate a relationship with myself as I attempt to determine how I mother, how I feel about mothering, how I want to mother and how I wish I was mothered. Having become a mother, I have also become a part of something larger than the maternal dyad of myself and my daughter: I am now a member of a new society, a new demographic, a new cultural category, with all the weight of our society's ideas of motherhood upon me. I am sorting out how I mother my child, how my mother mothered me and how I fit in with the world's idea of what a mother should be, and that is no small task. It's also not something I can do without ambivalence, conflict, or emotion. As I try to navigate this new terrain, I'm slowly learning that feeling conflicted does not mean that I don't love my child. I'm coming to realize that the ubiquitous magazine and media portrayal of the ever-loving, always-happy über mom is an expression of that childish hope we all harbor for the perfect parent rather than a prescriptive formula I must follow. I'm slowly convincing myself that experiencing what I'm really feeling is better than forcing myself to "love every minute," which only breeds resentment toward this tiny person who somehow rules my life and refuses me the complexity of human emotion. It's still difficult to admit to myself that I don't actually love every minute of what I do from day to day without immediately wanting to take it all back and try to be the Good Mom, the perfect blank slate onto which others can write their own impressions. I try to remember that I was psychologically complex pre-motherhood and that no one thought I was a bad person because of it. --Andrea Buchanan, Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It