Birth Is Never As Hard As The Guilting

When I was in high school I read a Japanese manga called “Maison Ikkoku“. Most of it is pretty memorable but there is one phrase, a supposed Japanese idiom or some kind of blessing, that I recall pretty often: Birth is never as hard as the waiting.

Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if birth is the terminus of gestation and that is it, when in reality the first cry that wails from a mother’s uterus marks the beginning of a tumultuous relationship between self and child. Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if everyone is able to have the luxury of making the “right” choice, or is able to pace up and down a metaphorical waiting room for nine months, and walk through the aftermath. As if birth was and has to be the inevitable outcome.

We are born into rupture and trauma, into shit, blood and amniotic fluid. When we’re born we give our mothers trauma and rupture, we begin to dispense blood, shit and piss. Our parasitism doesn’t end when we’ve popped out of the womb and begin to breathe for ourselves – we only get more demanding, vocal and unwieldy. I don’t deny that pregnancy and giving birth is a beautiful thing – I was in the room holding my sister’s legs apart when my niece was born – but I’ve seen what can happen after, and the reality of what demons can grip you terrifies me.

In another life, I wanted to have children, in every sense of what that conventionality meant. I imagined nursing, dressing boo-boos and baking cookies. Mothering. But I’ve come to believe that I was just naively in love at the time, and trusted what other people told me from observing my behavior, that I would make a good mother. I was a smug 22 year-old, and already ensconced in a false sense of worldliness. When my niece was born, I expected an automatic maternal instinct to kick in, already revved to maximum but I found myself still disturbingly (to myself) not sufficiently moved in the way I had hoped it would feel. To not have those amped up maternal feelings despite being in the room when she was born makes me feel guilty in a way I feel I cannot adequately express to anyone.

My sister recently made the observation that when we were children growing up (and yet in 2009 still not fully grown!) we never played at house, or pretended to be mommies with our dolls. It’s true we were never terribly domestic little girls. We ran a radio show and we wrote our own jingles for ads. We had a TV show about crafting, usually with recycled cardboard and scissors. Our Barbies played in a band called “The Blue Oceans” and we had a female drummer who played overturned yogurt containers while Ken and Luke Skywalker (from my brother’s Star Wars figurine collection) stood looking pretty.

We never played at being mommies. That, I know, doesn’t condemn us to being inadequate parents, or bad mothers for our children, real or potential. But I wonder if that makes us inadequate and hurtful for ourselves because we might be trying too hard to be like the girls for whom this all came much more naturally. Of course we have a choice to not be parents, to not go through it all but sometimes that choice is clouded by a “what if” or an “I don’t know”. I can’t deny that I still wonder if someday I’d be a good parent even if for now I’m fairly certain I don’t want to have children or cannot imagine them fitting in my life.

It is the lingering “I don’t know” and “what if” that make thinking about the eventuality of that choice so much more difficult, especially with their implications on one’s “natural” womanhood – breasts, ovaries, uterus and the supposed innate desire to breed. Even if there is no timeline, and no responsibility to anyone else, the guilt that I’m not completely a woman because I feel little compulsion (and in fact much heightened fear) for breeding and its aftermath, sit patiently inside me.

And so I just wait.