So yeah, I’m pregnant. After all the fuss about not being able to be, three years of fuss, my partner and I are having our first kid this summer. I’m firmly in the second trimester, that wonderful time when you look back on the last few months and realize “Oh right! THIS is how I’m supposed to feel, not exhausted and queasy and generally anxious. I’d forgotten.”
You’d think that, feeling good again, I’d be anxious to get back to writing here and elsewhere. Baby brain doesn’t seem to have set in yet, so the words are there in roughly the same quantity and sophistication as usual. I have a list of posts and ideas as long as my arm. I have the time (although less than usual, as a terribly timed basement renovation means commuting to the city from my parents’ house in the suburbs while our place is unlivable).
What I don’t have is the motivation. And it’s not just the motivation to write–it’s the motivation to engage in much of anything academic or intellectual. Instead, I find myself drawn to physical comedy (we’re watching the incredibly silly Baywatch movie as I write this), to cooking, to planning for my vegetable garden and the new basement, to walking, to snuggling the cats, to looking out the window, to examining the outward evidence of my body building a whole new human from scratch with no conscious instruction from me.
I’m into the physical, into sensation, into doing instead of thinking. Which is weird for me.
But I’m relishing being forcefully embodied, as strange as it is. I have a terrible habit, one reinforced by an academic culture that sees bodies as a nuisance or an afterthought, of forgetting that I’m not a mind in a meatsack but a wholly integrated, embodied consciousness. I can’t do that now. There’s nothing about this process over which my conscious mind has control–my body is in the driver’s seat. And I’m letting it be.
I haven’t always been able to. Part of the reason why it took us so long to get to this point was that I was afraid of doing just that. While in theory I wanted to have a child, I was fearful of letting that desire get in the way of my ambition as a professional and a writer, of my intellect. I’m really into my job and my writing, and into being good at (and ambitious about) both.
Through both, I not only get to exercise my skills and feel accomplished; I get to help people who need helping, every day. I get to put policies in place that pay for childcare and airfare for their children when my students and fellows go to conferences. I get to tell the Tri-Agencies that their insistence on postdoc mobility hurts the careers of academic mothers, and watch them make a different decision than they might otherwise have. I get to make sure that my disabled students have all of the equipment and supports they need to do their work and succeed. I get to write about how CanLit in the 1950s and 1960s set the stage for the messed up CanLit of today so that knowing its history can help us do better.
The fear that motherhood would prevent me from doing all of those things, even as I very much wanted both, kept me from actively addressing my infertility for longer than I should have. I was so tied to living and working in my brain that it kept me from doing something I really wanted to, but was afraid of. My ambition was familiar and desirable, whereas becoming a parent is a process entirely mysterious and unknowable.
But I’m not afraid now. That’s lie–I’m terrified about how hard motherhood will be, because I know it will be ever so good but ever so hard. But I’m not afraid of giving things up. I have, and I will again and again, but I’ll get them back, because I want them. I can be a body who builds and feeds babies and a brain who thinks and writes and works, who does the work of making sure that other people who want to do the same can have as much of both as they want and need. I can be a person who models that for my kid.
It seems silly to say it out loud–of course I can do both, with some significant compromises and what I’m sure will be plenty of guilt and conflicted priorities–but it doesn’t feel silly. And it’s not, really, for me or millions of other ambitious women who face motherhood in a world that makes it really hard not to have to choose.
Hook & Eye 