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I'm on vacation, so I'm handing over the newsletter to Kaitlyn Greenidge, a frequent contributor to NYT Parenting and the author of a magnificent new novel, "Libertie." This week, Kaitlyn writes about grappling with her identity as a new mom. |
— Jessica Grose, columnist, NYT Parenting |
So much of how you parent is determined by the stories you tell yourself about being a mother. I had a child later in life, after my friends did. In the many years between their kids being born and my own, I listened to how they talked about motherhood. Some seemed to self-soothe on narratives of constant near-catastrophe: Forgetting snacks for preschool or buying the wrong color tights turned into an epic tale of self-flagellation and damning of the patriarchy. |
Others reveled in their own nonchalance. I will always be in awe of a friend who casually mentioned watching old episodes of "Unsolved Mysteries" on her way from work to day care pick-up. "I just put my phone on the dashboard and go. It's like a visual podcast," she said, while our mutual friend looked on horrified and admonished, "That's called watching TV while you drive." |
My daughter is not even 2, so I'm still figuring out what story to tell myself. Before she was born, I had fantasies, like all parents do. I wanted to be a cool Brooklyn mom. I wanted her first food to be beef carpaccio, like someone once claimed to me their child's was. I wanted to casually take her from the park to the museum to the beach all in one day, only stopping for photogenic snacks at sleek cafes, where she definitely wouldn't try to eat the dirt out of the pots holding the monstera plants. |
But her birth was hard. It was an amorphous event that didn't fit the scary stories I'd read before I went into the hospital, but it still managed to be my own personal medicalized horror. After she entered the world, I was desperate to fill myself up with experience, any experience, to know that my life could move on, that motherhood could feel different than that. |
I threw myself into ambitious projects. When she was about a week old, I saw a flier for a block association meeting and spontaneously decided to join. Sitting in the meeting, still sore and bandaged from my C-section, I volunteered to help fund-raise for the annual block party. "You just had a baby," my neighbor gently pointed out. Another said: "That's good, though. She can bring the baby with us when we go door to door for money. People will open the door then." |
That neighbor was right. She and the baby and I walked up and down the block and collected something like $700 for a bouncy house and some hot dogs. It was such a success that it became a new myth I could create about myself: I went through a terrible birth and a painful C-section and not three days after being home from the hospital, I put myself and that baby to work. |
This is, in retrospect, unhinged. I feel bad for that past self, so committed to using work and service as a coping mechanism that I couldn't give myself even a week off. Even in the moment, as I told this story to myself and friends, it felt wrong in my mouth, like biting down on a tin spoon. |
I kept looking for different experiences, different selves to try on. The fliers in the neighborhood helped. One of them was for a baby music class that I started taking my daughter to as soon as it made sense. We found ourselves in a storefront with a bunch of toddlers, my daughter the only child there who couldn't yet raise her head. Still, the class leader welcomed us. |
About 20 minutes in, another mother burst into the room. She was all bustle and bright colors — her hair was topped in a large yellow head wrap and she had the confidence to wear dangling, Africa-shaped earrings around a roomful of toddlers. Her son joyously jumped into the middle of the circle. I saw her and thought, I need that energy. I hoped she would be my friend. After many attempts to make eye contact with her and her son, she noticed me and immediately clocked me as a first-time mom. "I was just like you when he was your daughter's age," she said. |
She invited us to join her and her son for smoothies after class, and it would become a weekly ritual. That first time we talked about trying to make art and be creative with young children. She told me how much she loved live storytelling events, how she was drawn to them, but that she was always disappointed by how white the lineups were. "I want a storytelling series for us," she said. "I want one where we can just talk about us, and our story won't only be about something some white person did to us." |
She is a powerhouse, so she had organized a storytelling show for her friends and family in another storefront in the neighborhood. "I have a vision," she announced to me, "You are going to come and you are going to strap your baby to your chest and you are going to tell a story for us. Nothing prepared. You will stand up there and do it." |
This was unlike the public speaking I do as part of my job as a writer — always preplanned, or from written remarks. The thought of speaking unguarded in public was terrifying, especially imagining doing so with my baby. But I wanted to be the type of mom this new friend imagined me to be. I wanted to be the mom in that story. So I said I would come and maybe I would try. |
After an awkward hour of lurking by the snack table at the event with my daughter in her carrier, realizing I knew almost no one there, my friend called me to the stage. I stood up there in front of strangers, supremely nervous, and just started talking. |
I can't remember what story I told; I think it was some rambling thing about walking past an old workplace. When it was done, I fled the stage and headed home to make dinner. But I do remember walking home in the dusk, telling myself over and over again, "This is possible, this is possible, this is possible." |
Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the new novel "Libertie" and the features director at Harper's Bazaar. |
Want More on Motherhood and Identity? |
| Parenting can be a grind. Let's celebrate the tiny victories. |
Now that my 16-year-old is on camera all day, her bed is not only made but has a throw draped artisanally across the foot. — Naomi Mercer, Arlington, Va. |
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