Being mom

The other day I walked past a storefront at the mall called "The Mom Store" and although I didn't look in, as I walked past, it didn't seem like it was a store for moms per se, but for babies because it was filled with strollers, cribs, toys, bath aids etc. And I found myself thinking what a misnomer the store was - it should've been called "The Baby Store" (though I suspect that name had already been trademarked, hence The Mom Store).

Then this week, I came to the realization that the gradebook I'm using is running out of room and I'll need a new one.

Yes, I know there are online gradebooks, but I prefer to record attendance and grades on the spot in an actual book. And if you're going to accuse me of being a luddite for doing so, you haven't been paying attention to this blog.

My point is, I've been searching for a replacement and every place I look, the only record books I can find have little hearts, or teddy bears, or stars plastered all over them. Ugh! What do high school teachers use? Are you seriously telling me that they ALL just use Excel? Nobody uses paper anymore? In not being able to find a plain record book suitable for adults, I'm a little offended that "teacher" seems to equal "grade-school teacher" only. Just like the "mom" in the store name mentioned above really translates as "woman with a baby".

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There have been several times over the last few years... okay, actually, the last couple decades... when I've come across various arguments about being a mother and identity.

Often the article (or more lately, blog post) has been written by a woman who is about to become a mother, or who has recently become one. These writers often worry that their careers will be damaged, that they will talk endlessly of their children (much to the boredom of others around them), or that they will somehow lose their identity.

Their arguments all just feel so disconnected from the reality I live in.

I've been trying to work out why. Am I defective? If everyone else feels their identity is forever changed by having kids, why don't I feel the same way? Did I miss something? Does that make me a bad mother?

The nearest I've been able to figure out is that having children when I was young meant that I skipped over all that worrying about identity and careers and such. Not that I'm advocating having children young. Or advocating not having children young. It's just that I think having children young inherently skips over this question. After all, when you're in your early twenties, you have yet to establish the career that could be potentially damaged by having children. Not having had a career before the kids came along, meant that my worklife post-kids couldn't really be compared to worklife pre-kids since the pre-kids part was so short (and was what I would define as "work" as opposed to "career").

And how do you worry about eroding your "identity" when you've barely begun to develop it yourself? I can see how living as an adult for a decade or more before having children, could make the decision to have children feel like an entire change of identity. I understand those kinds of changes that make you wonder who you will be without ____ [fill in the blank with whatever is relevant] I suppose when you've only been an adult yourself for a few years, becoming a parent gets mixed up a bit with becoming an adult, so that being a parent seems like a natural extension of adulthood. No traumatic change here, just part of the package. Not that mixing up adulthood and parenthood isn't without its (potential) pitfalls, since separating them again after the children grow up could create problems.

I think it's telling that whenever I might try to do so, I have great difficulty imagining myself as not-parent. Some people can remember not being a parent. For me, there never really was an adult me that wasn't a parent - what adult years I had that were childless were short and so close to adolescence that they sometimes don't even seem to be adult. Adulthood and parenthood are really one and the same thing for me - they're synonymous in my vocabulary. Again, not a good/bad thing, just the way it worked out.

All this isn't to say that having children at a young age is a good thing. On the contrary. There are a lot of things that I did the hard(er) way because I was doing them with the kids. For instance, it would've been nice to be an adult student without balancing family life the whole way through. And I know there are things that more financial stability (which older parents usually have) would've provided my children that they didn't get. Then again, we simply lived the lives of a family living at or below the poverty line. There were plenty of other people in that boat with us, both with and without kids.

So it's not a matter of good or bad, just that for me, I never experienced an identity crisis in becoming a mom. But I do feel like we generally forget that "mom" isn't a cookie-cutter label. It isn't just "woman with a baby" or "woman who gives up career" or "soccer mom" or any of the other labels we so easily slap on it. I'm still a mom even after my kids can get their own breakfast (ah! sleeping in again on the weekend), dress themselves, drive a car, fall in love, live with their boyfried, have kids of their own etc.... It never ends. My mom is not only a grandmother but still a mother as well.

So why do I feel like I'm being pushed out of the category of "mother" now that mine are growing up? If there's an identity crisis here, it will be learning to be an adult without being viewed by society as a mother at the same time.