Growing into motherhood

Every once in awhile, I wax introspective about life. This is one of those times. Bear with me--it's gonna be long!

Just over a year ago, I quit visiting a message board that had been my internet "home" for more than 5 years. The reason I stopped going to this site was simply because I was spending too much time online, and this board made up the bulk of that time. I knew that I could not limit myself, so I had to go cold turkey and just quit. (Gee, I sound like a smoker or something.)

That one choice has had great implications for my life over the past year. I've been thinking about all this because last week I visited this website again. And I've checked in every few days since then. It feels weird.

Five years ago, a few months before Dallin arrived, I discovered www.mothering.com/discussions . The boards are sponsored by Mothering Magazine, which promotes attachment parenting and natural family living. I learned many wonderful concepts by reading the magazine and spending time on the boards, concepts which have heavily influenced my parenting in positive ways. This is why I still include links to Mothering and related topics on the sidebar of this blog. I was warmly welcomed, especially by a small group of LDS mothers who became my friends and mentors as we chatted on our own little thread. I literally breathed attachment parenting, and I dabbled off and on in other aspects of natural family living (delayed/selective vaccination, homeschooling, alternative medicine, etc.)

Because of the influences of Mothering, I learned that it was not only OK, but beneficial to bring my babies into my bed to sleep near James and I. I learned the importance of maintaining trust with my little ones by responding promptly to their needs and not letting them "cry it out" in order to learn to sleep. I learned how important human touch is to babies' security, and this led to my choices to hold and "wear" them as much as possible. I also gained the determination to induce lactation so that my babies would have all the benefits of breastmilk and so we could experience the joys of mothering through nursing.

I learned many other wonderful and good ideas that have helped me parent my children.

I also experienced failure. My first "big" failure happened when inducing lactation didn't go quite as I had planned, and I realized that continuing to nurse my 4-month-old baby would be a mistake. Oh, how I agonized and cried over that decision. Yet I knew that I could have another chance. I would have another baby. I would know how to better prepare. I would know what signs of trouble to look for. And chances were great that my second baby would not have the specific problems I encountered with my first. I could do it. I would do it! With enough planning and effort, I would be able to mother my next baby the right way and she would have everything she needed to thrive.

I nursed Sariah for 11.5 months. I was disappointed because I planned to go for at least 2 years. But I knew I could not deal with any more. This nursing experience, though technically "successful", was fraught with difficult emotions. Other women raved about how wonderful I was, and how cool it was that I could actually produce milk without having experienced pregnancy. Yeah, making less than 2 ounces a day is really "cool" (note the sarcasm). Having to hook up a tube to oneself in order to feel your baby formula is just as "cool". I just envied that I could not be like them. None of them had to go through all this rigmarole to feed their babies. And it went deeper than that. Deep in my heart, I felt that they were better mothers than I--more "real" mothers than I, because they nursed, and nursing equalled mothering in my mind. After all, that's what I'd been hearing and reading for five solid years.

My second nursing experience was so different than what I expected. I found the using and cleaning of Lact-aids time-consuming and overwhelming, as I struggled to take care of a new baby on no sleep and soothe the feelings of a big brother who was acting out alot of negative emotions about this new arrival. I thought nursing would be relaxing. It wasn't. I thought nursing would bring me intense joy and bonding. It didn't. (Though there were definitely happy and peaceful moments on occasion.) Most of all, I thought nursing would make me feel like more of a mother. It didn't. In fact, it made me feel like less of one because my limitations were so glaringly obvious. In spite of all this, I was determined to carry on. After all, the message I'd absorbed over the years was that if one could not nurse, one must make up for that fact by martyring oneself to do everything possible to make it happen, to prove that it really was out of one's control. Plus, even if I wasn't experiencing complete bliss, surely my baby needed this, and I couldn't let her down. (Though when she finally weaned, she acted like she didn't even notice that something was gone.)

Now, nursing is of course only one area in which I've experienced failure as a mother. I could write about any number of issues, including discipline. But nursing is probably the biggest and most traumatic.

In my head, I knew that I was a good mother. I knew that if Heavenly Father really felt that nursing was necessary to my children's well-being, He would have made it possible for me to give it to them. But in my heart, I still didn't truly have a testimony of these facts.

So anyway, back to my story...

I stopped visiting "mdc", as we called it. It was tough. Those women were part of my life. I didn't know how I would get along without having support for he parenting choices I'd made. (I mean, seriously, who else was going to empathize with me when my daughter woke up 3-4 times a night, rather than tell me that I needed to let her cry.)

Yet within just a few weeks of making my less-internet decision, I found I felt more free. I started envisioning possibilities and choices in my parenting that had previously been "off-limits". I started to recognize that while much of what I'd learned was good, many other ideas were narrow-minded and limiting. I began to truly realize that the feelings of insecurity and self-doubt I felt as a mother who could not nurse, at least not normally, had little to do with my actual worth and effectiveness as a mother, and very much to do with the messages in which I'm immersed myself for over 5 years. When you're spending several hours a day having certain ideas and ideals reinforced in your brain, it has to have an impact on your psyche. How can it not? I was absorbing the message that bottle-feeding is bad, that sending your children to public school is bad, that putting a child in a short time out would damage them psychologically, etc. etc.
Now, in some situations, some of these things may very well be bad. Many, if not most, of the things I've learned while being involved with attachment parenting are very, very good and have blessed my life! But the problem was that I couldn't separate the two. As long as I stuck around to get the good messages, the bad ones came along for the ride. And they were very powerful! I've heard mothers say that attachment parenting principles empowered them to be better mothers. I had the opposite experience--many of the core principles (breast is best, birth is to be worshipped) did not empower me at all, in fact, those ideas made me feel more insecure and prevented me from accepting the mothering experience that Heavenly Father had given me.

I realized that with all its beauty, attachment parenting and natural family living are philosophies of man (or woman as the case may). That does NOT mean that there are not good ideas. There most certainly are! What it does mean is that there are limitations to those ideas. And yes, there are a few ideas in there that can be detrimental. It means that the ideals do not reflect the infinite wisdom of the God who created us all. They reflect the limited wisdom of human beings who are trying to understand the universe. Sometimes they get it wonderfully right, but other times they get it dreadfully wrong.

I have tried over the past year to separate myself from any belief system about parenting other than the gospel of Jesus Christ. At the same time, I still try to take good ideas from human sources, as well. I'm not dropping the good things I've learned over the years!

The gospel tells me that this life is not the beginning. I existed as a spirit before I came to this earth. My children existed before they were conceived, independent of me or anyone else. The gospel tells me that there will be bumps and bruises in mortality, even from the time of infancy. Pregnancy and birth, as wonderful as they may be, are not the beginning. Biological functions, "mothering" hormones, and other such things are simply the means to an end, not the end itself. My children have their own journey, and yes, it includes opposition, from day one. Sometimes that opposition will come through me, much as I try to make it not so.

I think I'm a much more relaxed parent now than I was a year ago. I'm more relaxed in my expectations of myself. Yet in some ways, I'm a more authoritative parent than I was before. (Keep in mind that authoritative and authoritarian are not the same thing.) I make parenting decisions every day without stressing that I will somehow do psychological harm to my children if I say "because I said so!" I think it would have benefited Dallin to have me be more authoritative much earlier in his life. But that's part of the journey, too, isn't it?

I'm trying to lose some of the perfectionism that is inherent in my personality, but which was fed by attachment parenting ideals. I'm realizing that it's OK for mothering to be a journey. It's OK for me to make mistakes, and sometimes simply handling a parenting situation is better than the indeciseveness caused by feeling that I have to handle it perfectly.

I don't know if I will nurse my next baby or not. I still long to have that experience, (relatively) stress-free, of course. I know I still have some inner work to do to completely resolve all my feelings about breastfeeding and motherhood, and I'm not sure it would be wise to go into nursing until I can completely work through all that. Sometimes I wonder if God wants me to have a purely bottle-feeding experience just so I can truly learn that breastfeeding is not what makes one a mother, much less a good mother. I think that we are heavily influenced by our individual beliefs--I see that my friends who have different beliefs about nursing and mothering are not tormented in the same way I have been.

I do know that I cannot imagine life without cosleeping with my little ones. I can say that despite that fact that Sariah barely began sleeping through the night consistently at almost-age-two. Yes, I doubted that one along the way. But coming out on the other side of it, I still feel the family bed is right for us.

Anyway, I feel stronger than I did a year ago. I feel like I've learned so much! I still struggle with lots of things, lots of losses. But I know I'm happier and more at peace as a mother, even in my imperfection.

I think this is a necessary part of the parenting experience. I think it takes different forms for all mothers, but we all have to go through a process of figuring it out on our own. None of us start on a path and never deviate from it. None of us will find the answers in a single book or single philosophy.

I still wonder and marvel at how the Lord has a different plan for each of us. I know that many of the moms I knew at mothering.com felt the Lord had led them to the things they'd learned. I felt that way, and still do. When I imagine motherhood in its most ideal state, it looks almost exactly like attachment parenting. Yet the Lord allowed me to experience heavy failure of those things I'd learned to embrace. Other women instead experienced success that transcended their expectations and healed their wounds. Why? I have often cried that it's not fair. And yet I keep returning to something told me in a priesthood blessing years ago, that the experiences I was having were designed for me by God. They are not "less than" those of other mothers. They are exactly what Heavenly Father wants for me, and they are meant to teach me important lessons and to bring me joy. How can it be that one mother needs to learn about the amazing power of breastfeeding, and I instead am supposed to learn the exact opposite--that breastfeeding doesn't really matter in the eternal scheme of things? Or another mothers needs to learn the empowerment of schooling her children at home, while I learn that public school can be a good thing in my child's life. Or yet another mother learns of the sacred profundity of a natural birth, while I again learn that giving birth doesn't matter.

So I've been thinking over the past few days whether or not I should return to the company of m old friends on this message board. I like these women, and sometimes I really do long for answers to questions and parenting dilemmas from an attachment perspective. Several times I've almost posted a quick hello. But I haven't. I wonder, am I strong enough to believe in who I am and to be happy with God's plan for my parenting in a setting where others have very definite ideas about what it means to be a good mother? Would I be accepted for who I am? Not just liked and empathized with, but not pitied? Can I stand the incessant discussions of pregnancy and birth? Can I be patient with some of the narrow views of life that I will meet?

And perhaps most importantly of all, can I manage to not spend all day on the internet???

Oh, and p.s. I hope this won't be construed as me dissing attachment parenting. I LOVE attachment parenting--it's taught me so much. I am still very much aligned with many of its core values. I'm trying not to be jealous of my friends who can be that type of mom. I'm just trying to figure out why Heavenly Father has given me the experiences I've had, who I really am as a parent, and what truly matters most in mothering.