Not another mommy blog! Or, from the warzone to the babyzone
I used to cover conflicts, insurrections, and intifadas. I met Afghans as they tasted their first days of freedom after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. (Yes, I’m aware that they’re back, stronger than ever, almost a decade later). I observed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have spent many years in Jerusalem, perched in a place that perpetually looks to be on the brink of war.
I’ve also covered a famine in Sudan, and visited regions of Somalia shattered by civil war. I’ve written about women fighting for their rights in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait and Yemen. I covered ethnic cleansing in Indonesia, corruption in the Philippines, oppression in Vietnam…and more bombings than I care to count.
But I had not yet learned to be someone’s mother. I am slowly getting the hang of it. Motherhood, I mused with colleagues when I left a decade-plus of employment as a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, is truly the ultimate front-line assignment.
The jobs bear some similarities. Unusual hours. Late nights. Being fast on your feet. Flexible and able to improvise. Not always having time for a proper meal. A whole-body experience. Your time is not exactly your own.
Today, it’s not just about the story. As of September 2010, when I gave birth, the world began to look different – all the more so when I had a second baby in February 2012. No news story could compete with the love I have for my son and daughter. And I’m blessed to have wound up with a husband who believes in the importance of my career as well as his own – and who wanted to be a dad as much as I wanted to be a mom. (Hardly anyone, incidentally, took note of him becoming a first-time father at 41.)
To be honest, this is the kind of premise for a blog which, had it existed 15 years ago – when blogs had not yet been invented – I would have found annoying. At 25, I was extremely career-driven. I was hard-working and ambitious, and I wanted to cover the world’s most pressing issues. Had I read then about a successful woman reporter – or any power-woman, really – who suddenly claimed to be more fulfilled by having become a mother, I would have made a gag-me face and have turned the page. (That is, when we turned pages…)
I hope that through this blog, I’ll find community with other women who are trying to make sense of the move from a high-stakes career to meaningful motherhood, and perhaps trying to strike a balance between the two. I want to take note of what makes us more “mature” mothers different. I’m determined to capture the trials and tribulations of a different kind of struggle.
After all, I got this far by taking copious notes: why stop now?
Ilene, perhaps I made it in just under the wire. I give birth to my daughter Lindsay just before I turned 35. She is now 18 and in her first year of college. She is an only child which has it’s pluses and minuses, and I am now a part time empty nester.
At 53, I feel young and vibrant and alive. Excited about all the possibilities in my life. Age is a number, and the numbers have shifted. I never felt like an older Mom. And I still don’t.
my neighbor rachael ellison sent me a link to your blog. interesting. I too am a primigravida–first at 35, second at 37. my journey was a bit more complicated than that–my first was a preemie and i spent 3 months on bed rest with my second–but I too am trying to figure out how motherhood has transformed who I am as writer and as a woman. can’t wait to read your future posts!
My background before I came to the rabbinate & to mothering was in poetry. So when Drew was born, I started writing poems about the experience of motherhood. I managed one poem a week during his first year of life. Those first poems focused an awful lot on breastfeeding, and on the ways in which my world had changed. Actually, I guess they’re all about that, in some way. Anyway: if you’re interested, you can read them here: http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/mother-poems/ (and I look forward to continuing to read your musings here.)
Yes, time is counted differently now. Eli is 5 months. How he must have changed since a month ago.
My son Nadav will be 20yrs. in June. I had turned 40yrs two months before he was born (at home). I was relieved at the time to find plenty of other stay at home moms on the upper west side. We formed a support group, which grew into our kids play group.
I’m now at the stage of dreading the learners permit becoming a real drivers license. Why do I bring up this pivotal moment to the mom of a 5 month old.
Simply to say this— it goes too quickly. Cherish those adoring eyes, the gentle fingering of your full breast, etc. When it comes to an end you will miss it. But before you know it he will be a young man. Despite all the strife of my son’s adolescence, it fades into the background and the closeness of our early warmth dominates my memory and can not be diluted.