I love reading and writing about motherhood. I recently finished reading Kate Hopper’s memoir Ready for Air, in which she recounts her difficult pregnancy, her daughter’s premature birth, followed by weeks in the NICU, and her first few months at home as a new mother.
“Down-to-earth and honest about the hard realities of having a baby, as well as the true joys, Ready for Air is a testament to the strength of motherhood – and stories – to transform lives.” {From the inside cover}
This one sentence captures everything I loved about this book. It is real and honest. It’s about the joyful parts and the hard parts. It’s about how motherhood transforms us. It’s about the power of sharing our stories and experiences as mothers.
Even though Hopper’s experiences were different from mine in many ways, there were several similarities. Her daughter arrived 8 weeks early after Hopper was induced due to severe preeclampsia. My children were full-term, but I was put on bed rest at the end of both of my pregnancies due to high blood pressure and what my doctor called “pre-preeclampsia.” We both ended up having c-sections after long and difficult labors. And we both struggled in those early, lonely months at home with our newborn babies.
I was fascinated by Hopper’s story of what it was like, day after day, to drive to the NICU to see her tiny baby. She writes about the hardship of pumping for hours a day, and the challenges of then getting her daughter to actually digest the milk. She shares the frightening moments in the NICU when her daughter had seizures, or setbacks, or didn’t gain weight as expected. It gave me an entirely new appreciation for what parents of premature babies go through. As hard as my transition home from the hospital was, I cannot imagine only being able to hold my baby for a few minutes each day.
Ready for Air made me think about how, in so many ways, we are so not-ready for motherhood when the nurses, in what we perceive as an act of sheer lunacy on their part, allow us to take that tiny baby home. I’ve been a mother for a mere 47 hours!! I have no idea what I am doing!! I’m not ready for this!
Is there a way to truly be ready? Do mothers need a rite of passage?
In most cultures, a rite of passage is a ceremony performed to mark an individual’s change in status; they are usually performed at significant transitional events in people’s lives such as adolescence or marriage.
New motherhood is certainly a significant transition in our lives. In fact, there’s probably a reason why the most intense stage of active labor, the period just before the baby is born, is called “transition.” It’s not only our contractions and bodies and breathing that are transforming, but our selves and our worlds as well.
But there’s really no “ceremony,” at least in an anthropological sense. Sure, we have baby showers, but they tend to focus on all the STUFF we need. We may even read a few books {okay, A LOT of books} in order to ready ourselves for the changes ahead. But a true rite of passage not only formally marks the transition from one life stage to the next, but also prepares the individual for the new responsibilities of their journey. Young men learn to hunt, or to conduct sacred rituals. Young women learn the secrets of their elders.
And oh, how I wished to hear the secrets of my elders during those rough early months of new motherhood. I am forever grateful for the help of my mother, and her advice on soothing, diapering, and bathing my infant daughter. {This probably explains why many women today are turning to Blessingway ceremonies, which focus not on gifts, but on exploring the hopes and fears of the mother-to-be, pondering what it means to become a mother, and enveloping her in the support of her female network.}
A few months ago, I was speaking with a friend who had just announced her first pregnancy. We got to the topic of books, and I began recommending a slew of them, about sleep and developmental stages and having the happiest baby, when she said, “Well, I think I want to read more books about what it is like.”
Oh.
She is so right! Reading the What To Expect books may have helped me figure out how the booger sucker worked, or why I would possibly need special baby versions of laundry detergent, but it didn’t prepare me emotionally or mentally for the challenges of motherhood.
Oh, sure, I knew it would be “hard.” I knew I wouldn’t sleep much. I knew spit-up and other gross bodily fluids would be involved. But I didn’t realize how much I would cry. Or how incompetent and isolated I would feel. Or how panicky I would feel when I was left alone with my baby.
But it’s not like we want to respond to a friend’s announcement of her pregnancy with, “Well, let me tell you what you’re REALLY getting into!” And I think that’s why we inadvertently help to perpetuate all the myths about loving every minute of motherhood.
Hopper addresses this in Ready for Air when she describes being in a writing class, and sharing her writing about the months with her daughter in the NICU. Another student in the class suggested she write more about the deep bond with her daughter because “You are your baby’s first lover.” To which Hopper adds: Gross.
She writes, “I didn’t feel connected to my daughter when I first saw her. Hell, I didn’t even want to love her because I was so afraid I’d lose her. I felt guilty about this, like a failure. And it’s people like her, perpetuating the myths of motherhood – You’ll fall instantly in love! Everything will be perfect! – who make it harder for those of us who don’t experience that to reconcile myth with reality.”
It was the admissions like the one above that made me love this book. I’ve shared with you previously that when I was pregnant, I envisioned long days of nursing and rocking a sleeping infant under a cozy blanket in a gorgeous nursery while listening to classical music on NPR. I thought I would love every minute of it.
Don’t get me wrong; there were moments of beauty and joy ~ holding my daughter while she slept {yes, even with Mozart playing in the background}, seeing her first smile and her first laugh {and those wriggly, full-body smiles!}, and finally being greeted in the mornings with a big “mama!”
But there was also anxiety and postpartum depression. Hopper writes of the first time being left alone with her daughter at home, “it doesn’t feel at all natural. I have that fluttery, restless feeling I experience the first few days of every vacation…. I wonder if I’ll ever feel at ease in this role.”
And oh, how I related to this one: “I thought the hard part was the preeclampsia and mag sulfate and C-section…. But this, being home all alone, is much more challenging. I can’t look around and see half a dozen other women in the same boat.”
I felt a kinship with this author I’ve never met, because we both once danced and bounced inconsolable infants around our dining room tables while we counted the hours {minutes!} until our husbands returned from work. Nothing had prepared me for that.
I loved Hopper’s use of the present tense – it creates an immediacy to her feelings, and allows us to see how she changed through her first year of motherhood. It’s not all anxiety and loneliness and feelings of failure. It gets better. We transition, we transform, we become mothers.
On Saturday, I was in the greeting card aisle at Target, attempting to select a card for a friend’s baby shower. And I couldn’t buy a single one of them. Because they all looked like this:
I know I shouldn’t expect a $4.99 {!} greeting card to thoughtfully ponder the nuances of contemporary motherhood. But these just didn’t feel honest.
I wanted a card that said, “There will be big joys, and there will be happiness. And sometimes it will just suck. But we’re all in the same boat. Call me when you need some help rowing.”
Perhaps one of the best ways for us to see those other women in the boat, to see what it is really like, is to share our stories, to read other women’s stories, and speak as honestly about the ambivalence of motherhood as we do the joys. That’s why I think books like this are so important.
When her daughter was still in the NICU, a colleague sent Hopper a note with the following passage. It is one of my personal favorites, and it became a lifeline for her. In many ways, it is the best we can do.
“Live the questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it you will live along some distant day into the answers.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
*****
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of Ready for Air from the University of Minnesota Press. I was not compensated for this review.
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