Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (11 page)

A
few weeks later, we sat in the basement of Amy’s Wash Park house. Wash Park is the locals’ term for Washington Park, a neighborhood Derek and I had driven through for fun when we moved, knowing nothing in that zip code would fit in our budget. The group had already met a handful of times at Amy’s house, so I wasn’t shocked that day by the craftsman furniture that matched her 1920s bungalow, but I couldn’t help but calculate in my head how much each piece must have cost.

“I found a day care for Justin,” she announced to the group.

I could tell by the excitement in her voice she was happy about that. I looked at Gabi drooling in the middle of the mommy circle, other babies climbing over her, and was grateful I didn’t have to hand her over to anyone else for the day. I pictured a sterile room with dirty toys, seven kids screaming, and two women trying to manage it all, and I had an internal shudder. I couldn’t understand why Amy would be so anxious to get back to work.

“I’ll just be going back three days a week.” Three days a week sounded like a lot. “And we need the money.” It rang of justification. A reason no one could deny: the need for money.

The new can lights in her recently remodeled basement shone down on us.
Need?
I thought.
How about going without? What is “need” anyway?
I knew I was judging her, but I didn’t care. I thought of all the penny pinching that went into my every decision, big or small: what was for dinner, whether I could visit my mom, if I could go out for coffee, the brand of diapers I bought. We didn’t have cable or cell phones or new clothes. We were sacrificing so I could raise our daughter. How dare she say she needed the money!

Jen and I made eye contact over the pile of babies. Her face didn’t move, but our eyes reassured each other.
Stay strong, sister. You’re doing the right thing
, and a little bit of,
And she is not. For shame.

Now, ten years of mothering behind me, I am embarrassed at how quick I was to judge another mom’s decision. But I did. And on certain topics I judged frequently. It was because my choices were based on my values. Values I desperately clung to. Starting a family of my own, I was in control of how it would look. I was determined to do it the right way. I would give all of myself to my child. All of my attention. All of my time. All of my resources. She would never question whether I was there for her. Even if that meant smothering her.

So if another mom made a different choice, it was because she was operating under a different value system. Or at least that’s what it felt like. And that felt threatening because I had a lot at stake. I couldn’t offer room for ambiguity because that meant there wasn’t a right way, and I needed there to be a right way. One right way.

Just like when I was a high school student who wanted a formula for success, a perfect combination of required and extracurricular courses, I wanted a mothering formula. And one I could be graded on that would give me a chance for that 4.0. To affirm my value as a mother. Those perfectionist tendencies were creating a need to compare myself to others, making me competitive and self-righteous.

My pastor, Steve, says if you are good at following the rules, at performance, you run the risk of becoming proud. And that’s where
I was. Following rules that I thought pointed to the right way to mother, the best way, the most sacrificial way. And I was priding myself on it. I was judging others, walking around with an invisible measuring stick and comparing all of my measurements. My motives weren’t malicious; in fact, I usually didn’t realize I was doing it. I can see now I was merely trying to figure out where I stood in the world. Saying there was a right way to mother and following the rules gave me something to cling to, a misplaced security.

Six months later, I walked into a MOPS group meeting at Corona Presbyterian Church in Denver and met the group’s coordinator, Julie. We’d talked on the phone the week before and discovered a Pacific Northwest connection. Her parents and sister lived on Whidbey Island. She understood my coffee-drinking, ferryboat-riding side, and it felt like a taste of the friendships I’d left in Portland. I didn’t need to introduce those parts of me; she already understood them.

“We’re about to break for the summer, but come anyway. We’re really laid-back,” she’d said on the phone.

Still desperate for some friends, I thought this group could introduce me to moms beyond my weekly Wednesday playgroup. My phone call with Julie confirmed I might have a connection.

Though she was ten years older, Julie looked like she could be my sister with her dark hair and short stature. She had grown up a pastor’s daughter, but she didn’t fit my stereotype of a prim, quiet church lady. She was boisterous and direct in her communication. A mother of three—her youngest child being the same age as Gabi—she was tying up her baby years as I was diving in. I watched as she went out of her way to make other moms feel comfortable, me included.

My assumption about being a mom, a grown-up, in the church was doing things a certain way, based on the right answers. Julie
openly questioned everything. About mothering. About church. About why God said certain things in the Bible. I didn’t quite know how to respond. She’d grown up in church. I hadn’t. She must have known if she was out of line.

Once when our MOPS group had a counselor come and speak about self-care, the conversation turned to our children’s fathers. An equally outspoken and candid woman sitting next to Julie raised her hand to share.

“I feel like my husband only wants sex from me. And he feels like the only reason I stay with him is for his money.”

Julie, sensing an opportunity for a joke, turned to her neighbor and responded so the room could hear, “So what you’re saying is, you get paid to have sex?”

Laughter exploded from the other fifty women in the room. I skimmed the crowd to see if anyone was offended by her comment. No one seemed to be. Although I was a little stunned at these two women and their openness—they knew we were in a church basement—I was also relieved. A release from the formula of what I needed to be and say. I was still stuck in those Christian rules for living from so many years earlier, which fit right into my drive for perfection. I walked into this church group thinking I would have to censor my conversation, when in reality there was more freedom. Less comparison. Less judgment.

In Philippians, Paul writes,

Steer clear of the barking dogs, those religious busybodies, all bark and no bite. All they’re interested in is appearances—knife-happy circumcisers, I call them. . . . The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for.
[2]

Circumcision—not something I’ve dealt with as a mom of girls. But in the Bible, it represented a rule, an outward appearance, that showed religious compliance, doing things the right way. I had
unknowingly become a knife-happy circumciser. Someone running around with scissors, wanting to cut all of the wrong things out of my life. My credentials of performance—of being a stay-at-home mom who cooked a real dinner every night, who was financially responsible, and who went to church on Sundays—were what I pushed forward first for everyone to see. I was allowing what I was doing, and doing the right way, to define me. But it didn’t leave much room for authenticity. I could be honest about the parts of my life that were going well, but I’d catch myself censoring conversations when they were in areas of insecurity.

Julie had already torn up her credentials and thrown them in the trash like Paul. She’d been divorced and pregnant when she got married the second time. When her husband met her parents—a retired pastor and his wife—for the first time, he and Julie also announced the news of her pregnancy. Julie said her mom jumped up, hugged her, and said, “You’re going to be a mom!”

“That could have been embarrassing for her, me being the pastor’s daughter and all,” Julie told me. “But that’s who she was. She was excited for me and didn’t focus on what I did. She focused on what God was doing.”

I was searching for the grown-up rules. I found Julie and her confidence to be invigorating. Rather than needing to prove she was good enough in mothering, she trusted in God’s amazing grace. I wanted to live with the same freedom she did. Less concerned with how things appeared and more concerned with how they actually were. I just couldn’t shake the need for a playbook. That rule-following part of me that had always been there followed me straight into motherhood.

But right there in the playbook of life, the one I thought had all the rules I was supposed to follow, Paul says:

I didn’t want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ—
God’s
righteousness.
[3]

Righteousness—a word that means always behaving by the moral code. On its own it sounds religious, judgmental. What I didn’t realize is the Bible, the playbook, was saying let go. Let go of the rules. Of the expectations, of the list of “shoulds,” of the outward appearance, and know Jesus. Plain and simple, know him and trust him.

W
e’ve decided she likes it best when I am holding her and she is looking at Daddy,” I told Carol. We were at my mother-in-law’s house, and I was sitting on a stool at the bar in her kitchen, watching her prep dinner for us. Gabi sat on my lap facing her Oma and kicking and flailing her arms up and down with joy.

“She thinks you’re just an extension of her, like an arm. Daddy is clearly someone else.” Carol held the knife midair for a moment as she thought about what she’d just said. It gave me pause too. Gabi did think I was an extension of her. A set of breasts to feed her, arms to pick her up when she cried, her need-meeter at every turn. She was happiest when I held her. When Derek tried to take her from me, she’d lean her body, her arms outstretched in my direction, so it was just easiest if I held her all the time.

And I was starting to wonder if she was an extension of me. I’d never spent so much one-on-one time with another person. Well, maybe my own mother when we moved to Italy, but that was only for a few months while we traveled before I went off to school and she went to work. Gabi was now ten months old, and
I didn’t go anywhere that she didn’t go except for the single dentist appointment I’d had since her arrival. Even at my postpartum visit to my obstetrician, Gabi screamed in her car seat on the floor next to the exam table while my feet were in the stirrups.

She went with me to the bathroom, to the bank, to bed, to the grocery store. I was wondering where I ended and where she started. But that’s what I’d wanted. I didn’t want to leave her with anyone. At the same time, I was exhausted and dreamed of time by myself.

A week earlier, I’d looked up from the kitchen sink and found Derek unraveling his earphones while walking toward the back door.

“I’m going for a run,” he said, his eyes focused on his earphone wires, his running shorts and shoes on. I felt my anger instantly flare at his announcement that he was off to do his own thing for the next hour while I stayed at home. Again. With no one but a baby to talk to. All week I’d waited for him to come home, and he was leaving, making my weekend look like an extension of my week.

“Fine,” I replied.

He stopped midstep and turned to face me. “Is there a problem with that?”

“No,” I lied.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Fine,” I said as he turned toward the door.

He stopped midstride again and turned back around. Tired that the tone of my voice was not matching the words coming out. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Well, why did you think you could just leave?”

“Do you have something you need to do? Besides, the baby’s asleep.”

“Just this”—I flicked my hand toward the dishes in the sink—“but you leaving without asking implies I’m always on baby duty.”

“You’re welcome to go do something when I get back.” His tone rang of “we’ve had this conversation before.”

Safe for you to say
, I thought.
What am I going to go do? I don’t want to exercise. I don’t have any hobbies. We don’t have any money to go shopping. I have no friends who are available at a minute’s notice to meet for coffee. They all have kids too. You know I’ll just stay here and do nothing.

“I don’t have anything to do,” I finally answered.

“Well, don’t blame me for that. I’ll be back in an hour.” He turned toward the door again, but this time completed the task and walked through it and left.

Perhaps it was because I’d been plucked out of my pre-baby life in Portland and dropped in Denver while pregnant that I was so at odds with what to do with myself. I didn’t have any earlier life to go back to. It was as if my mom identity started with a clean slate when we moved, and there was no context for the woman who was there before. I spent the next hour flip-flopping between feeling sorry for myself and feeling resentful of Derek.

When he came back, Gabi was awake and I was feeding her in her high chair. He picked her up, his shirt soaked in spots from his sweat, and she started to cry.

“Go,” he said, waving his hand toward the door he just walked through. “I’ve got this.”

Gabi reached her arms toward me, her mouth opening wider to let out her screams, as if she understood her father’s instructions and wanted to make sure I knew she didn’t like the idea. I couldn’t leave them like this, with her upset and him annoyed; that wouldn’t result in a good outcome, and I wouldn’t be relaxed, knowing that’s what I was leaving. Besides, where was I going to go?

I reached my arms toward Gabi to rescue her from her Daddy’s hold.

“No,” Derek said as he pulled her away from me. “You need to go.” His voice was firm.

“No.” I matched his tone. “It’s just easier if I stay.” I took Gabi from him, and she immediately stopped crying. Derek and I both
looked at each other as if to say, “See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

In Carol’s kitchen, her comment, “Gabi sees you as an extension of herself. Daddy is clearly someone else,” rang true. A girl is defined in relation to her parents. Had that been true of me? What did I see when I looked out from my mother’s arms? How grateful I was that I had such strong arms holding me, showing me the world. I knew that part of the view was missing, but the landscape she offered was rich.

And then there’s that breaking away, a daughter from her mother. Does it ever fully happen if one is the extension of another?

I still see my father when I look in the mirror. His blue eyes and the dark circles underneath. When my nearly black hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, I look like a Spaniard. But these days I am also seeing more of my mother than I ever have. In many ways my life looks markedly different than hers did at my age. But I catch reactions, phrases that sound more like her than ever. Is it because it takes a lifetime for a daughter to separate herself from her mother? Because the bond is tight and makes the breaking away difficult? Impossible? Would I always be this tethered to this child?

It was true, Gabi was happiest when I was holding her and she was facing her daddy. We realized it one day as she was kicking and laughing, facing him. But all that holding was starting to tire me. I felt I was always attached to her physically, or at least with my attention. My sleep schedule, lack of exercise, rare alone time—everything was determined in some way by the baby.

What stops being supportive and becomes unhealthy and consuming?
I wondered. Maybe I just needed a hobby. Or an interest. Something to remind me that I was more than a couple of breasts to feed a ten-month-old.