Right Mothering

I returned to work today after a gloriously long break, and it is pure misery.  I will work until two weeks before my due date at the end of March, but from then until  September, I will stay at home full time with my new baby.  Now, I can easily leave this job, because I hate it.  I am overqualified for it and feel my mind numbing as I perform its myriad of administrative tasks.  Perhaps, if I had a position for which I am qualified and which I found intellectually engaging, I would be tempted to put the babe in daycare, but more likely, I wouldn’t have had another child at all, because I firmly believe that one shouldn’t have a child, if you aren’t going to raise it, at least for the first few years.  Choosing to have a child is not about the mother-to-be’s wants and needs, but about those of the baby-to-be.

Even now, with the babe in my womb, I feel that I should be with him or her in a way that I cannot be while at work.  During the Christmas break, I could rest my tired body (growing a baby is exhausting!) and just think about the baby, in a way that I cannot do while sitting at this wretched desk.  I had time to prepare my home for the baby’s arrival and nourish my body with food eaten at a table instead of at a desk.  I spent quality time with my daughter, this baby’s big sister, after school, rather than collapsing on the couch after tiring myself out at work.  I spared my baby the stress of our morning and afternoon commute.  In truth, even a pregnant mother should stay-at-home.

Now, for us, my not working once the baby is born will put us in financial peril.  We will likely turn to public assistance, in some form or another (which is not easy to contemplate as a conservative).  I will look for work-at-home writing and editing opportunities.  But, I just cannot imagine not being with this baby once it is in this world.

As a mother, I subscribe to the school of Attachment or Natural Parenting.  I read Mothering Magazine.  In fact, it is the only print magazine that I read.  But I am also politically conservative, which is rare among attachment parents and Mothering readers. As I post to this blog, I will develop my personal parenting philosophy.  But most basically, I believe that the first 3 years and 9 months (starting from conception) matter most when raising a child.  It is imperative to do right by the child right then and less so as the years go on.

Yesterday, in a posting to the Motherlode, Lisa Belkin expresses astonishment at the parental passing of judgment.

As I wrote in my first post, I do not shy away from judging parenting decisions.  In fact, I am perplexed by the political correctness-inspired moral relativism of so many who write about parenting.  The fact is, some parenting decisions are better than others.  And that not all parents do the right thing as parents.  How can we make such important decisions without judging between alternatives?  The problem rests not in the passing of judgment on parenting decisions, but the guilt of those who knowingly make the lesser decision and who take the proclamations of others in favor of the better decision – or sometimes merely the execution of these decisions – as a personal indictment.

When our daughter first began preschool, my husband and I missed the first parents’ potluck supper, because he did not yet have his driver’s license and I needed to stay home to nurse our daughter before bed.  I explained to a fellow parent that we don’t use babysitters.  I further explained that we both come from families in which babysitters were never employed and that we just weren’t comfortable leaving our daughter with one.  I was simply being honest, but my interlocutor took my explanation as an indictment of her decision to use babysitters, and she proceeded to attempt to shame me into finding one to use that evening.  I know that her aggressive behavior stemmed from her own parenting guilt.

Now, I sometimes have made decisions as a parent that are not the best for my daugther.  Last spring, I taught as a visiting assistant professor at a university in a south Atlantic state.  I came home every other weekend and entrusted the care of our daughter to my mother-in-law.  As I made this decision, I did not delude myself into thinking that it would not have negative consequences for my relationship with my daughter, although God-willing they would be short-term, nor that it wouldn’t have a negative effect on her psyche.  Mothers and fathers had one of two responses – the delusional ’she won’t even notice you are gone’ or the empathetic ‘i can’t imagine…’.  Personally, I resented the former and appreciated the latter.  Those who showed empathy with the difficulty of the situation were those parents who know that some parenting decisions are better than others, and I cherished that moment of empathy.  Many months later, my absence last spring is a distant memory, but I cannot pretend that it hasn’t left some sort of imprint on the psyche of our daughter.

Some parenting decisions are better than others, and we must simply be adult enough to live with our decisions without needing others to lie to us in order to make us feel better about them.