Tenderness

Tenderness, where is the
Tenderness, where is it
I don’t know where I am but I know I don’t like it
I open my mouth and out pops something spiteful
words are so cheap
but they can turn out expensive

– Dave Wakeling, “Tenderness” (sung by General Public), 1984

I haven’t written much lately because I had a baby earlier this year. My other children are much older, and I had forgotten how little writing it is possible (for me) to do when I have a baby. I had forgotten a lot of things, as it turns out. Unlike some blissed out women to whom new motherhood seems to come easily, having a newborn is not like riding a bike for me. I sweat the details. I can’t fall asleep on command. I break into a sweat when I can’t soothe a tiny person I’m related to. And now, nearly 12 years after I first became a parent, I have two other kids and many more variables to manage. There are so many things I wish I could tell my younger self about what it’s like to be a mother. In the years since my middle child was born, I nearly perfected the litany of things I didn’t know then but that supposedly would have made life easier. For one thing, I would have told my younger self to stop reading books about pregnancy while pregnant. If I had to read anything, I should have read books about newborns. Luckily I read Ann Lamott’s Operating Instructions, but that was only after my first baby was born. By then I was already in over my head. But it was still good to read a non-whitewashed version of new motherhood.

I wish I had forgotten what I hated most about becoming a parent — the fact that your decisions about child rearing and work and child care, really your whole life, is held up for public scrutiny like never before. When I had my first baby, I was in grad school and in my early 30s. While I had female friends, I’d never had a sister and somehow had missed a lot of the supposed cattiness girls inflict on one another in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Not long after the birth of my daughter, I discovered mean girls. Only they weren’t girls but women. The most minor shocks were in the form of overfamiliarity — the random women at the park or in a mommy class who asked me (Out loud. In 2002. In Los Angeles.) why I had a different last name from my daughter and husband. The worst were when people close to me tsk-tsked about me going back to work. “Oh. That’s sad,” my mom said when I told her. Somewhere in the annoying but harmless realm were people who gave well meaning advice. “Sleep when the baby sleeps!” If only baby naps weren’t the only times I had to shower or write!

The most painful times were when other family members and friends could not contain their disapproval about my parenting and life. I’m thinking of one dour family member who had been kind enough to me for years. Once I had a baby, she never let an opportunity pass to grimace at my incompetence, or fatigue, or frequent lack of joy, telling me that I really ought to be grateful! And what I was worrying about was idiotic! And that I had no idea what I was talking about, ever! To the point that, all these years later, I still dread seeing her.

I thought I was beyond such ingenue emotions and would not make the mistake of letting other people’s misery bring me down, especially at my age. If there’s one advantage to having a baby not for the first time in your forties, it’s that, as a fully grown-ass person, you’re more immune to the free-associating opinions that strangers, acquaintances, and click-bait parenting articles spew. But I had forgotten what it’s like to be so raw and tired, loving the touch of the sweet baby but wanting more out of your day than that too. Like a peaceful meal or a night of sleep. Or time with a friend or partner. Or reading a book without falling asleep. It was at these moments in years past when the smallest gesture of understanding or real empathy and listening from a friend or therapist was enough to make me cry.

Over the years I have convinced myself that my immaturity and lack of experience were to blame for feeling piled upon when I first had a baby. (I’d only ever babysat a few times as a teenager, and only because neighbors had practically begged me to.) Not long after my most recent child was born, I found that some things about new motherhood haven’t changed. While you couldn’t drag me to a mommy and me class now and don’t participate in the click-bait ‘mommy wars,’ I am still related to the same people. The relative who infuriated me 11 years ago is unchanged, perhaps more judgmental now. I could write on about the way that she both tries to be helpful while saying rude, hurtful things, and compare her to other family and friends who say kind things, even if they’re platitudes, but rarely offer any tangible help. I’ve actually been asking a serious philosophical question lately — is it better to be a helpful, mean person, or a sweet but relatively useless person? And I am pretty sure that, while it would be a dream come true to have someone other than my spouse close to me who is both kind and helpful, I’ll take airy sweetness over spiteful help.