After my son was born, I was diagnosed by my family doc with post-partum psychosis. However, before he could get me the help I needed, he suddenly passed away in the middle of the night during one of his hospital shifts. After that, I wasn’t about to divulge my soul to another person. He had known why I was suffering. He had been there.
He had been there for the 19 hours of my labor, the 4. 5 hours of pushing, and the lack of administering of drugs (my request). He was the one who reached in and moved my cervix to the rear, repeatedly, trying to get it to stay in place while I pushed. Nothing worked…until it did. And my son flew out of me like a projectile. My doc caught him like a football under his right arm. I shit you not.
But it was not over with that. I tore completely through and began hemorrhaging as soon as the placenta detached (this was my MO going forward, lucky me). By the time he was born, I was so delirious that the bleeding didn’t even phase me…that is, until I saw the blood. It was everywhere; all over the nurses, the doc, the walls, the floor….everywhere. And it was all mine.
In those days of recovery at the hospital, I didn’t say a thing about the blood…how the vision of it haunted me. But it did. And it messed with my head in a big way. All of the fear turned inward and attacked my mind in a way that made me feel a little “crazy”.
I might have only been 25 years old, but I knew myself pretty well. I had been through a lot with that mind of mine. From panic attacks to paranoias to hypochondria, to being diagnosed with GAD at age 13, we had not been friends for a very, very long time. And we were not going to be friends anytime soon, either.
I tell this story to set the framework as to the reasons I was “rebellious” as a mother. Once I recovered from post-partum psychosis, keeping myself and my son safe the entire time, I wasn’t ever going back. My mind was changed. I was going to do this mothering thing like I wanted to do it, goddamnit.
It’s not that I had to fight with my then-husband about anything around raising kids. He had no idea how to do anything with kids and was never around. So…it was my fresh palette to work with. My children are my greatest creative work. I will never create anything like that again. And I’m okay with that. It has demanded my entire soul to land where I am today and to sit in the joy I have with who they are.
They are not perfect. But they make sense. Minus their father’s manipulations and neglect of us all, my kids are mine.
My rebelliousness was defined by my desire to do this “mothering” thing my way. My children all had cost me so much. I had sacrificed my body in a really significant way, with years of recovery needed between each of them. And yes, I had chosen that. I wasn’t going into this flippantly.
- I was going to raise them in the countryside. No, it wasn’t a nice home. But it was safe and they had trees and land to play.
- I was going to hold them all of the time they weren’t sleeping. They were attached to me from birth. I breastfed them and it worked, after everything went wrong, treated with all kinds of interventions. Yes, my back hurt and I have scar tissue in my rib cage to prove it, but was it worth it? YES. My little mammals were properly imprinted. 😉
- I was going to raise them on food that I raised. From the barn to the large gardens to the orchards, I raised a lot of food. We preserved foods for the winter and ate out of the gardens for months of the summer and fall. I immersed myself into organic gardening manuals and magazines, subscribing to Mother Earth News for years and years, adopting everything I could manage.
- I was going to homeschool them. No, I didn’t use prescribed curriculums because I couldn’t afford them. I pieced things together and we made do. Thanks to libraries and documentaries and friends who would swap me teaching music for their science skills…we did it well enough.
- I was going to avoid giving them drugs, if possible. I studied herbal medicines and homeopathy. I made garlic oil for earaches and violet syrup for fevers. I made dandelion tea. The girls and I had a nice herb garden with tulsi basil and every mint under the sun, including lemon balm, their favorite.
- I wasn’t going to allow poison on my grasses. My chickens would be free-ranging and we would be eating those eggs. I’d be damned before I saw see my chickens and ducks pecking on poison. No glyphosate for me, thanks.
- I was going to see them mentored by good people, in scouting, ballet, robotics, choirs, and more. They were loved by all kinds of great and talented people.
- I was going to make sure they had a lot of time with their grandparents and cousins. I knew how pivotal those relationships were to me as a child. They were not going to miss out.
- I was going to feed them well. I made all of our bread from starter I brought home from Austria many years before. I soaked beans overnight and made our nut butters. I made homemade yogurts and cheeses from the goat’s milk from our barn.
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What I need to mention here is that it was not free. Homeschooling wasn’t cool back then. Neither was herbal medicine and being self-sufficient. Sourdough starter was a weird thing on weird people’s counters back then as well. I might just as well of been a witch to some people.
Every day, there was someone in my life who tried to convince me to put my kids in school, take them to the doctor like “everyone else does”, and go to work because we needed the money.
What they said was not untrue. We were living under the poverty level. However, it worked. The kids thrived. They were healthy and strong (thanks mostly to genetics) and had ample opportunities to stretch and grow. They were not socially awkward nor were they stunted in any other way. I made sure that they had access to the “outside” world. But every day there seemed to be a reason for me to need to defend my choices and kindly tell that person, whomever it was, to shove it.
…
My kids just about killed me in the process of being formed and born. I wasn’t going to do this “mothering” thing the easy way either. The sacrifice to get them here wasn’t going to be wasted by feeding my kids Twinkies, penicillin, and a steady diet of Dora the Explorer and Teletubbies. No, we were going to learn Latin and learn to sing in rounds and use harmonies. Yeah, we are weird. But I like our kind of weird. And so do they.
Just about every day, one of my kids mentions something about a cousin or a grandparent, how much they are like them, are grateful for them, are entertained by them, etc. Just about every day, I hear about how much they loved dancing in the orchard or picking and eating berries on warm summer mornings. Just about every day, I see representations of their love for each other in their jokes in our group chat. I see them throwing quotes around from our family’s favorite films like Oscar and The Importance of Being Earnest.
I hear about where they have placed their Shakespeare books on their shelves…how it feels more like home now. I hear about how they are making their own bread…and someday I’ll have to give them some of my sourdough starter. I hear about how happy they are to be making lives of their own…and the sweet things they want to have for their families.
It wasn’t perfect at all. But they have good memories and they hold on to them, together. They want good things for themselves. And as a mother, I could want nothing more for them.
And now, I get to rest a little and support them. My perfectly imperfect mothering will never end, but it is time to let them fly.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Eric Prouzet on Unsplash