We all change and grow; we’re not the same people we were 5, 10, 20 years ago.  At least I hope you’re not; I know I’m definitely not.

One of most profound changes has been motherhood.  Even though my oldest child is nearly ten years old, I still find things that are changing about me because of my motherhood.

At first it was just the whole concept of being two-in-one – being the bearer of a future human.  Trust me, guys, it’s a weird and lovely sensation of duality, being both an individual and NOT being an individual.  Weird, like in Alien when the little creature is inside John Hurt, all those unknowns waiting and hanging about, taking control of the human surrounding it.  But lovely, because it's a beautiful little person with dad's ears and mom's nose and something entirely new that you're actively cultivating and awaiting.  It’s primal; other women share it with you, can relate to that singular time when a woman is not just a woman.  Total strangers will walk up and pat your belly, right there in a public venue, as if they too will become part of that duality again in doing so.

Then the baby came and I was kind of myself again, and yet I wasn’t.  I was me, with a living attachment; the baby was the baby, with a grownup attached.  We were a package deal, a we/us entity.

Walking came, and language; the other could be on their own, an individual, and yet not.  School came and the divide was greater, made even wider by the demands of work on the parent.  The workplace doesn’t see you as a parent, only as a tool, a fungible, that is present or not present for deployment.  It see you as an individual with a set of skills and a toolbox and a pair of hands, a brain – but not as a progenitor or a portion of a family or head of household, all the other private things you are at the same time.  The workplace partitions us off, separates the public and private.

But then the workplace disappeared, and I was no longer someone’s fungible asset to be pushed about on a budget as a headcount number, a mere bead on an abacus.  I was a parent, but invisible outside the house.  It was an oddly disconcerting netherworld to be in, a person who doesn’t really exist except within some highly specific confines.  Here in this blog, and here within these walls I existed. 

Somehow, over the last couple of months, I’ve kind of morphed into something entirely new.  I work now, for myself, yet within the confines of the virtual space.  It feels kind of strange even though for several years most of my work was virtual.  I have only tenuous ties to my cohorts – I’ve never seen them, been to their offices, met their clients.  I’m more like an avatar than I’ve ever been. 

And yet, at the same time, I’m becoming entirely more fleshed out.  I’m THE LEGO MOM, the one pulling a wagonload of Legos into the school every afternoon, followed by a herd of excited boys and one lone girl into a computer room.  My daughter remarked last month that most of her classmates wouldn’t be able to point me out, wouldn’t know who I am.  That’s all changed now.  I spent a half hour on the phone this morning with another mother who wanted to speak with THE LEGO MOM.  All of a sudden I’m concrete, I’m tangible, I’m a body with a face and a name.  I’m the mom who’s cooking up a Lego community and trying to get girls involved in the sciences.

It’s an odd sensation, being recognized this way.  It’s like that period of time after getting married, when we are still getting our sea-legs about being part of a formally recognized team.  I feel a bit of surprise at being called, So-and-so’s mother, the same kind of surprise that I felt when first being called Mrs. So-and-so. 

But here I am, I’m public, again.  All thanks to being a mother.

1:25:27 PM    comment []

I’m fed up with all the comparisons between Howard Dean and George McGovern.  The eyes rolling, the sighs of frustration, the exasperated throwing up of hands: Oh, he’s just like McGovern, he won’t get elected.

Bullsh*t.

It’s a whole new ball game, baby.  If McGovern had the resources that Dean has at hand, lived in the kind of immediacy that we experience today, he might not have become a has-been. 

The real crux of the McGovern comparison is this:  will the McGovern nay-sayers vote another Nixon into office, again???

Don’t f*ck this up, people, keep your eye on the ball.  The misguided comparisons may not be that – they may be attempts to undermine your confidence.  Don’t let them slip a fast one by you in this whole new game. 

11:41:21 AM    comment []