Jan. 29th, 2006

velvetpage: (Chicken potholder)
Some of you will remember last May, Elizabeth and I were in a wedding for an lj/rl friend. Being a bridesmaid was somewhat last-minute but very welcome. However, because of the tight timeline, we never got as far as finishing the bridesmaid gift for the shower.

Well, now I want to finish it. The bride, [livejournal.com profile] sassy_fae, is moving into her newly-purchased home tomorrow, and what was a bridesmaid gift is becoming a housewarming gift.

The gift: a binder with recipe cards in it. I already have about a dozen recipes to include; I'm going to print up my Welsh Cakes and Christmas Pudding recipes today. From you: your favourite, relatively easy-to-make recipes, things you use fairly often.

This post is unlocked, so [livejournal.com profile] sassy_fae can see it. Wish her luck on her new home, and give her your recipes!

(Note: the icon is one that [livejournal.com profile] sassy_fae made, and it's the closest I come to a cooking icon. I hope it made you snort when you saw it; that was the general idea. :)
velvetpage: (cat in teacup)
This post is inspired by the rantish musings of a pregnant friend.

When I was first pregnant with Elizabeth, a few people mentioned jokingly that my social life, especially late-night gaming, was about to experience a serious downturn; a few even told me I wouldn't have time for it at all. Others told me that nothing would ever be important again except the well-being of my children, that I was about to become the archetypical Mommy persona. I rejected the idea then, and I reject it now. The difference is that now I have proof: I have not given up on anything I did before Elizabeth, just because of Elizabeth. If anything, the reverse is true: I am more connected to my world and more interested in my place in it, because of her and her sibling-to-be.

Where does this idea come from - the idea that, when we go through a big life change, we're supposed to leave behind everything we were before and make ourselves over? Perhaps more importantly, why do we buy into it?

My feeling is that this theory is one put forth by fairly shallow people. Now, I'm not using the word "shallow" as an insult; it's simply a descriptor. A shallow person is one who has room in their lives for only one persona at a time. They can be the perfect employee; they can be the perfect spouse; they can be the perfect parent; but they can't be all three, and they can't see that there's no need to be perfect in order to take on all personas. They go from one stage of life to the next, without taking anything with them from the previous stage.

We all know people who have done this. It was an expectation until fairly recently that a woman would quit her job, or be forced to quit her job, when she became a wife; after that, the expectation changed to exclude mothers from the workforce. Wifehood, and motherhood, was enough of a job for any one person, and that was that in society's eyes. But society has changed in recent years. Many of the women who gave up on their early personas in order to become full-time wives or mothers have eventually gone back. Some developed so much resentment towards their spouses and families for expecting that of them that the result was a schism in their family. Frankly, I think this expectation is a huge part of the reason for soaring divorce rates. It's neither realistic nor healthy.

Yet the expectation is still there, as evidenced by the fact that many people still tell new mothers they will have no hobbies after their children are born, and many new mothers allow those hobbies to slip away, wondering later why they did.

Each of us, upon undertaking a major life change - parenthood is only one of them, but since it's the current life change for me, I'm going to focus on it - needs to evaluate what it is they're taking forward, and what it is they're willing and able to leave behind. We need a new parameter, one that doesn't require us to have only one or two personas at a time.

We need to add layers.

I gave up on my creative writing for many years after high school. I didn't do it consciously; I just kind of stopped writing stories. As it became less and less a part of my active brain, the ideas stopped making their way to the conscious level, and a part of me started to dry up. When I thought about it, I still sometimes described myself as a writer, but I wasn't actually doing it. I had let the layer slip.

Meanwhile, I was adding other layers: wife, teacher, roleplayer, liberal-minded Christian, mother. Each one was laid over the others, and none of them blocked the others out. I didn't let them. I needed all of those layers. They made me a whole person. But that one, important, creative layer was blocked. Writing was something I had done, not something I did - until I came across a roleplaying campaign that awoke the desire to write again. For a while I immersed myself in it, neglecting some of my other jobs in order to write. But within a few months, I achieved a balance again. There are times when i write more than others; at the moment, the creative fire is banked due to too-much-to-do, and I haven't touched my book in weeks. But it's not gone, and it's not buried. Ideas come, and I welcome them and record them for the future. Plans for the next few months include the time to finish my book. The layer is back, and I'm not letting it go again.

I think I was lucky. It would have been entirely possible to lose that part of myself, and I would have been poorer for the loss. Something woke me up to it before it was too late, and I took it back.

I'm about to add a second layer of Mommy to my life. Two kids will be much busier than one, of course. I won't be able to immerse myself in the baby stage with Claire as I did with Elizabeth, because Elizabeth will always be there, wanting to do puzzles and sing and dance and "help." That's okay. It's not the old layer over again; it's a new layer, a new stage, and I can embrace it without losing any of the other layers. I don't have to shallowly accept that a part of me is gone for good, unless I want it gone. Each of my layers will be affected by the new one, just as reviving the writer-layer made me a better teacher, a better mother, and a happier wife. That's life. Giving up on any part of that would make me a bitter, unhappy woman. That's the only thing I refuse to do.

May 2020

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