Between a rock and a hard place

"Being a mother is hard."

I remember thinking that before I became a mother from watching my friends around me have children. I think mostly the issue was that they were enormous and pondering before they disappeared for a couple months and when they reappeared they looked tired.

"Being a mother is hard."

I feel this now as a mother. The first couple months, it was probably mostly the tired thing that came from frequent feedings around the clock and painfully engorged breasts. But that phase is a distant memory. L sleeps relatively well, and I now get to sleep through most of the night. Feedings are a breeze, both solids and nursing. What's hard is that I feel torn between attending to her and my work.

The trick is that I feel like I shouldn't feel that being a mother is hard because the physical stuff isn't hard anymore. Yea, I have to attend to L's physical needs: food, clean diapers, warm clothes, a safe place to sleep, but really it's her emotional needs of wanting attention and affection that tear at me. I'd rather be writing or reading. Can't she just sit with me and let me do that? We'd still be together, you know?

This past week my husband and I read through the end of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about the signs of his second coming and the end of the age. And here (Matthew 24), he talks about how at that end time those who are in Judea flee to the mountains… and in that fleeing How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!…For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now… In all the dreadfulness, pregnant women and nursing mothers are the only named category of people; they are singled out for particular difficulty. That has always struck me as kind of unfair, but this week, I agree.

Pregnant women and nursing mothers not only must keep themselves alive but also are the literal lifeline for their child. You might think that nursing mothers are a somewhat different case than pregnant women but their children also depend on them and not just for physical but also emotional care. Children can nurse into toddlerhood even after they can eat solid foods which suggests to me that their nursing isn't just for physical sustenance but also emotional connection. Reports from orphanages where children were fed but not tended to help us see how important emotional care is for proper development and survival.

Looking at this passage, why are pregnant women and nursing mothers in desperate straights in times of trouble? Because they cannot be substituted for. No matter the upheaval in the world around, no matter how desperate the fleeing, that mother has to care for that child or the child is not likely to survive.

For moms and probably new moms in particular, it is easy to feel a lot of guilt and then to feel guilt for feeling guilt. This text helps me to realize, new motherhood is hard. Not that new motherhood is insurmountably hard and for most of us, it'll never be fleeing from destruction hard. It's a special kind of, special stage of hard. I don't need to beat myself up for not feeling like this is smooth sailing even though I've had great support from family and friends and I get to work at home. And I can remind myself that eventually, I won't be a nursing mother and I'll be out of that special category.

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This post is part of an ongoing series I am writing along with the author of On Expecting