May 2009

The Second Bear: Reflections on Motherhood

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE  LARGER FELLOWSHIP

It’s a well-known fact amongst ministers that Mother’s Day is a next to impossible thing to preach on. For every person who brings a sainted mother to church on Mother’s Day for a little well-deserved appreciation, there is someone else gritting their teeth over the utterly inadequate job their mother did of raising them. And, as a mother through adoption, I’m keenly aware that the dichotomy of those two hypothetical people is only a shadow of the complex and ambivalent feelings of those who have never known their birth mother, or who have chosen not to parent a child to whom they gave birth, or who have chosen not to give birth to a pregnancy. There is no simple, unambivalent way to talk about motherhood.

The more I think about my own experience as a mother, and the more I talk with friends who are mothers, the more I get caught up in what I would call the Goldilocks Paradox. You remember Goldilocks. She breaks into the house of the Bear family while they are off on some sort of a family outing. And far from feeling ashamed of her reckless and invasive behavior, she sets about criticizing everything. The Papa Bear’s chair is too big. The Mama Bear’s chair is too small. The Papa Bear’s porridge is too hot. The Mama Bear’s porridge is too cold. Only the Baby Bear has things just right.

Having a child, it seems to me, is a great deal like having Goldilocks break into your home, only without the option of scaring her off at the end of the story. This small, imperious being moves in and takes up residence, and there is no way that the parental role will ever be just right. Only the baby gets to be perfect. In any given situation your response as a parent will be too hard or too soft, too warm or too cold. The job of a parent is to provide children with limitless, unconditional love and affirmation, with a deep sense of safety and of being at home in the world and in their own bodies. At the same time, however, a parent is also charged with setting limits, teaching boundaries and self-control, ensuring that a child knows what behaviors are unacceptable and what things are terribly dangerous. Children cannot thrive—perhaps cannot even survive—without both all-encompassing love and clear boundaries and limits, and those two essential qualities are invariably at odds. It is our task to teach our children that they can be anything, do anything, that they have the power to live out their wildest dreams. At the same time, we must teach them to avoid what is unsafe, to check their unwise impulses, to speak politely and use the right silverware—or, more realistically, to use silverware at all.

There is, as far as I can tell, no way to do it right, nor any way to tell whether at any given moment you have made the right choice. At what age, if any, do you put babies on a sleeping schedule and let them cry themselves to sleep? What is a categorically unsafe thing to climb on, and what only looks dangerous when it is merely adventurous?

How old is old enough to walk alone to a friend’s house, or to stay in the house while you run an errand?

There is no clear-cut, Baby Bear, just-right answer. So the chances are good that much of the time what we got from our mother was too hard or too soft, too distant or too confining, too restrictive or too permissive, too demanding or too indifferent, anything but just right.

Of course, what we rarely acknowledge on Mother’s Day is that our moms probably had just as complicated and ambivalent feelings about raising us as we may have about how we were raised. I have talked to a wide variety of loving, dedicated moms who have confessed that, while they would never hit their child and abhor child abuse, they nonetheless fully understand, in the pit of the stomach as well as in the rational mind, how it is that parents come to physically hurt their children.

I couldn’t say for sure, but I rely on the assumption that my own personal mix of devotion and murderous rage is probably more typical of motherhood than the beatific images of the Madonna which are held up for us as expectation and ideal. Mothers have been viewed through the archetypal split of the passive, all-loving Madonna or the terrifying energy of the goddess Kali who devours her children as she dances. The truth of the dance of motherhood, however, is something much richer and more complicated than that good mother/bad mother split. Our experience of our mothers, and their experience of us, leads us straight into the heart of the paradox of human life—the reality that we are, at one and the same time, inextricably bound to and inseparable from all of life and that at the same time we are also independent beings, living our individual lives within the boundaries of our individual skins. Through our mothers we are given the primal experience of unity, the sensation of floating, utterly secure and utterly bonded, within the body of another. Before we learn to identify our separate selves it is our mother’s body that sustains us, that serves our every need. And it is through the failure of that mother’s body to perfectly read and respond to our every desire that we first discover our separateness, our distinct and independent identity.

We want unconditional, unquestioning love, to be loved simply because we are there. But we also want to be recognized for our unique selves, our particular accomplishments. We want our soccer games attended, our pictures on the refrigerator, our cartwheels or football tosses endlessly and individually praised. All of our lives, it seems, we are caught up in that same dance of separateness and unity, sensing that we are somehow only whole in relationship, in connection, yet knowing at the same time that our growth as human beings depends upon our development as independent individuals with a set of experiences and opinions that are unique in the world.

The trick about love is that it exists not only because of our unity, our profound connection to one another, but also because of our difference. Love depends upon there being an “other” to whom we can reach out. The primal union of an infant may be perfect or ecstatic, but it isn’t really love. Love exists when we cross the boundaries, when we acknowledge and appreciate someone for who they are, when we connect across our diversity, when we allow the skin which defines us to touch.

And in my life, certainly the greatest and scariest adventure into this realm of love was the choice to bring a child into our family. Adopting a child is a leap of faith of such magnitude as to seem more like free-fall. What sensible person would commit to loving a total stranger, some random person off the street? Of course, Jesus said “Love your neighbor,” but even he didn’t suggest that you take that neighbor, whatever neighbor you happened to get, and bring them into your house for the next two decades. We’re talking love here—not some namby-pamby sort of general goodwill, but unconditional, diaper-changing, tantrumtolerating, hands-on, unshakeable love. No questions asked, and no backsies.

There is a prevailing myth amongst adoptive parents that our children were somehow destined for us, divinely or cosmically pre-ordained. It might be true. I marvel at the ways my daughter shares her mothers’ love of music and dancing, of animals and reading and thrift stores. However, it is also true that my daughter and I couldn’t be more different. Mattéa is a raging extrovert who lives her emotions in operatic tones. I am reserved by nature, and inclined to mumble.

Now, it’s possible some committee of angels did the calculations and determined to put us together. Or maybe the truth is more shattering, and more beautiful. Perhaps it is, in fact, possible to take any random person and place them in the center of your heart. Perhaps love is so possible, so strong, that all it requires is intimacy, and the will for it to be so. Perhaps any one of us, ordinary as we are, could meet up with any other ordinary person and care for them and be beholden to them and love them, love them, for all the rest of our days.

There are no perfect parents, no single right way. But there is that ongoing miracle—whether through birth or adoption, as mothers or fathers, people do choose, all the time, to invite Goldilocks into the house. We make up the bed and fix the chair and adjust the porridge until it is just right. We say to this mysterious stranger, this person who is, at essence, always unknown to us, “My house is your house. My heart is your heart. For now and for always.” It is, in the end, the quintessential religious message, the heart of our Unitarian Universalist faith: whoever you are, there is a place for you. The table is set, and you—whatever your quirks— you are welcome. There is always enough love.