A Room of One's Own...

I started to think a bit about how much I've changed over the past seven years--since E. was born.  Two of my very dear dear friends are having their own little girls this month (one of them is here already! M.L.K-W, you know who you are!) and this has prompted a little soul-searching on my own...after seeing a beautiful picture of my friend's babe, I began to look through old pictures of E.  Not all of my reminiscences are comfortable.  Like all parents, probably, I wish I had done some things differently--been a little (okay, a lot) less uptight and anxious, never said a sharp word, weaned a little earlier, and not offered candy ever! For some reason this picture of two-year-old E. brings tears to my eyes:

Especially when I consider the real little girl she's become, and don't think I don't shed a surreptitious tear each time she loses a tooth!

But the single biggest, realest mistake I made as a parent was not to have a room of my own right from the start.  A. and I had planned that I would be a stay-at-home mother, and I was entirely behind that concept.  A. would go to work and I would be with E.  As it turned out, I was with her, all the time.  As in pretty much every second for the first three years.  Sissy and I are always talking about how much we hate the notion that you lose yourself when you become a mother--that "mama" is your new identity, and all other parts of you are negated.  But throughout E.'s baby and toddler years, I think I secretly believed that I would be a bad mother if I wasn't subsumed in motherhood.  If I hired a babysitter, let someone else take over for awhile, I'd be wrong.  I even hurried home from marketing as quickly as possible when she was home with A.  

And you know, I made myself quite miserable this way.   In paradoxical effect, I didn't worry less about E., nor did I feel less guilty.  In fact I still feel guilty in retrospect, because although I was home with her, I feel I didn't enjoy her babyhood as I should have.  Of course I didn't! It was claustrophobic and onerous and lonely.  Don't get me wrong, she was a love--in fact, that's what kills me looking back at pictures of her adorable lovey toddler self.

Now that I'm slowly reclaiming parts of myself long dormant--violin-playing, writing, daydreaming, school--I'm realizing more and more how much this was missing from my life. Maybe this sounds a little like '70s self-actualization crap, not to mention ungrateful, but it couldn't be more true.

Okay, that said, I will abruptly change the subject with a question: if any of you have seen the "Little Bear" cartoon on Noggin, why is it that Mother Bear has apparent boobs like a human? Why is the bear family half-anthropomorphized like that? It's downright disturbing.