I just went digging about for a post I felt sure I made over a year ago, because I remember thinking about it so much and I wanted to see how I worded it, but I never did apparently. And it's interesting to me, the few things I meet with quiet.
When I was much younger and wanted children for myself, from myself, it was the sort of thing I viewed with solemnity and awe.
Now when friends announce pregnancies and intents, I mostly just shrug and go, "wacky," because in many ways, I simply just don't get it, my seriousness and solmenity having drifted to other things, and my fondness for my body and life having arrived at a point where I feel literally horrified at the notion of so altering it with a pregnancy of my own. This is most likely partially the result of no longer wishing to be claimed by anything or anyone.
But every once in a while, I get banged on the head with that former feeling of awe, and it is a perpetually strange feeling, this recollection of those first moments when I really found a way to understand my quiet, sly and status obsessed self.
I remarked to someone on the phone last night in a ranging discussion of society and psychology that perhaps so many men have such odd relationships with their children because unlike women, they are not used to being defined by others -- in the larger societal picture, regardless of what an individual might think, a woman is defined by her husband, parents and siblings far more than a man is. A wife stereotypically reflects on a man like an accessory, but a husband on a woman like an overarching title. And so when couples have children, men are faced, often for the first time (at least in perception outside themselves), with being defined by another being, often by no more than the mere staggering logistics of a child, and it necessarily must bend the whole notion of self around a tree, sometimes gracefully, often not.
I know I did write once, surely I remember writing this, how we reward men for being even halfway decent fathers ("oh that's so sexy, he's carrying his baby") and really only acknowledge acts of motherhood when they fail, even by the smallest incriments ("I really think that maybe should have a hat on, it's cold").
Children are strange signifiers, and I adore them, but where I should have a biological clock, I have an academic fascination and a quiet admiration too rarely triggered. I'm not a cold woman, just over-ritualized.
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