Tuesday, May 25, 2010

The Clean Badge of Motherhood


It's late, time for sleeping and lately Sam has been unwilling to end his days, to fall asleep as he used to, snuggled up close until we drift off peacefully. I don't know what has changed for him--nightmares, growing up, not wanting to be parted from his Thomas trains, it's hard to say. So now, I read, sometimes for hours, until he falls asleep.

But tonight we are fuming at one another, feeling huffy and annoyed. For he has a smelly load in his diaper and I want him to change it but he refuses. These moments are often the worst of my career as a mother, the times when I am indecisive, angry, unsure what the hell to do. Because all my prior conditioning tells me this--that you can NOT let your kid go around with a dirty diaper, let alone the fact that he is even still wearing diapers at this age. It's not right, it's not healthy, I am a Bad Mother, it's just not OK.

And yet, here we are. So much of my life is lived to the soundtrack of that tape playing in my head--it's just not OK, it's just not OK, you're not OK, your life is not OK, your choices are not OK, you are not OK, and your mothering is really not OK.

And yet, here we are.

What I have learned from unwilling experience is that, in fact, it doesn't seem to harm him in any way to carry around this foul smelling business in his diaper for hours on end. He doesn't get a rash, he is not unhealthy, nothing about his life has changed except that now I have become a nag, the thing I was quite sure I would never do. This poopy business pushes me up to the very wall of my ability to expand, to love without condition, to mother with my heart instead of my head.

Because here is this child who smells terrible and who fiercely lays claim to his right as sovereign leige over his own body, his own poopy and his own smell. And I have pledged myself to the service of this sovereign. I have said that I believe a child should have dominion over his own body but I had no idea how hard it would be to truly live this ideal. I want my son to remember his own innate wisdom about how the body works, I want him to remain connected to the vessel that will carry him throughout his life. I don't want to teach him to abhor anything about himself, his body, the way the natural world works.

And yet, here I am. Angry and annoyed that he won't agree to change his diaper, that he is so offended by even the suggestion. Sometimes I see him standing there saying 'Love me, no matter what I smell like, can you do that? Love me no matter what I look like, can you do that? You, who have always preached such pretty words about unconditional love and yet, when you look at me, you see only my ratty hair and dirty diaper. You do not see ME, you do not see me standing here, you see only how the world will gauge your failure as a mother by the tangles in my hair and the poop in my pants.'

And there he is and I find that it takes absolutely everything I have to SEE HIM, to look past all the little failures that make me cringe, his dirty fingernails, his dirty feet, his dirty, tangled hair, and his dirty diaper, beyond which lie the sparkling pure truth, the clean soul, the real boy.

Because this is how the world has always judged our mothering. If we keep our children clean, their hair combed, their feet washed, their little bodies neatly dressed, if we teach them to use the toilet early so as not to offend, not to remind anyone unneccessarily of the animalistic humanness of our own bodily functions, if we see to it that all of these things are done, then we are Good Mothers.

And yet sometimes, the doing of these things requires that we hold our children down, that we ignore their protests, that we tell them they are wrong, that we establish dominance over their bodies, that we model for them that might makes right, and that what they believe about their bodies, what they intuit, what they feel, is invalid and untrue because it does not jive with our own conditioning, our own beliefs that cleanliness is next to godliness and that, therefore, we as mothers and the children we so love will fall from grace if we do not scrub behind their ears.

In my heart, I know this to be untrue. In my heart I know that what matters most truly is the ability to love this child unconditionally, even when he smells that bad, even when his choices result in what looks like Very Bad Mothering.

And yet, here we are.

Sometimes I nag and become self righteous. Sometimes I don't. Some days the smell is mild and I am really, totally fine with it. Sometimes I feel a rare confidence and I say simply that we all share this home together and the smell is too strong and he must do something about it, at which times he shrugs and says sure.

Of all my failures in mothering, I suppose I lament my inconsistency the most. I comfort myself with the thought that there is in me a core belief in the truth of the adage that love is all that really matters. But when I am caught in the quagmire of old thinking I wander far from this home truth, sometimes into a deep dark wood from which is is difficult to find my way out again. And my son, being my son, must wander there with me, poopy diaper and all.

I see that if I still believed in the idea of cleanliness somehow equating godliness, or if I still believed in the idea of rules, that I could simply make a rule and stick to it and all of this might, in fact, be a little easier for my son. But I no longer believe those things and so instead I wander these new paths, hacking my way through the underbrush, hoping to find a clearing with the sun shining down on it and daisies growing all around.

And yet, here we are. I manage to refocus my attention on the really great book we are reading and Sam's little body, stretched out long on the edge of the bed, finally relaxes. Within a few minutes, he's asleep. While he sleeps peacefully, I change his diaper, wash his little butt, dress him in clean pajamas and put him up on the pillow looking like the child of a Good Mother. The next time I see him, when he wakes me up in the morning, the pajamas will be gone and the diaper will be dirty again. And here we'll be, in a new day, a new chance to find the clearing in the woods.

I will be glad to get there, and I'm sure it will smell heavenly.