Regretting motherhood?
How to be feminist without denying what you want
If you ever wonder how to get away from your comfort zone, here is the answer ….
TO
HAVE A CHILD
TO BECOME MOTHER.
Motherhood secret is not set upon giving away, totally free, but always enlarging the boundaries of your own comfort zone.
This is the reason why more heartbreaking and more painful is the sense of rethinking it, tasting as regret. This is not for the choice, but because you discover yourselves little and orphan of benchmarks, unless trends, common places or black pedagogy.
Never as becoming mothers you we are exposed to the unknown, to the persistent measure of our ability to grow up and adapt.
It is a challenge with ourselves.
It is an unresolved tangle exploding (sometimes to be resolved) just when you become mother.
This is a titan venture leading to lose yourself, or better, your identity, unless as you perceived it before.
It is an experience of loss leading to understand time to end up is greater than what you imagined.
By a deed — outrageously carnal — you pay your tribute to life, you bring to life a being who is going to test your consistency.
How?
At the beginning, by needing you as the core of its existence and breathing; then, pushing you away and questioning you;
then again emulating you (for instance, after I became mom, I noticed I use in my speaking an adverb my mom uses all the time), taking you as an example, because it realizes you are whole and fair…..
In the end, this human being is going to make you responsible for its failures or a certain numbers of therapy sessions, if you are lucky!
The greatest treasure, the most ineffable secret, giving you the idea this is a journey you are doing while walking, it is really the chance to improve yourself.
Some time ago, I red a book sounding interesting since the title and above all for the stubbornness of the author , a child free one, looking for the philosopher’s stone of motherhood. And yes she found it: regretting of being mothers.
At the end of my reading, I found more than an affirmation, sustained by facts — belonging to a very typed women — the title is fading into a common place:
regretting motherhood is a truth you cannot wisher, but you have to scream it out in this sexist world forcing women to roles and cliches.
Now dissonant voices and those one trying to wake up conscience? Oh, I love them all.
What I consider is that if a regretting of this size, to break the chains of men power, is needed and embraced by every woman, life wouldn’t ever be on earth. And we are not reading the Handmaid’s tale.
There might be other forms against this dominant machismo.
For example, by considering motherhood as a persistent research of yourself, an aware overcoming of your own comfort zone. A purposeful listening to the other person.
Or maybe are we still needing the reassuring comfort and warmth of common places?
