Stepping out of the trap...

After having blogged so highly about the book Committed, today it turned me off. I have entered the section on motherhood in relation to marriage, and let me say Gilbert's thoughts on this area are highly negative and entirely limited. Perhaps I'm only hearing my deepest fears and missing the boat, but to me, her words were literally and figuratively in black and white. Although I could stomach her frequent reference to marriage as the loss of identity for both parties- which in my experience has been quite the opposite- hearing her define motherhood as a woman giving up her soul made me want to hurl. Now, in her defense, she herself does not want things this way and pleads for our country to find a way so that this is not be the case. However, I don't think it is in the first place.

Never having been a mother, I can only speak from a place of expectancy and hope, but I for one do not plan on giving up my entire self when I give birth to a child. In fact, in my mind that can hurt a child as much as it can help. In my reading of The Artist's Way today, I learned about what the author refers to as "The Virtue Trap". This is the ugly, dark place we squeeze ourselves into when we trade our importance for another's. She gives the example of a husband spending all his free time with his wife, though what he really needs is some alone time. She tells of a mother whose pottery classes, which she loves, interfere with her child's baseball practice, so she quits. And, the father who, though his love for photography leads him to yearn for his own dark room, spends the money instead on a couch that will benefit the whole family.

I myself have lived my entire life in this trap. I am familiar with its wicked ways. But as I listened to the words of both authors today, I pulled away from the immediate and looked out upon the overall. Will my children benefit more from my giving up everything I love for them? Or will they benefit more from seeing me balance my needs with theirs and those of their father? If we are having such a hard time making sacrifice after sacrifice, why would we want to model that for, thereby passing that on to, our kids? It is precisely this reason that I will never ask my husband to quit his job when we have children, though it causes him to travel around the world quite frequently. I would rather my children have a happy example of a person who follows his heart than a man "making a living" devoid of passion, yet filled with regret. How does that benefit a child or a marriage?

So, to me, Gilbert's words ring absolutely false. I am by no means championing the idea of the woman who does it all. No, no, no. I hate that mentality. I am championing the idea of a family who is there for each other. Not just a mother who is there for everyone else. There is no better time for a child to learn that he must at times forfeit his own happiness for others than the present. So if little Billy Ray has to step back on baseball practice so that his mom can go to pottery class every once in a while, I believe he will be a better man for it.


One lesson that my friends taught at the thespian conference last weekend that I absolutely loved was don't be nice. They were leading a partner task in physical acting, and they pointed out that if you are "nice" to your partner, thereby doing the work for them, they will not learn, they will not grow. Enough of this being nice stuff! We are making life too easy for each other, and definitely for our kids. Maybe it's time we stopped being so nice and instead started supporting each other's growth.