Waiting For Godot (or a Baby): Notes on Identity, Change and Public Presentation
Any day now, I’m going to have a baby.
Like, an actual baby that I get to keep indefinitely. Which is, admittedly, an awfully long time.
I still haven’t wrapped my head completely around this concept, even though I’ve been quite pregnant for many wine-deprived and sushi-less months now.
Little Thwacky McKickerson, currently 2 days late and counting, has been wreaking increasing havoc on my insides this season, growing to the point where I am indeed sporting the archetypal, unforgiving bowling ball strapped to my midsection, which renders previously casually easy movements (like, say, sitting or turning over or putting on shoes and socks) not so easy. I feel like an ungainly arthritic dugong most days.
Did I mention that one unexpected side effect of this whole gestation thing has been ridiculously arthritic joints? Like, to the point where I have to do hand and finger flexing exercises for half an hour every morning just for the privilege of being able to bend my fingers enough to, say, hold a tea cup or turn a door knob? Did I mention the headaches? The exhaustion? The desire to just curl up into a quiet ball and hibernate indefinitely like Gerald T. Bear?
This is why I haven’t written much this season. Not because of the bowling ball or the creaky granny fingers, no, but rather because I’m very self conscious about what I choose to focus on in my writing here and in my overall public self presentation. This is still technically a travelly expatty personal blog with an Asian focus- I have yet to change the title or the design or the descriptors even though my current life doesn’t match any of them.
Sorry, guys.
I feel very self conscious now when I write about what I’m doing or thinking (or rather, start to write, as my drafts folder is bulging with attempts at writing that quietly petered out and were left forgotten). I have an unspoken fear that if I write about my current life, I will either freak people out or bore them or annoy them. I will not be the person they expected me to be, the person I had presented to the world for so many years.
You know, the one hijacking the black pirate taxi in that third tier city somewhere in China. The one begrudgingly doing shots of toddler-face baijiu at banquets attended by low level communist party officials, trying to work up the courage to eat the braised bear paw on the plate, rather than just the greens and garlic in the sauce (for the record, bear paw tastes like fatty cartilage and the greens and garlic are the most appetizing part of the dish). The one on the back of a motorcycle taxi in [insert country here], or the one trying to navigate the local bus system in a script she is wholly illiterate in. The one trying to learn Turkish, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish. The one documenting the secret lives of Chinese mops or deconstructing ingredients in comfort foods so they can be recreated using what is found in an Asian market. The ones who does things, goes places, experiments with daunting and discomfiting options, then writes something really long and dryly snarky about it.
I’m not really that person these days. I mean, I’m still the person that did those things in the past and will probably do them again in the relatively near future, but I can’t really be that person right now.
The person I am right now is 40 weeks pregnant, tired and achy, barely leaving the house (it’s grey and wintery anyway), happily spending days reading and baking bread and drinking tea, living a very quiet and stable but happy life in a terrace house in a slightly granola bohemian inner suburb of Leicester, surrounded mainly by my husband’s (I have a husband! Holy crap!) massive circle of family and childhood friends. Any day now, my time will be filled with baby wrangling and sleeplessness and further disorientation when it comes to matters of identity and perception.
I’m not just talking about introducing a kid into the picture. I’m well prepared for the madness that brings.
What I’m really trying to wrap my head around is how to articulate this abruptly altered version of myself that others know. I’ve avoided writing about my pregnancy because I didn’t want it to define me. I didn’t want to do a week by week photo montage of bump shots. I didn’t want my physical condition to become my temporary identity. This isn’t a pregnancy blog. The same goes for the changes I’ll be dealing with any day now. How can I write about my life and experiences and observations without it turning into a single track Mommy-blog?
For probably the first time in my adult life, I’m experimenting with a remarkably domesticated, stable, fairly ordinary, family-centred approach to living. It’s rather nice. In a way, I feel like those people who, at age 40, quit their jobs to go sailing around the world or to teach English in [insert TEFLy country here) or to write a novel whilst on the road. It’s an inner shake up, a necessary change.
I just need to figure out how to incorporate my current incarnation into the messy patchwork of all my previous incarnations so that I am still recognizable as myself, as a multi-dimensional person with a complicated history of experiences and experiments and an unwritten future that I’m determined to not allow to become tedious and predictable.
I still want to learn how to make proper aged cheeses from raw milk and daunting peasanty breads from a levain. I want to learn Arabic and Spanish. I want to learn how to work with glass, both stained and blown (ooh, kinky). I want to start drawing and painting again. I want to travel a lot. My list is still long. I want to move to new countries and be forced to learned a million new things, over and over, until I reach the end of my rope. I want to write. Maybe a book, maybe a spin-off of the mop blog, maybe a weird and subversive collection of stories for kids. I want to buy a cheap and crappy old property somewhere far away and figure out how to make it lovely.
I want to do a lot of things.
I also want to figure out how to integrate a kid into all of these wants and I want to be able to see the big picture clearly enough that my world doesn’t become too small, too focused on just one aspect of it all, that I lose sight of what is out there.
Ceci n’est pas un Mommy-Blog.
I just don’t know what it is yet.
Bear with me while I work this one out. It may take some time.
You’ve just beautifully articulated my own concerns over the possibility of adding a child into the mix. It’s a frightening prospect for someone who loves travel and has previously relished independence. I think there are a lot of women out there who could benefit from your lessons learned in this new arena.
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It is a frightening prospect in many ways, indeed. I mean, I feel pretty much as ready as I’ll ever be to have a baby and my insides feel pretty calm and confident and willing, but I am daunted by how it’ll affect my relationship with the outside world (if that makes any sense). I’ll keep you posted on the struggle!
I went through a similar transition (well, except for the whole baby thing) when I decided to move to Michigan. I never considered myself much of a travel blogger, but at least I was living overseas or just-home-from-overseas so I still had something of an exotic air about me (or so I told myself… it’s possible that was just gas).
But Michigan? It was time to give up the travel blog schtick for good… but then what? I pretty much stopped writing and when I did write I wasn’t enjoying it. Until this Christmas when I decided what the hell. I’m just going to write about plastic dinosaurs and cat videos and soup. And, you know what, people still read it. I’m not entirely sure why. But they do.
So I’m sure no matter what you write about — whether it be nappies or crumpets or sea monsters — people will read. Or at least I will. And that’s all that counts… right? 🙂
P.S. YOU’RE HAVING A FREAKING BABY! SERIOUSLY?? THIS IS CRAZY. ALSO, AWESOME. AND EXCITING. AND CRAZY.
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I know, right? A FREAKING BABY! Still wrapping my head around that- hell, wrapping my head around the whole year. It’s been an interesting one to say the least.
I’ve found your transition home to be a good guide for easing back in to the familiar without automatically resisting and buying a flight to [insert daunting country here]. You went home and you found things that made you happy. You went home and remained an interesting person who maintained curiosity and adventurousness. I’m not exactly at home, but, jeeze, England isn’t exactly a challenge by any means, nor is it different enough for me to feel like I can write a culture shock post. It’s been really nice and really easy. And that unnerves me…
Take photos! You don’t have to post them online, but you’ll love to see your bump later, years from now. 🙂
I can’t wait to see pics of your little one, but as far as the blog goes, I think you get a fresh start. You can turn this space into whatever you want, it’s your talent as a writer and story teller that’s important, you’ve never been a straight genre writer (or else you are the worst travel guidebook I’ve ever read) so you’ll be fine. 🙂
Photos have been taken, for personal interest only 😉 It’s been a very interesting journey and I still can’t believe how quickly I reached the massive bump and shuffle stage- it seems like only a few weeks ago I was telling you that I was 6 weeks pregnant and asking for advice…
There will be pics posted online when he’s born, but I want to keep it at a non-invasive level. Balance is important. There will be laser cats. And for this blog, god, I don’t know what’s next. You’re right- I suck at genre specific writing. I just don’t want to get sucked into a one dimensional focus, or to be perceived as doing such due to having posts about baby stuff. We shall see…
I’m going to pray for you tonight, Mary Anne- seriously. The changes that are happening in your life (although they may seem strange to you right now) are beautiful and wonderful and right- nothing at all to be embarrassed or apologetic about. God designed us to have families, and to get to that place where we are content with what we have. Your new life sounds lovely, it really does, and I, and I’m sure all your friends out there, wish nothing but the best for you. Take good care…. 🙂
Thanks, Stacey! I’m really enjoying having this low key, gentle family time, and for the first time in my life, I feel quite confident that I’m on the right path. Took me long enough… 😉
I second what Christine said, you get to do whatever you want with this space. I’m nearly 14 months into motherhood and still figuring out the direction for mine, but that’s more because of having moved away from Kyrgyzstan than adding a little one to the mix. Just like Sally, I’m writing about new things because I want to, and people are still reading it (even though I got a few emails from people saying they’d “miss my blog” after I moved out of Bishkek, but oh well).
Also, good luck with the post-due date waiting. My son was 16 days past his (ahhhhhh! have I mentioned that before?) and no amount of “rest while you can” or “you can’t be pregnant forever” or “try doing _____” helped me feel any better about it. But, good luck anyway 😉
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Someone actually said that about your blog? Dang! I read your stuff because I like your stuff (including the baking) not because you are in Country X. Mind you, that’s MY current anxiety, as reader numbers have halved since I left China. It could be because I’m no longer writing about China, or it could be the overwhelmingly personal focus of the posts, or the scarcity of posts, or the fact that they’re all hovering around 1000 words or so… I don’t know. Am I only readable and appealing when I’m in a faraway land that captures people’s imaginations? What can I do if I’m living in suburban midland England?
Oh dear.
Dang. 16 days??? Did they pressure you to induce? From what I gather, they start suggesting it around 12 days after the due date here. Don’t want to think about that…
Anyway, still waiting for the arrival. 40w + 3 days now, but am not counting. 😉 Just feeling ungainly and achy and ready to feel a bit more physically normal again.
I know that feeling of not wanting the baby and pregnancy to become definition. That said, I do think having a baby changes you. I know having Lila changed me, although it took some time for the post LIla-fog to life and for me to figure it out.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why it feels funny to write about pregnancy. I also don’t take a lot of photos, although mostly because I just kind of run out of time at the end of the day.
That said, you will always be you. Just now you’ll have this person in your life, and that does change things.
I’m in the middle of writing a piece for my blog about “home vs travel.” And how staying in one place is considered being home, but truth be told, I think when you’re having a baby and your life is about to completely change in who-knows-what-way, that seems not very settled to me. It’s just that no one ever writes adventure travel books about the 9 months of pregnancy.
Ok, this went longer than I intended. Thinking of you! Hope the little one arrives soon and you can get back to your cheeses and the rest of what your life will be.
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Adventure travel books about the 9 months of pregnancy! Totally! When I look back on the past year, I’m actually quite shocked by how very unstable it has actually been, even though I’ve been privately chiding myself for being too domesticated (possibly due to the fact that we had been planning a mega road trip through central and maybe south America for this past Sept–>?). But really, in the midst of the upheaval of finding out I was pregnant (expected, but not so soon- seriously, we thought at my age it would take more than one month of trying…), we left China, went to Canada, went to England, went back to Canada, got married, struggled for months over my tricky UK visa application, moved at the last minute to the UK (27 weeks!), stayed with his folks out in the very villagey countryside, found a home of our own and furnished it from scratch. And now we are here. And I feel boring and settled. How irrational.
I wonder if I only feel interesting when my geographic context is very juxtaposed?
I think we probably put a lot of pressure on ourselves, because marriage, children and domestication are definitions of women that have, well, pretty much kept women from exploring, writing and creating for centuries.
I’ve been struggling with the balance. I can’t help but think of Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own. Like if I don’t have space and time for adventure and creation then I’ll go insane or something.
Or perhaps I just think too damn much. (Probably so.)
Fwiw, I think part of the reason it feels so irrational is because there aren’t that many models for how to do this life thing of travel but with a family. There are some, more now than 10 years ago for sure, but family and settled tend to by synonymous. Even though, to be honest, settled in one place with a house, mortgage, rent, bills and the like isn’t really as settled and safe as people think.
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Indeed. And in a weird way, I’m relieved to be slowing down and staying somewhere easy and fairly familiar for a while, as the past decade has been pretty chaotic. The funny thing is, it’s deceptively settled as we’ve only signed a 6 month lease on our little terrace house and a huge percentage of our furniture is borrowed from friends and family and our actual possessions are super minimal and there is fairly constant talk about what we could do next, where could we go… I’m pretty sure that travel and movement and change will always be a huge aspect of my life because it always has been and it’s how I like it, how my brain works. I guess the whole baby thing is making me feel irrational because, as you noted, there aren’t that many role models out there for families. I’ve met a few over the years, and know of others through blogs and FB, but it still feels a bit unreal…
Yes, well, there is definitely something unreal about waiting around for a new human being to arrive, you know, from your body. For all I know, you have a kid now between the time you posted and I had a chance to get back to you.
Which, btw, it is a pretty amazing adventure. I think easy to overlook bc it doesn’t include jumping off cliffs and the other typical travel scenes, but there’s nothing quite like life changing over night with a baby.
I’ll be thinking of you! 🙂
Leigh Shulman recently posted..How-to find images for your blog without getting sued
So, your life has changed a little. Your reader’s lives have changed a little too. It’s fine. There may be some old readers who’ll abandon you, but you’ll also get new readers drawn by how normal motherhood is even in such a crazy place as China. Or they’ll be drawn by something else. Make your kid a Chinese themed baby blanket and you’ve got the best of both worlds. Don’t sweat the small stuff, if you stifle yourself your writing will go flat and you’ll lose waaay more readers that way then a small content shift. I mean, your still an adventurer, your just adding a sidekick into the mix and traveling in unknown territory. Cheer up! 🙂
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Am well cheered up now! Thanks for your comment- and you’re right: readers will come (or go) for many reasons…