Before my son was born, when my belly was pushed to its limit with the outlines of this new life, when an unknown future confronted me and the world was new with possibilities, I sat on my husband’s lap and cried giant tears. In spite of the joy of this pregnancy, in spite of the wonder of carrying this new life, I was miserable.
“I don’t want to make my son unhappy,” I cried to Matthew. “I don’t want to do to him what my mother did to me. I don’t want him to grow up doubting himself and being afraid of everything,” I sobbed into Matthew’s shirt.
Matthew soothed me with assurances that that wouldn’t happen. He told me that I had a deeper understanding about myself than my mother ever had. I knew the warning signs of being too protective, too hands on. And I wasn’t the kind of person who needed to micromanage everything. On the contrary, I tended to let things be for a while until I understood them better.
“You won’t be the kind of mother who demands love from her child,” Matthew assured me. He will love you because you love him and you will create a wonderful life for our son.” I quieted down for a while. But a worm of doubt stayed with me for years.
Everything I did or didn’t do was suspect. When Andrew refused to breastfeed any longer at six months old, was it my fault because I had to go back to work? Would he be a sickly child because he wouldn’t be getting breast milk? Was there something wrong with my breast milk? Was I drying up? Was I a failure? Or maybe he just preferred formula because it was readily accessible while I was in my office earning money.
Expand this kind of crazy twenty questions with all the myriad topics that consume new parents and you have an idea of my own craziness. It was not easy being me. But neither did I turn into my mother. I let Andrew take the lead on walking and talking—actually, I didn’t have a choice. So that was easy. He walked at nine months but didn’t utter a coherent sentence until he was nearly two and a half. His nanny and I could understand him, but no one else could.
After I got over the breastfeeding humiliation, I didn’t care much whether Andrew ate or not, or how much he ate—unlike my mother, who would have conniption fits when my sister and I didn’t finish what was on our plates. She dragged us to the doctor all the time because we were so skinny and demanded that he tell her how to make us eat more. The doctor kept assuring her that we were perfectly healthy and would eat when we were hungry. And he was right. We are both overweight as of this writing.
