When my children were really little, I wanted nothing more than to be a fly on other people’s walls. Breastfeeding, sleep-training, whether to wear Baby and if so in a sling or a Björn — the decisions were all-consuming and the stakes unprecedented. Much of the time, I saw each as a giant opportunity for failure. It didn’t help that all of the other new parents I knew seemed to be running this gantlet of anxiety without so much as a scintilla of self-doubt.
When it wasn’t down for the count from sleep deprivation, the rational part of my brain knew that other people must struggle, too. Surely they were equal parts elated to see their toddler after daycare and frazzled enough to secretly wish bedtime would come early. Certainly they got nuggets at the drive-through from time to time. Maybe one or two occasionally snapped.
Add to that the question of my identity. Broad swaths of the old one had up and disappeared on me while I was in the maternity wing and had yet to be replaced by anything that felt solid. The popular mom stereotypes didn’t fit, but neither did I feel perfectly at home anymore with my childless homies.
There was precious little out there that spoke to any experience of parenting that wasn’t white, middle-class, heterosexual, and overjoyed to be living the whole nuclear fantasy. I resented how infantile mainstream magazines made mothers out to be. Books? There was Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, but the momoir genre had yet to be birthed. Salon.com was publishing great “Mothers Who Think” essays, but parents hadn’t yet tumbled to blogging. There were, in short, few windows into the experiences of others.
What was out there was frequently dull and soulless and made the mistake of assuming that we are all traveling a single, well-worn path from one universal experience to another. This dark and mirthless age for me was a mere decade ago, Dear Reader. Since then, the number of books describing their authors’ unique path to parenthood has exploded. It’s as if in a few short years, a genre was born, matured, and spawned subgenres that now are sending tentacles into niches.
I mention this because two radically different books by St. Paul parents describing radically different experiences are on shelves at your local bookstore. In very different ways, each tackles the arguably universal subject of trying to become a parent without a road map.
In She Looks Just like You: a Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood, Amie Klempnauer Miller explores her and her partner Jane’s experience becoming parents. Originally Klempnauer Miller was supposed to be the partner who birthed the child the two, with their “lesbian love of process,” had gone on a retreat to discuss having. After two years without success, Klempnauer Miller gave up. At which point Jane conceived with a single vial of donor sperm.
Klempnauer Miller then found herself without role model or road map. “I am excited about having a baby, but the excitement is tinged with some sadness,” she writes. “I feel left behind in unmarked territory. I am expecting a baby, but I am not pregnant. I will be a mother, but I won’t have given birth. I will adopt our child legally, but my experience has little or nothing in common with most adoptive parents. There is really no category, no name for what I will be. I am defined by what I am not: a nonbiological parent, the non-birth mother.”
From the trajectory of Jane’s pregnancy to Klempnauer Miller’s adjustment to work-at-home motherhood, the story is, in many ways, wholly familiar. I may be a biological mother, but I identified with Klempnauer Miller’s disorientation: At each turn, she was forced to negotiate first what she wanted motherhood to look like and then the terms on which she could have that within a larger society that, gayby boom or no, doesn’t have a word for someone like her, much less a shared vocabulary with which to describe her experience.
At the same time, not a day goes by when I don’t have at least one exchange with a child that’s couldn’t come straight from the pages of Colin Sokolowski’s The Accidental Adult: Essays and Advice for the Reluctantly Responsible and the Marginally Mature. You know: one of those near-out-of-body experiences where your child says or does something that suggests you are infallible, all-knowing, or all-powerful and you think, “Oh yeah, I’m the grown-up.”
Strictly speaking, Sokolowski’s is not a parenting book. Rather it’s a snarky look at how it feels to find that the above-referenced nuclear fantasy snuck up behind you and overtook your life. The parenting essays are sandwiched in between a chapter on entertaining — “Emily Post versus wiener roast” — and one on transportation that, yes, leans heavily to laments about minivans.
For “parental poseur” Sokolowski, fatherhood is “a place where I’m required to have a more reasoned response to the question, ‘Can I have some of that cake for breakfast, Daddy?’ than simply offering a knee-jerk, ‘Hell no! Daddy’s hungry too you know.’”
Sokolowski’s book is peppered with advice for the hipster hoping to maintain a modicum of self-respect. For instance, he advises parents of girls to “discourage them from giving you a button with a photo of them in their leotard from dance class or gymnastics. Because if they do, and you don’t wear it, then you’re a jerk. If you do wear it, then you may as well buy a Members Only jacket to pin it on… Wearing buttons like these is exactly what grandparents are for. They already have an outfit that complements these buttons perfectly.”
Most new parents are too self-conscious, too engaged in the tricky business of trying to grow into the role to be convinced their path to forming a family, extraordinary and unique though the details might be, has been trod before. I daresay the proliferation of books by parents who have blazed their own way could go a long way toward helping us understand that we’re more alike — and better parents — than we think.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
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