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Primal time
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As a new mother, you can't think about what else you could be doing. It's no longer up to you.
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By Louise Kennedy, Boston Globe
`OK,'' the obstetrician shouted, ``it's time to get primal.''
At the time, her advice seemed to apply only to the task that immediately confronted me: pushing my son out into the world. In the nearly three weeks between that day and the one on which I'm writing this, however, I've come to believe that ``getting primal'' is the best short description of new motherhood I can imagine.
There's a simple reason for this: Babies themselves are primal. They eat, they sleep, they digest what they ate and awaken hungry again. At least in these first exhausting days, that's pretty much it. And so mothers fall naturally into a responsive rhythm: They feed, they soothe, they clean and feed again. Everything else fades into the background; there's no room for any demands but these simple, essential ones of the baby.
If you're a parent, you already know all this. If you're not, no amount of reading about it can make it real to you. (I know, because I read such descriptions in every parenting book on the market while awaiting my baby, and yet it all seemed new when he at last appeared.) And, whether you're a parent or not, you don't need to read yet another late-blooming mom's essay on her transcendent bliss. Don't worry: I won't deny the bliss, but what I'm more interested in right now is the transcendent un-transcendence of daily life with an infant, the way he relentlessly demands that you immerse yourself in the mundane physical facts of existence. This isn't an easy experience to put into words, because it's so profoundly nonverbal. Still, I feel a need to try - not to analyze it or interpret it, but simply to preserve it. For I know that, as intense as the sensations of these last weeks seem now, unless I apply the fixative of language, they will eventually fade and blur. That's the problem with being primal: It's all in the present.
Of course, that's also the great reward. ``Be here now,'' they told us in the '60s, but with a baby in the house, you don't need a guru to remind you. ``Now,'' he cries, and ``now,'' and ``now'' again, and you stop folding laundry, or writing, or whatever it is you're doing, and tend to his need. Then, maybe, you go back to what you were doing, but the important thing, the essential thing, is not to think about that interrupted task while you are being pulled away from it. Quickly, you learn a new way of being: You do what you can, when you can, and you try to stay focused on what's in front of you. If you want to stay sane, you stop thinking about what else you could be doing right now - because the truth is that it's no longer up to you.
This surrendering of control is precisely what I feared most about becoming a mother. And, yes, I feel impatient when I leave the house an hour later than I'd planned because the baby got hungry unexpectedly But the great surprise is that, most of the time, I like this new rhythm. It forces concentration; it focuses my attention; it reminds me to decide what's important and then ignore what's not. I'm a lot more tired with a baby than I was without one, but I'm a lot less neurotic; I just don't have the time.
As I write this, I can hear some of my childless friends (and the pale ghost of my own childless self) sighing over how simple-minded it all sounds. That's exactly right. It is simple-minded, in the way that all those Zen masters were counseling us to be. I think this is what the obstetrician was preparing me for: By sending us back into a primal state, babies rescue us from our exquisitely intellectual, abstract, modern selves. And while I doubt that any adult could live in this state forever (for one thing, the level of witty banter is pretty low), we need to be reminded now and then that it's what lies at the core of all our lives.
You'll have to excuse me now. The guru is hungry.
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