I’m a grandmother now, but when I was a young mother and still entirely committed to the bookstore, a friend of mine who was already the mother of two, came in one day.
In a try to align my motherhood self with my bookstore self, my husband & I had come to a shared baby care plan: he took the morning shift while I worked like crazy at the store. By noon, on his way to his work, he’d bring our baby to stay with me for a feeding and then, hopefully, a nap.
Our office in the back of the bookstore had been turned ever so slightly domestic to allow for the primate activity I’d brought into it. We’d made space in a corner for a bassinet. The small kitchen worked okay for breastfeeding.
In my life up to this time, I had built self-definition from a practice of reading deeply, following threads of theoretical complexities, exploring expression through writing.
With my headstrong plunge into motherhood, I found the gifts & abilities of that practice did not translate. Expecting to craft a heart-infused yet clean paragraph of motherhood, I felt instead failure floating at the edges of my sense of self, tracking me.
Although it seemed as if my group of women friends were all having babies at the same time, motherhood then was a more ambiguous, less endorsed venture in my “artistic” set than it appears to be now. My friend who came to visit at the bookstore that day was the first among us to be a mother. I shared with her my illusive state of self. She was empathetic.
I stand in the center of the store, listen to her response. I hold my baby. He’s fussy. To keep him calm, to be able to listen a few moments longer, I let my body absorb his restless motion. It reverberates across my arms, down my hips grounding out through my legs.
I watch my friend's eyes sweep back and forth across the room in demonstration of her point. “It’s the scanning, interrupted focus of motherhood,” she says. This interrupted focus is familiar to her. She recognizes this pull of attention here and there, notes it is entirely different from my developed practice of concentrated thought. (My unrecognized privilege, then, I think, now.)
As her eyes come to rest on my boy, she says having a scanning focus is the boots on the ground, everyday meaning of being the one who gives care to vulnerable and dependent life: always listening, always at the ready to respond; always and still entirely connected, both bodies a part of the same biosystem, even after giving birth - that last punctuation mark many of us thought would signify bodily separation.
A grandmother now, like I said, I’m long back into a less-bodily-with-others connected self. I can make time again for concentration and ponder. But in my consideration & use of this Cyber tool, with its scanning, interrupted focus, always leading here and there, I think how much it’s like that mind of motherhood.
Perhaps, in this era of Cyber immersion, we’re all mothers now.