2011 - Talk Birth

notice any worth I had as a person or to accept and have patience for my birth as a mother.
When my first son was almost one, I wrote in my journal:
I feel like I have no one to talk to. I feel like no one understands me. I feel like I cannot
express what I really feel inside. I feel like no one believes me. I do not feel accepted. I feel like
my needs are not being met. I feel burned out. I feel drained. I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel
desperately unhappy. I feel guilty. I feel wrong. I feel alone. I feel unworthy. I feel like I am
not good. I feel invisible. I feel ignored. I feel small. I feel bad. I feel like I cannot say what I
mean and actually be heard. I feel like I can’t explain my “bad” feelings. I feel trapped. I feel
suffocated. I feel stressed. I feel overloaded. I feel like snapping. I feel mean. I feel unfair. I feel
selfish. I feel disconnected.
I miss Mark. I miss our relationship. I miss feeling right in our marriage. I miss being alone
together.
I feel like I am not enjoying motherhood the way I am “supposed” to. I feel confused. I feel
conflicted. I feel torn. I feel low. I feel resentful. I feel worried about the future. I feel anxious
about being good enough. I feel stretched. I feel taut. I feel like changing.
What helped me a great deal during this time were the voices of other women. Not women face-to-face,
though I had begun building a network of wonderful female friends, it seemed too painful or dark to broach
the question with them—-“Do you hate this sometimes too?” And I couldn’t really bear to voice my feelings
to my own mother, also a tremendous source of support for me, because to risk hearing her say, “Yes, sometimes
I did feel tortured by YOU” was not really what I needed. She also has a well-meaning, but frustrating
tendency to meet genuine expressions of despair with comments that imply I should put on a happy face.
Instead, it was the voices of women reaching off the printed page that met my hunger for contact. For truth.
For rawness and a look at the “ugly.” I gobbled up books about motherhood and women’s experiences of
mothering and have a permanent place in my heart for the “momoir.”
A quote that serves a recurrent guidepost (or almost obsession) in my life is, ”Don’t die with your music
still in you.” During my abovementioned painful transition to motherhood I couldn’t shake the feeling
that I wasn’t letting my ”music” out. Then, following the birth of my second son in 2006, sort of accidentally,
I began writing again and in earnest this time (articles, essays, blog posts, journals) and later realized that
I no longer have any fear about dying with my music still in me. And, I also don’t feel depressed, invisible,
worthless, or muted anymore. During my original fretting over this phrase, I felt like it was another type
of ”music” that I needed to let out (mainly that of the social service work that I had been groomed for in
graduate school), not words necessarily. However, I’ve finally realized that maybe it was literally my words
dying in me that gave me that feeling and that fretfulness. They needed to get out. I’ve spent a lifetime
writing various essays in my head, nearly every day, but those words always ”died” in me before they ever
got out onto paper. After spending a full three years letting other women’s voices reach me through books
and essays, and then six more years birthing the mother-writer within, I continue to feel an almost physical
sense of relief and release whenever I sit down to write and to let my own voice be heard.
—–
Molly Remer, MSW, CCCE is a certified birth educator, activist, and writer who lives in a straw bale
house in central Missouri with her husband, two young sons, and infant daughter. She blogs about birth at
[2]http://talkbirth.wordpress.com.
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