Pretentious Mommy Blogging

Apparently, those of us who waste bandwidth writing about our lives as stay-at-home moms are betraying the revolution. Similar to the current hatin' going on about women leaving upper level type jobs to raise their children--it is to betray women who use the internet to write about Important Things for those, like me, who use this writing thing to exercise our creativity in ways that work for us and our families.

If you've seen this controversy, you know enough about it. If you haven't seen it--lucky you--the above description spares you the vitriol casually tossed about in these, ahem, discussions.

So, I wonder, what if I did my mommy blogging in a pretension sauce? Not politics--that's for an entirely other entry--but literature? World literature? More precisely---Kafka?

Mr. Sweetie and I got to have a date night last weekend, and we went to see Theatre de la Jeune Lune's production of Amerika, or the Disappeared. I must admit that it was not exactly enjoyable, at least in part because the downward spiral of the main character was so painful. Despite his best efforts, he found himself on the wrong side of authority, unable to understand the charges against him, unable to escape punishment for things that were not his fault.

So, because I am who I am, I had to come home and Google Kafka, where I learned that he was the child of a domineering father. Kafka never married, and he was forced to retire in his 40s due to tuberculosis. He spent his last years in treatment, living off the money he received from his parents.

And that's where my mommy instincts kicked in. It's hard to be an adult--but it's something you can't avoid if you raise children. At least raise them responsibly. Kafka never did that--he never established his life and identity separate from his parents--and his art reflects the nature of his efforts to win his father's affection and his failure to do so. (More at my other blog, here.)

So, with that lengthy prologue, I come to my point--the way that parenting has forced me to step entirely outside my role as a daughter of my family of origin, to become a responsible adult in my family of choice. Even when the Pony was a baby, I did a number of things that were not easy (or even wise) for my family because I had not yet begun to think of myself as the mother. The addition of the Bunny made it inevitable--the balance had shifted and I had to be the one making decisions for the best of my family.

Which is not an easy step to take. I am far from certain that the decisions I make and the things that I do are right. I often want someone else to be the expert and give me the right answers. It is only over time that I have begun to realize that no one knows my family better than I do. No one has the "right" answers--there may even no be such things.

So, as I consider Kafka, I see the pain caused by his inability to separate from his parents--pain that is multiplied by the apparent arbitrariness of his father's behavior. It makes me glad that, painful as it is, I have had the opportunity to grow into adulthood.

Not that I don't like a little bit of praise now and then.