Giving Birth

“Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-groomed, and unaggressive.” This quote by Leslie M. McIntyre appears as a sidebar in the pages of Julia Cameron’s wonderful book The Artiste’s Way. 

In the book, Cameron shares several insights on how blocked artistes – writers, painters, dreamers – can access and recover their creative selves. She talks about our tendency to be self destructive and what that really means.

“The question “Are you self destructive?” is asked so frequently that we seldom hear it accurately. What it means is Are you destructive of your self? And what that really asks us is Are you destructive of your true nature?” Are you?

Am I? At this point, these questions resonate with me deeply. They bring to the fore issues I have been struggling with – the fact that I want to grow as a writer and a creative person while feeling that my biological clock is ticking. I know what having a baby here in the U.S. means – it means hard work and the fact that that will be my main job for at least a few years.

Could I still bring forth my creative babies while tending to a human baby? Would the stories inside me remain still-born and never come to term? These questions create ripples of discomfort inside me.

And then there is the other dimension – of other people’s expectations. “When are you planning to have a baby?” Haven’t many of us heard this? Sometimes, when I hear such questions, I wonder why they don’t ask me – “What are your plans for giving birth to yourself?” Like countless women, I am inching closer to that moment when I need to make a decision about having children.

Growing up, that was always a part of my dream. It still is, but there is also the growing sense that without fully being and becoming who I am, it’ll be very hard to be a great mother.

Motherhood is not, of course, the idealized state we see in Hindi movies or see glorified in Indian culture. The real truth isn’t mentioned very often. That each of us has a being that needs expression as well as relationship to find fulfillment. And which curdles inside when it doesn’t find an outlet.

One of my earliest memories of a strong woman is the mother of a friend of mine. She was intelligent, resourceful and ambitious (isn’t that a bad, almost dirty word for a woman to be associated with). I remember her pacing up and down the corridor of her swanky NepeanSea Road home in what was then called Bombay, straining to breathe inside the confines of a traditional homemaker’s role. Her children didn’t always make her happy.

I am afraid that if I am not ready for them, my children won’t make me happy either. And yet, I have so much love to give. As I wallow in these doubts, I come back again to the beginning and ask myself: Am I self-destructive?