"I"

From "Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood" by Naomi Wolf; Doubleday: 2001; p. 106-107)

Like so many of the feelings of pregnancy and new motherhood, it was paradoxical: sometimes I felt the brightness and darkness at the same time.

I would burst into tears at the slightest emotional nick--scalding, cleansing, perverse tears that are ... lightly called hysterical. ... It occurred to me that, even if they were "merely hormonal," those convulsive tears were necessary, just as tropical storms are necessary when the barometric tension rises too high.

The tension was this: I was mourning, protesting a point of departure in the road that I could never retrace. An "I" would go forward, swept irrevocably on by the tide of the natural order, and that "I" would sit on the sofa hour after hour and be someone's Lithium, someone's Lethe, someone's Popsicle--someone who would come to be the love of my life, but whom I did not yet know. And the "I" would reconfigure eventually around the need, and take joy in it, and spin a new identity. But it would never again be the "I" it had been before.

So many older women kept advising me that the mother-self to come would be a better self. I found this less than reassuring. This ostensibly transformed person of the near future might indeed be kinder and more patient than my prematernal self, with whom I was at least familiar, shortcomings and all. But that maternal "I" did not exist yet. I did not yet know if I could successfully transform my current self into her--let alone, given how famous descriptions of motherly qualities can sound, if I would even like her.

Meanwhile, the maiden "I" sometimes had to weep with the sure, coming death of the maiden-self, the self that could "arise and go now" at will; the self that is not food for others, but eats and drinks the world.