Motherhood in Fragments

Blogging is popular these days, it seems to me, precisely because of our sense that reality has become more and more fragmented and distorted. Blogs seem to cut to the chase--so immediate! So unmediated! At least in appearance...and blogs tell us that, yes, we can learn about life by picking up one shard of a fragment after another.

I also like the immediacy and fragmentariness of blogging--perhaps because motherhood itself is so much about not being fragmentary--about remembering where I put the keys and the cell phone because the baby is in the carseat already and I have to go now, remembering whether the baby Tylenol is in the baby's room or in the kitchen, remembering how to do a thousand little things to keep a child well-fed, well-rested, well-exercised, clean, dry on his bottom, and (ultimate hat trick!) happy...motherhood is about being solid, above all else--

And blogging feels like the reverse. But maybe it's not true. Maybe one learns to be a mother in fragments. I do feel sometimes like I'm dancing in place--learning one new skill today, only to find that some mysterious new event has taken place with my child that will force me to learn another new skill tomorrow. And since we never really master motherhood--maybe all we have are these fragments of knowledge, and just like blogs, we hope that they will someday form something like a complete story.

Perhaps my dream the other night had something to do with my feeling of ignorance where motherhood is concerned...a Japanese woman I'd just met was angry with me because she had not received guidebooks and maps when she had disembarked from the airplane at San Francisco Airport. "At every other airport I've been to," she told me, "I receive these things. Why weren't they available this time?" I felt horribly guilty. Why she should be especially upset with me is besides the point--somehow, in the dream, this woman was my responsibility. In the dream, then, I was both myself and this woman--the lost woman looking for a guidebook, and the woman who feels that somehow, she should have had a guidebook ready for the other woman, even though in reality, no one ever receives such things at the airport terminal--nor when one takes off into the frightening and not-too-friendly skies of motherhood.