I’ve just come back from nearly three weeks in Rome, Vienna, and a couple places in between (thanks to Sheila and Liz for holding the fort!), where I expected my 8-month-old, plus stroller and diaper bag, to hamper the routine. Instead, being a mother suddenly became my primary travel experience. It drew interactions that a loner introvert like me would usually have had to work at.
It’s no secret that the Italians love kids. Groups of Italian teenage girls dropped their boyfriends’ arms and turned their backs on the Colosseum to take pictures of my little boy, who smiled away and took it all in stride. I left his legs bare much of the time and once a woman ran out of her shop as I was passing, not to lecture me about covering him up, but to kiss his bare little feet while he was slumped over asleep in his stroller. Elderly people made a point to play with him in restaurants when he got fussy during dinner time. It all made me want to move there immediately, because, frankly, the US doesn’t do a good job of making you feel like the coolest person in the world for being a mother.
What really struck me was the middle-aged woman I met in passing, or simply passed on the street. They melted when they looked at him, of course, maybe thinking of their own grown-up children or grandchildren to come, but there was something else, a kind of pathos and patience in their expressions that gave me the odd feeling I was constantly passing retired goddesses who spend a lot of time doing dishes.
There was wisdom in those faces, adoration of this new human and knowledge of everything I am to experience over the next decades of my life: the joys my son will give me, but also the heartbreaks. Their expressions of pleasure and sadness said everything anyone needs to know about life. It’s simply here to be lived, every little part of it.
For almost as long as civilization has been around, literature, history, and current affairs has focused on the meetings and clashes of great minds and overblown egos. It has focused on the activities of men, ignoring the activities of women who were simply at home making life happen. The trials of bringing up children and making food and creating a home-space have been ignored as trivial.
But last week, while George Bush took his ego on a trip to Jerusalem and Gordon Brown frantically tried to save his political career, I was standing in various places talking with other women about teething, and I knew, suddenly, that there was nothing more important in the entire world than two women from different cultures, neither of them speaking the other’s language, waving their hands around to talk. We gestured to demonstrate methods of alleviating teething pain; we rolled our eyes and laughed ruefully to show how exhausting and frustrating it was to have a baby at all, and how wonderful. We didn’t need words or trade deals or peace treaties or conferences.
Even elderly women in Vienna, a city not known for its love of children, smiled at him. “Hold onto it,” said one 80-something-year-old on the U-bahn as she was getting off. “Hold onto every minute.”
I could, I realized, go anywhere in the world and have something essential to talk about with knowing anything about local politics. Motherhood is universal. And if you think discussing teething and sleeping habits and pooping is trivial, consider this: how many despots, dictators, and paranoid egomaniacs are running the world right now because their mothers were too harassed, tired, uninformed, or incompetent to hold their babies when they were crying? If you believe that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects the weather of the whole world, then how do you think the world is affected by how one single mother deals with her teething baby when he’s screaming?
