The Lure of the Gothic Heroine, Part Three

The summer that I discovered Twilight, the continual existential crisis that forms the heart of post-modern motherhood hit a peak. I struggled mightily to find myself as anything more than H’s mama, and I fought against the general drudgery of the housework that was supposed to make up my days. I had worked for ten years before my marriage, and once married, everything screeched to a halt for me as we picked up and moved four times in the first two years for my husband’s career and interests. I had defined myself by what I did for so long that without a job or academic career, I no longer knew who I was. We had moved to Philly when I was pregnant with H, so almost all my friends were from the mommy mafia. I craved creative outlets, but also wanted to find contentment at home, a goal that seemed so elusive as to be fantastical to me. Perhaps my existential crisis sounds odd to those who know me well, as I am not exactly an ardent feminist. Nonetheless, that crisis has haunted me through my years of mothering and I’m still trying to find my way through it.

I identify with Bella as a Gothic heroine, being a person who eschewed many of the ideals of the feminist movement and yet found myself feeling lost amidst those around me who went back to work and didn’t have time to cultivate a domestic life. I felt out of step with all the women who wore trousers every day and never engaged in religious ritual, be it fasting or simply attending a church or synagogue service. There were a handful of us that stayed home, but we were scattered all over the city, and had a great diversity of personality, interests, and available time, and so it became harder and harder to maintain those relationships. Four years on, I have basically lost touch with all but two or three of that original group of 20 or so women who were so important to me in the early days of mothering. When H was about a year old, I started my stamping business and did the crafting thing, which helped to give me some sense of purpose, but I still felt like there was something off-kilter about my life. I never seemed to be able to get a handle on the chaos of my days, even as H settled down into a more predictable schedule.

Shortly after finishing the Twilight series and getting somewhat caught up in the Twilight mania that seemed to grip everyone that year, I rebelled against my frumpy fashion years and started dressing “young”, wearing jeans and more form-fitting shirts/dresses, cut my hair into trendy layers (but kept the length for the sake of my marriage) and worked hard on my physical appearance. On some level I thought that if the outer shell was pleasing, I would be content. Not surprisingly, my attention to the externals wasn’t enough to satisfy the deeper (and until recently unidentified) sense that something was very wrong with me and my perspective on life.

I sometimes read a mommy blogger who writes about her domestic life and she is domestic with a capital D. She is everything I aspired to be at the beginning of my marriage—makes everything from scratch, washes her baby’s cloth diapers, cleans her entire house every day and takes joy in it, and has found motherhood to be a complete panacea of contentment and bliss. I, on the other hand, found motherhood and housewifery to be one of the first five circles of hell, with horrible nursing experiences, a cranky/fussy baby that didn’t sleep for the first year, and the inability to get the rest of it under control. I could feel my brain atrophying with every diaper change. I just couldn’t find myself in the role of housewife and mother. Her ruminations rubbed me raw and I couldn’t figure out how she managed her sanguinity. What changed things for me was the beginning of my meal planning journey, and from there, a number of household tasks fell into place. I felt a sense of purpose and rootedness that I hadn’t felt for a long time. This may not seem to fit with Gothic heroism, but I think part of Bella’s development as a character is that she finds her place and her purpose within the family structure of the Cullens and is content. Finding some sense of purpose in my life as a homemaker and wife by organizing it all into daily tasks has given me some measure of content for the present. The incredible wanderlust and urge toward change that has characterized much of my early adulthood has been tempered by this contentment. I’m still eager to visit new lands and try new things, but I’m happier to come home again at the end of it.

I will admit that the addition of two children in two years has disrupted sense of order, and right now I’m just trying to stay ahead of the meals and the laundry, and doing blitz cleaning as needed, but I hope that as I settle into life with three little ones, I will find a better rhythm again. I miss my academic life sometimes, but I miss it in the way that one misses being single—it was a different time and place and quite incompatible with the life I’m living now. I still struggle against a certain amount of slothfulness, and fight a continual battle against the basically selfish desire to have a whole day to myself to be creative or start work on a new novel, and I suspect that these will always be stumbling blocks for me, but I do know that the terrible restlessness that plagued me that summer has gone, if not replaced with total peace, at least some small measure of it.

I’ve come to two great conclusions in thinking through these points. The first is that my longing for pre-modern society is in fact a longing for place and purpose as much as anything else. The second is that modern technology and the capitalist urge that accompanies much of it are useful in their ways, but not a substitute for connectedness in community. I’ve always been tempted by people who live off the grid and other extreme types of life styles, as it seemed to me that there was a kind of simplicity and happiness in those choices. I’ve recently begun to think that eschewing technology or post-modern society simply for the sake of itself is not the road to happiness. It is more about ordering one’s life in a way that gives purpose.

That still leaves me with the quandary of having to exist in a post-secular, post-modern world and find meaning and purpose in it, while raising my children to walk the path of salvation and keeping to the journey of the straight and narrow myself. I’m still pondering that one, but I’m finding that there are little moments that remind me of the journey and help keep my mind focused and prayerful. Oddly, since I’ve found my way into this new place, I’ve identified less with the pop culture phenomenon that Twilight has become, even though I still very much enjoy the stories and movies. The angst and general unhappiness that accompanied my first readings of them has left me and now I’m left only with a (slightly) guilty pleasure, with none of the excess weight.