Does Motherhood Define Us?

While attending a recent seminar, I listened to Jungian analyst Katharine Bainbridge talk about the mother archetype. It was a good talk, the kind that prompts the rapid taking of notes and the quick-fire making of connections you hadn't thought to make. I kept thinking about the book I'd started and reluctantly set down to get to the workshop on time, Melissa Fay Greene's, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet. What I was reading in the book echoed what I was hearing in the classroom, though not in an obvious that's-because-she's-a-mother kind of way.

Melissa was one of the first journalists to interview specialists about the care and outcomes of post-institutionalized children for articles that appeared in such publications as The New Yorker (I remember reading "The Orphan Doctor" several months after we returned from Russia after adopting). She is also the author of the acclaimed books There is No Me Without You and Praying for Sheetrock. But this particular book, a memoir, is about Melissa and her trial-lawyer husband, already the parents of four children, deciding over a period of a few years, to adopt five more; one son from Bulgaria, three sons and daughter from Ethiopia.

I love this book. For one, it immediately engages and has tension and conflict, and keeps you turning pages to find out what happens next. To find out why. And how! Some of the stories she tells are really funny, as you would imagine with nine kids. Others will make you cry. Which I did.

These stories are not only about the children they adopted, but about all their children and how each fits into the lives of the others. Each story about her nine paints a distinct portrait of each child (their childhood, orphanage life, meeting the family they left behind, going off to college, for example). Yet the bigger the familial nucleus grows in number the more it seems to honor and paradoxically define, nourish and strengthen the individuality of each member that much more. No one is lost or eclipsed; everyone belongs. As the mother and the writer, Melissa holds the space for each child to...be. And so naturally. I noticed this immediately; I felt it.

A few years ago, I wrote this about motherhood:

"Motherhood did not come naturally. I used to think that was because I jumped into it midstream (given my kids' ages). Come to find out that wasn't the reason. The age thing (theirs) wasn't what made me feel more vulnerable than I ever imagined I could be, or ever wanted to be.

Motherhood changed my life on so many levels I still have the tendency to say it's made me an entirely different person. But when I stop and think about it, a more accurate description is to say it made me move beyond the person I thought I was supposed to be to finally see and find and accept the real me.

Parenthood is, well, intense. No kidding. It's mostly a raw process, not for the weak. And maybe less because you're raising kids and more because you're raising you, defining you, figuring out who you are—separate from your role as parent but all at the same time."

For me, this is where the archetype stuff resonated as both a parent and as an (adult) child. If an archetype is a universal symbol, an overarching, unshakeable pattern of being, it must exist in all of us. I can see that today. I wish I'd seen more of that a decade ago.

But I found comfort in Melissa's book, for she seems to know this, and it is really great to watch her children know this about themselves through her. I like that she seems to know the undulating truth that took me a bit longer to learn (but that's okay, too): that we are each already whole, whether we know it or not.

For a more traditional review of this book, read this one from The Christian Science Monitor.