The XX files

It’s
fitting that Mother’s Day occurs in the spring, but not because life is
bursting out all over. It’s fitting because spring is when daycare centers and
kindergartens need to know your plans for next fall. Will you stay at home with
your kids (if you’re lucky enough to have choices)? Start working or increase
your hours?

            Instead of leading to cut-and-dried
answers, these questions often lead to the Big Philosophical Questions, like:
“Who am I?” and “What was I put on this earth to do?”

            I blame Maternal Stockholm Syndrome.
It’s not unlike Stockholm Syndrome, named after a group of people in Sweden who
were kidnapped by bank robbers and grew to identify with their captors.
Maternal Stockholm Syndrome is what happens to us when we’ve spent just a
little too much time nursing, pacing, wiping, bathing, singing, and
patty-caking.

            If you’ve had the resources and
desire to stay home with your child and you haven’t gone broke or bonkers,
you’re already ahead of the game. At some point, though, it’s time to plan a
return to work. But mothers worry that in caring for our children, we’ve lost
something of our old selves. Of course we love our little captors. How could we
not? They’re, well, captivating. But
there’s a downside.

            The tone of our conversations has
swung from the extreme irony of our child-free years to the mind-melting
sincerity of parenthood. Black clothes reveal the spit-up, so we now wear “fun”
colors. Gorgeous Italian shoes don’t do sandbox time so well, so we wear
sneakers. Showers become so infrequent that they replace hot sex in our fantasy
lives; our neglected hair flies in wisps all around our heads.

            Not only do we identify with our
captors, we look like them. How can we ever go back to work? Who on earth would
hire us?

I made a break
for it. After
18 months of cooing and coloring, I decided I should either go back to work or
just stick my brain in the microwave and be done with it. When I landed an
interview for a PR/marketing job, I polished my job-lady pumps and squeezed
into an old power suit. I don’t know what I was more excited about — the
prospect of making money or having access to, in my friend Michelle’s words,
the “adults-only bathroom.”

            My prospective employer, an older
man, and I chatted as we drove to the lunch interview. I astonished myself at
how well I was doing — I could talk like a grown-up! I remembered what a
marketing plan was! Just as the shiny brass ring of having a real life dangled
within reach, I had the great misfortune of noticing a train passing overhead
on an elevated track.

            “Oh, looky! A choo-choo,” I squealed.

What hubris to
think I had any control over my life. I was in denial about being in the grips of
Maternal Stockholm Syndrome (M.S.S.). My only comfort, other than vowing to
carry cyanide pills from then on, was that any mother worth her salt would
understand why this happened.

            This is where the M.S.S. pedal hits
the metal: As mothers we know that we are our infants’ and toddlers’ windows to
the world. There is nothing more important to them — and therefore, to us —
than a big noisy train, a grazing horsey, or a rainbow. So sometimes when we’re
out with “grown-ups,” we forget ourselves. Recall that now-mythic story of the
mom who, at a dinner party, cut up the meat of the man sitting next to her.

            Maternal Stockholm Syndrome is, in
the final analysis, a disorder of the willing. If you postponed working and
opted for the baby-talking, sing-songing lifestyle, it’s inevitable that you’re
going to feel a little of your gray matter leaking out of your ear and running
down your neck. But you knew that when you signed on. Like most people, though,
you’ll try to keep your M.S.S. a secret. No one wants to be viewed by other adults
as dopey or baby-obsessed.

Speaking of
which, what
would a Mother’s Day column be without a little teary-eyed sentimentality? As
sure as spring turns to summer, your little tots will grow up, go to school,
and leave you alone with nothing but your spit-up-stained pastel clothes,
monosyllabic vocabulary, and a wicked M.S.S. hangover. And you’ll miss those
little cutie-patooties. Aww.

This article appears in May 7-13, 2003.