Drawn by Dragons

So, yeah. Thursday night I broke down in tears on the way home while talking some stuff out with my husband, and then asked Little Light if she could remember any myths touching on female monsters who devoured their children. We didn't get much of anywhere, and I sort of lost the thread, and then when I actually get around to catching up on blogs, I see antiprincess has posted about fatherhood.

So let's see where I can go from here.

I am the product of a generational curse. I don't know if it is older than my grandmother, but it is at least that old: the oldest child in some way rejected, emotionally neglected or vilified, probably in part because it's the first child that changes a parent's life the most. I am my mother's oldest child; my mother, my grandmother's oldest child. Growing up in the center of maternal resentment is ... hard.

I do not exaggerate when I say my deepest, bone-deep terror is perpetuating this curse, swallowing my children (especially the first, the most vulnerable, the most likely) alive in this horror of transformation, this profound change that is becoming a parent. Talking with my husband, what I kept repeating brokenly through the tears was, "I don't want to turn into a monster. I don't want to turn into a monster."

(Which of course is why I was looking for myths -- ways of relating to this internal Beast so as to be able to not go off my own map. Monsters have our own nightmares.)

I don't believe a two-parent family is enough to get healthy children. Even with two parents with a wide range of interests and experiences, the potential range of kids is further. (My brother had no sporty parents, though my father tried quite hard to be there.) Two parents and a community -- extended family, friends, neighbors, teachers -- gets closer.

I was raised in a community of parents with kids about my brother's age, all of whom served as semi-parental figures, who traded little cards with "1/2 hour" printed on them around so that nobody was crushed under the weight of constant kids, so that they could maintain themselves as well as raising their children. I adopted the neighbors across the street as honorary grandparents and learned to play solitaire and learned about painting porcelain from them (a plate she painted a kitten onto is on my ancestor shrine; I attended her funeral years and years ago); the next-door neighbor taught me folksy crafts and introduced me to her budgie. I wound up at one point getting involved in a church community, which could also have been part of that had I been someone else.

My friends with kids have ties to an extensive supportive community, diffused over area but still present. (One friend of mine has taken over childcare for another, a stay-at-home-dad, for this week -- on the condition that he leave the house.) A different level of intimacy and support, but still enough to take some of the pressure off, to keep the whole 'two parent family' from being a seething mass of personal inadequacy because people think they ought to be able to handle all the childrearing stuff and fail or burn out or just desperately need a vacation.

And I look at the insides of my head, my family curse, and try to figure out how to get my eventual kids some reasonable chance of having adequate support in their lives -- taking into account the possibility that I might wind up less than a whole parent. (I hope I won't become a negative parent. I hope. I fear. I ... don't want to be a monster.) Because if I lose my shit in any of the ways I think plausible, my husband will not only be dealing with parenting without much assistance from me, but also dealing with taking care of me.

Antiprincess asks what fatherhood is about.

Fatherhood is about what my husband said to me over ten years ago, that my children will also be his children, because he's committed to them and their welfare. That he is willing to make that investment in theoretical human beings, without the personal bonds that may come of incubating them, in advance, without just saying 'If there's a crisis, I'll be there.' Being there before the crisis, from the beginning, being a part of their matrix of living from the beginning.

And I'm afraid of being a burden, of going mad, of withdrawing from the world, of the possibility that I like my mother before me and her mother before her will eat my children alive; fatherhood is something more secure and trustable than motherhood to me, without the burden of generations of monstering. Something I want my children to have a wealth of, because the mothering I have in me may be untrustworthy or flawed. I want my children to have fathering, along with the richness of crazy auncles that I know our friends will supply.

I know the terror of the curse is the thing most likely to make that thing manifest, the thing most likely to push me over the edge. If I can be secure in the knowledge that my children will have enough fathering to get by, then I believe I can shed the madness of the mothering I learned well enough to put my faith in the wisdom of Hetharu, the great Mother, and accept Her guidance. (Dua Hethert.)