ambition and kids

how motherhood made me dumb (complimentary)

The governing force of my life was ambition. The most important relationship, the defining romance of my life, was between myself and my own ambition. The relationship, I think, was an abusive one, a sadomaschistic one. My best friend said she uses writing like a cudgel to punish herself (writing being the thing she loves most). We’re so similar I immediately realized I also use the things I love most to punish myself.

But I suspect myself of the basest, crassest instincts. In middle school a very smart girl told me I was not a true Greek, I was a Roman (or maybe worse, I thought, a Hun). So I don’t credit myself that the thing I love most, my keenest torturer’s blade, is anything as artistic as writing. I think until 2021 I mostly punished myself with my own ambition which is to say my own self-regard, which is to say I dangled self-love and withdrew it from myself as skillfully as a fly fisherman teasing an unblinking, open-mouthed salmon desperately swimming upriver.

As I said, I have always suspected myself of hiding fundamentally uninteresting dreams. Undistinguished complexes, the neuroses of ordinary people.

Then my first child was born. And then my second. So if I didn’t have ordinary dreams before I really have ordinary dreams now. I dream that they will be healthy and safe. I dream that drivers on streets around them will obey traffic laws. I dream that crowds at concerts they attend will file in and out in an orderly fashion. I’ve never been stupid enough to pray for greedy things, wishes fulfilled, job offers, but I certainly used to pray for things like happiness, or peace, or purpose. No more. I wouldn’t dare waste a single wish of any kind on myself. Every bottle a mother hand-washes, every extra car seat check, is a prayer. I cut grapes in half like a Catholic thumbing a rosary. Whether I get what I want (jobs, funding, glory, followers, significance, delight, creative camaraderie, publishing deals, townhouses and second homes, Botox and new teeth, my greed knows no bounds) is my problem and mine alone. I wouldn’t want to trouble the universe about it.

Here’s the thing about having kids: the fear. A black terror I am never more than a few feet away from. Arm’s reach, really.

Here’s the thing about fear: it makes you so productive. Do I sound miserable to you? That’s fine if so, I readily accept my new psychological makeup of anxious anhedonia as the price I pay for kids buckled in correctly with minimal microplastics in their bloodstreams. If anything I sometimes think that maybe my self-obsession, my daily miseries, can be additional offerings I lay out on the altar, additional prayers.

The good news is, the crises of work and ambition have been radically demoted and utterly defanged, and ironically, I think it’s made me about ten times more interesting, intelligent, productive.

There was a certain obliviousness I had when I was young that I think somehow worked in my favor — as the meme says, the very wise and the very dumb are often in agreement. It’s like — I was anxious about how I was perceived, but since I was so terrible at telling how I was perceived, and so terrible at trying to be perceived well, I ended up simply expressing myself very sincerely and very boldly. Being so young, so charmingly clueless, so obsessed with self-flagellation that I was authentically incapable of having my head turned by the wrong things — in some backwards way these defects arrived at the same place as being brilliant and unconventional. I found myself, as I got less dumb, unable to reproduce them, accused by some of the people I respect the most of sins like, “having a conventional career”, “possessing the physiognomy of a venture capitalist,” being someone who “could maybe go to grad school.”

But after becoming a mother, I’ve found a new route to the same destination, that destination being: going down the mountain 10% over your skis. The perfect casual recklessness of the young and brilliant. Courage, or at least the identical behavior of the fiery proselytizer. My first day skiing, a few hours in, I got confused and found myself at the start of a “blue run” (please note, I’m a huge physical coward and a really big fan of not sliding down things). The only way to go safely, or to get home at all, was to go faster than I liked. That feeling — sailing down the mountain with panache as a matter of survival is the absolute best way to do creative work.

I find myself, at 34, deliciously, delightfully, deliriously oblivious once again. I write like a madwoman. I get rejected with a shrug. My husband recently turned to me, confused, and asked, “Why do you think that’s possible?!” I have my children to thank.

It’s partially that extreme sleep deprivation mimics drunkenness, which mimics courage (you didn’t think someone like me would sleep train, did you?). It’s partially that I have a new, powerfully clarifying need to pay for organic berries and private colleges.

But mostly I think it’s that motherhood for me, has centrally been about functioning with joy under conditions of bleak terror. I am so preoccupied by my new defining relationships, so busy praying my day away, that in the small hours of the night after my kids are asleep, I find myself well-practiced in the grim art of playacting fearlessness. And, of course, what do I have to fear, that could arrive via work email? Nothing—not while my fridge is still full of neatly sliced grapes and next month’s mortgage is paid.

Ambition is now one voice among many on a small council that someone new is in charge of. An older, much harsher dictator governs me — motherhood, an iron fist Old Country lady, who has no time for narcissistic American frivolities. Living under her reign, I’m enjoying a bit of an Elizabethan age. Ambition, it seems, is a good friend, and very bad boss.