impending motherhood

from stinky kinky mama

I have been chewing off the skin on my fingers to the point that it is painful to type these words. My teeth ache from chewing ice all day long and my bloodshot eyes are a gross reminder of my sleeplessness. I’m just a little nervous about impending motherhood. I do comfort myself with the fact that no matter what I do or how I prepare or what I read, I will never, ever know exactly what I’m doing… and no one has ever mastered motherhood. I mean, right? So all I have to do is my best. Right?

Something that has been irking the shit out of me is how lucky I am, just to have been born to a mother whose teaching job has us in the middle class. I don’t know the exact figures of income for middle class for our region, lower or upper, but I know we’re definitely in the lower middle class, having experienced many instances growing up that as a family we were near broke by the end of the month. But since I was 4, we’ve always lived in houses, always had a car, always had health insurance, always had new school supplies and clothes and my mom always had free time to spend with my two sisters and I. Now the income and charitable spirit of both Marc’s and my parents is helping us out immeasurably. I was able to choose not to work (now I realize I may have been happier working) while pregnant. I have learned so much these past months though, from sheer reading time; I have absorbed more information in these past months than I did in that year I was in college.

But from all this learning a feeling of panic has set in. I’ve always been a bookworm, always excelled at academia and loved to write. I also love to talk and share information I’ve gathered. This has led to me having a hidden dream to be a professor someday. And now that I’ve been slowly unlearning all my history classes and realizing that what made me hate the idea of furthuring my formal education was its irrelevancy to my life (read: high school history books had nothing to do with being a brown person on the US side of the Mexico-US border). Okay, the history of Texas has plenty to do with my life as a confused, border-town, brown girl– but not the way it was presented to me. As for that panicked feeling, I’m fretting about how I let my four-year full-paid scholarship (that I worked hard for) go down the drain, how I succumbed to drugs and partying and how I never believed that I could be ’smart’ or articulate enough to get up there and do it, be a professor of, well, I didn’t know WHAT I wanted to profess back then. But now Chicano studies would sweep/has swept me off my feet. Border studies. Womens studies. Other stuff I don’t even know exists as part of the UT Pan American programs because I am too melancholy to look. I was extended this great opportunity and some flimsy ideology I possessed a year ago allowed me to think I’d be happy leaving the great resources at the local university. A friend named Hector was ranting about the ICC infiltrating the university, sputtering about how “this University is ours, these resources are ours, this place is for our people!” And now I realize how important it is to my mental health to have time to be a little, oh, scholarly.

I explained all this to Marc near tears today. The beautiful person of my dreams was genuinely concerned, and asked me very specific time-span questions. In his mind, it’s not a question of can Sofia do it, it’s how long will it take? And he said he’d work to put me through school, no questions asked (Marc passionately wants to be a stay-at-home daddy).

All that said, back to impending motherhood. Or parenthood, for that matter, since me going back to school would affect all three of us so intensely. I am going to continue to research positions in the Valley where I could help people in my community without going to college, or going to college for a shorter period of time. I know I could feel fulfilled doing something else related to radical change or the providing of information here in the Valley. Hell, I would even go to vocational school to do something meaningful on the side. It’s just that I’m so damn good at academic stuff, it’s that natural talent I have. Oh well- there is no conclusion to be had today, in this post. This post has already changed so drastically from what I thought I was gonna write about when I started typing.

I’m gonna try to sleep now. Marc’s been asleep for a couple of hours already, but I had to let my damn food go down so as to avoid heartburn. And as usual, I got to thinking and chewing my fingers and whatnot. And yeah, I’m off.

PS My stomach itches.