A different perspective

This morning while getting together breakfast for me and A, it came to me why the questions swirling around "Opting In" and all the rest were so frustrating and a little bit annoying to me. It's because it is coming at life, and motherhood, from the wrong angle. The title that speaks of "Having a Child Without Losing Yourself" automatically assumes a loss. It comes from a place of negativity and talks about how to overcome (sort of). I say, why not instead ask how having a child might help you find yourself. Or for those who have found themselves, ask how it can help you find out more about yourself, find a richer self, a deeper self, a different self...or maybe even find a way to look at life that is NOT centered around ones self! (Buddhist philosophy tends to eschew the "self".)

Now, an aside that will take us all the way across the Atlantic...
Truth be told, I first learned of the "Opting In" book through a great article on Paris I was reading in Condé Nast that said:

Women age better in France, and they are better admired as they age. One worries about being objectified by pornography, but the danger of being objectified by maternity is far greater, it seems to me. Hidden behind Hummer-size baby carriages and camouflaged in colorless sweat suits, mothers can become shadow people. Americans go for books like Amy Richards's Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. The French have such books internalized.

The characterization of American motherhood in that clip is overgeneralized for the sake of making a point, but the article as a whole has intriguing undercurrents. Here's more:

It occurs to me that this is part of the reason French women enjoy the reputation they do—for sexiness, coolness, confidence. It's not just a matter of personal temperament but of public policy, the fruit not only of individual style but of country and culture.

"A toast for the baby girl!" exclaims a man at the table opposite. "What would you like to drink?"

"A kir?" I offer, thinking it a modest suggestion—made as it is with crème de cassis and a simple sauvignon blanc.

"But it has to be with Champagne," he hollers—and presently the waiter delivers a bubbly glass of pink.

In America, I think, I would have been ignored, sitting as I am with an infant. At any moment, after all, I might suddenly have spit-up on my shoulder. "But even President Sarkozy picked a woman with a child for his new bride!" says the beauty next to me, when I offer this remark to her. "It's true," I say. "If he were a public figure in the States and the sort of man people claim he is—vain, a show-off—he'd have picked a twenty-year-old trophy girl. As it is, he chose a fortysomething with an eight-year-old boy in tow."

And later:

I muse about the magic of all this sexual ambiguity. Waiters routinely make gallant remarks to taken women—thus reminding their partners of their perpetual appeal to rival suitors. What would be counted an insult in more macho countries, like Greece or Italy or the United States, is considered simple civility in France. Sexual relations in this country are fluid and unregulated; you are not out of the dance just because you have children, or indeed because you are married. Moralists can argue that this is a problem—but I wonder if it's not also, in some ways, a solution. The members of long-standing couples in France flirt with each other. They labor to impress one another. They seem to understand that love is complex; it is free; it answers to no law, however reasonably imposed. Relationships, therefore, become balancing acts, feats of imagination, works of art. Nothing is taken for granted, so everything is earned.

Things to think about...