Personal Boundaries

There are some things no one can explain or understand until they have a child. I think you might actually have to give birth to that child, although perhaps not. But there is something that happens to you when you carry a child in your body for 9 months, then nurse it from your breasts for many more after that: you lose perspective on where your body stops and where your child's begins. This means that when they hurt, you hurt. It also means that your personal space gets invaded all the time, but you don't realize it. It's a very sensual relationship you have with your kids, but not sexual at all. I don't think I would have understood it until I had a child myself.

Margaret has taken to disliking my leg hair. If I have shorts, a skirt or cropped pants on, she demands that I put a blanket over my "itchy" legs before she'll sit in my lap. Thanks kid. I stopped shaving every day when I got married (or probably before that) and my own husband doesn't seem to notice or care if I have blonde stubble on my legs, but you certainly take affront!

Ironically, while she dislikes my leg hair, she has told me more than once that my underarm stubble is soft and pretty. "Margaret likes it" she has said. It's terribly interesting to see her judge my body on her own aesthetic values, completely untainted by societal norms. I suppose if she had to sit in my armpits to read a story, she'd feel differently, but to her, leg hair is bad because it's itchy. Why armpit hair is pretty, I'll never know, but I can assure you no one other than my own child would say this to me.

She also still has an attachment to my breasts, which seems to have increased lately, most likely due to the fact that my actual breast size has increased (the good pregnancy side effect). She did nurse until she was a few days shy of 17 months old, so she certainly developed a long relationship with my breasts that only ended 8 months ago. She pats them, and puts her cheek on them, and tells me she loves my "boobies" and that they're pretty. For someone who was small-breasted until pregnancy, I'm not accustomed to my boobs getting much attention. But now they do.

I wonder how long this blurring of personal space exists...I'm sure it disappears sometime before the child hits puberty, but it's hard to imagine now that we're so connected. I wonder how the new baby will affect it. Kate Moses wrote an interesting article in Salon's Mothers Who Think book about this, but I can't quote from it because all of her mothering essays seem to make me weep. Darn hormones!