Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was breached. Günter Schabowski, an East German Politburo member, announced that East Germans were free to travel. Now an old man, Schabowski claimed on the BBC this morning that he didn’t make a basic mistake, that he just jumped the gun by a few hours, but the record is more ambiguous on that. Anyway, the people of East Berlin seized the moment, drove their cute but stinky Trabants into West Berlin, and shredded the Iron Curtain forevermore. As a young grad student in German history, I watched the Wall fall on my 13-inch TV in my little apartment in Ithaca, New York,
Ten years ago today, I was living in Berlin. Fireworks were exploding. Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush were speechifying. I was begging my midwife to top off my epidural, which was only working on one side, and running through my little arsenal of breathing techniques. Shortly after three in the afternoon, my first child, the Bear, was born. I was dimly aware that the rest of the city was celebrating. My own world had radically contracted, both literally and figuratively. The small part of me that was still sentient thought it was cool that my child arrived on an auspicious day. I liked to think the fireworks were exploding for him. The rest of me, the greatest part of me, was only animal. I’d lost a lot of blood. I could hardly walk. Truth told, by the end of the day the Bear was far more alert than I.
Hardly anyone predicted that the end of the Cold War would usher in a new era of terror, instability, and fundamentalist hatred. On November 9, 1989, people danced on the Wall. A decade later, the fissures in the new, united Germany were apparent: high unemployment in the East, increased xenophobia throughout Germany, and mutual resentments and recriminations. Two years later, the Twin Towers fell. Those of us who’d comfortably embraced that creature called the “New World Order” realized it had fangs. Nothing in history is as simple as it initially seems.
So, too, in our personal histories, in our transitions to parenting, we can’t imagine what will come next. I think much of this is true for involved fathers, too; I’d love to hear from some of you, since I can only speak for myself as a mother. In all the propaganda about the joys of motherhood, no one ever mentions how sleep deprivation can render a person virtually psychotic. No one explains that you may feel, for awhile, as if your former self is not so much transformed as dead. Hardly anyone offers a road map for finding your way back to full personhood. Pundits expound on “work-life balance,” but the process of redefining one’s self runs immeasurably deeper than questions of career and time management. Nothing in mothering is as simple as it initially seems.
Then again, no one would have predicted that the Bear would grow into the deeply empathetic, intelligent, charming person that he is today. Well, okay, my mother saw it coming, even when he was throwing hour-long tantrums as a preschooler. (He never did stop being intense and alert.) He still has lots of moments where he’s bossy and ornery. But our Bear is a pretty wonderful kid.
I still don’t know what will come next, but this I do know. Freedom is better than oppression. Loving is better than refusing to risk one’s heart. Commitments to principles and people trump opportunism any day. And if we don’t embrace change and vulnerability, we might as well give ourselves up for dead. We might just as well erect our own, personal Walls.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
