When my first child was born I knew my life was going to change forever. But I didn’t suspecthow much. I didn’t know that mothering would oblige me to re-evaluate my own culture. I didn’t realize that I would come to question the beliefs that underlie everything we do and say.
My first child, Lauren, was unplanned. Richard and I had just returned from a year of backpacking around Europe and Asia. We had no money, no jobs and no place yet to live when we discovered we were pregnant. I remember being traumatized at the thought of starting a family. We weren’t ready! We still had to figure out what we were“going to do with our lives.” Both of us had undergraduate university degrees but no career in sight. Even my mother-in-law was anxious. It’s the wrong time, she felt. We weren’t sufficiently prepared. Of course, I knew I could choose not to have the baby. I am a devout believer in planned parenthood. But I was twenty-five and married and already starting to notice children and babies whenever I passed them. I just couldn’t resist the new life growing inside me.
Looking back, I realize I was conflicted about the idea of having a child. I never doubted that I would be a mother. But my family and community believed strongly that women should have careers; as a dedicated feminist I felt I should be independent and self-reliant. Staying home with children seemed old-fashioned at best, a cop-out at worst.
My problem was that, although I had a university degree, I wasn’t drawn to any particular career. Richard and I liked to spin scenarios of the lives we could lead but beneath all my fantasizing lay a sense of unease: I felt no ambition to“be someone.” The yuppie lifestyle many of my friends were pursuing seemed hollow and unsatisfying, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do instead. I was hungering for a place and time and way of being in the world that I had not yet experienced— one that was less materialistic and more rooted in community. I was“homesick for an unknown country,” as the French writer Flaubert called it.
Having a child seemed meaningful in a way that the other options open to me at the time did not. I think I was a little ashamed of this feeling. Part of me saw having children as the easy way out. It would immediately give me a role to play, a sense of purpose in life, even though it was one that was not admired any longer by my culture. When I look back on it now, I realize that I felt a strong calling towards motherhood. At some deep level I knew that my heart path lay that way; I sensed that the journey of mothering would be the road to my own flowering as a human being.
When Lauren was born a powerful sense of meaning entered my life. When I first held her in my arms, the world shimmered with aliveness. Here was a whole new universe emerging into being and I was privileged to be the conduit. This luminous stranger was not part of me, but we were intimately and intensely connected to one another. Any thoughts of“what does it all mean?” fell away as I looked at her. It was like gazing at Life itself, and having Life gaze back at me.
I stayed home with her for nine months. Richard enrolled in a three-year graduate program in architecture and was eager to begin a professional career. Gradually, although I loved being with my baby, I began to feel
