It was while my daughter slept that I lay on the bed in our shared room, the bed upon which she was born, putting down in words the story of her emergence into this great wide world. Between thoughts, I casually flipped through the pages of my previous writings and came upon the following reflection:
“There is a strange familiarity to pregnancy, a home like quality that one is becoming one’s natural intended being by carrying life. The concept has always been lining the edges of my own womanhood, my own powerful play of feminism—that this act made us, makes us, Goddesses, that mothering made us and makes us still, Divine Deities, truer than those on the onion pages of a man’s bible.”
These words, written in the early stages of a pregnancy none too romantic, stirred the waters of my soul, for what could be a more beautiful call to motherhood than to equate the choice to be a mother, to embrace the act, the role, and the essence thereof, as a choice of spiritual transcendence. This is solace in my weaker moments when I mourn that which I “gave up” for the selfless life of a stay-at-home mom. My earlier musings elicit a keen sense of esoteric spiritual awareness in the face of a world that now claims we, those of us who have left our work to be mothers, are doing a detriment to women who remain within the work force as well as to the women’s liberation movement itself.
This comes after CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl reported on a story originally aired last October about women in “powerful positions” who are leaving the work force by choosing to stay at home and mother. She notes a 15 percent increase in stay-at-home moms in less than 10 years. The women who are choosing their families over there jobs are extraordinary women, women with degrees from Yale, women who are mere steps away from senatorial seats or women who are among the elite boards of Fortune 500 companies. There is the not-so-subtle suggestion that this may be an epidemic. Linda Hirsham, lawyer, philosophy professor and author, seems to believe so. When interviewed she claimed that women who are exercising their right to choose motherhood over work and politics are not doing the right thing. Hirsham goes on to quote Mark Twain who said, “a man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read,” implying that those of us who can do more than merely mother are ignorant for turning away from our work force potential to be mothers.
What is shocking is that women within the academia seem to hold this similar Brave New World view of mothering. Marilyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard was reported as saying, "It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: When we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" in response to a New York Times expose by Louise Story which revealed that 60 percent of 138 interviewed Yale coeds expect to cut back on work or stay at home once they become mothers [1]. Do we live in a world wherein intellectual and social liberation come at the cost of Motherhood? Are they mutually exclusive?
Granted, I am not Yale bred, nor was I steps away from a position wherein my work and opinions could have changed the climate of my country’s politics, I am and was a teacher. I left teaching in the middle of my pregnancy to be…pregnant. I felt it was a time in my life that may never come again, and a crucial time in the melding of my child’s being, a time that required my total energy, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. I am neither wasting my talents nor choosing to be ignorant in my choice to stay at home and raise my daughter. Nor does my decision indicate that the money and political force that went into securing me the right, as a woman, to quality education is lost.
