Motherself

Recently I was reading a book about motherhood, and came across this quote from The Captivity of Marriage by Nora Johnson:

“The old illusions of what life was supposed to hold, the restless remains, the undefined dreams do not die as they were supposed to. Probably every educated wife has found herself staring at a mountain of dirty diapers, and asking herself desperately, ‘Is this all there is?’ And at the same time she is embarrassed by her dissatisfaction; she of all people, with her intelligence and realistic view of life, should be able to rise above it. But the paradox is that it is she who is least able to. She lives for a better day. Things will be easier when this baby is born, or that one toilet-trained, or the children are all in school, and she will have time to be pretty and intelligent and young again.”

Believe it or not, this passage was written in 1961. And almost 50 years later, many moms can relate to this same sense of frustrated passion. I know that when I first read it, I immediately resonated with the feeling of waiting … waiting for life to begin, waiting for the job of motherhood to get easier, to give me time to pursue my own goals again. The problem is that even when certain elements get easier — the baby sleeps through the night, or the child leaves for school — some form of distracted busy-ness seems to always continue. And so if we don’t somehow slow down inside ourselves enough, we miss out on our lives in the present.

I don’t know about you, but I want to engage with my life right here, right now. I want to appreciate my children and feel deeply moved by the work I do in the world. I can not be the same young, carefree woman I was before I had children (and doesn’t that woman seem even more free in retrospect, anyway?) And so it is up to me, and to you, to find out who we are today.