The Eternal Yin

Recently my mom's group had a discussion regarding the ways we, as educated and intelligent women, find fulfillment - or don't find it - as stay-at-home moms. Most of us agree that there is no place we'd rather be than home with our children, yet we also miss the intellectual and professional pursuits of our pre-parenthood days and wonder what we are going to do with our time when our children have moved on and we are left searching for ways to fill the hours that used to be spent bathing, dressing, feeding, diapering, and otherwise cleaning up after our young ones. One of the moms suggested that perhaps our dissatisfaction with the mundane nature of our lives as homemakers stems from the fact that we have schooling that our fore-mothers did not have, which has prepared us for, and allowed us to expect to have, careers that we have now chosen to leave behind, at least temporarily.

I wonder: Is it that education has somehow opened up the options for us, so that we can no longer happily settle for lives at home? Or have feminists, who have struggled to achieve equality between the sexes - clearly a worthwhile goal - somehow thrown out the baby with the bathwater? Perhaps in the glorification of the "yang" - activity, achievement, attainment, aggressiveness - we have lost sight of the value of "yin" - the feminine, the nurturing, the softness. Perhaps it is not so much that women used to have no options, but that they recognized that the work of nurturing a family and ensouling a home was just as important, if not more important, than the work their husbands did outside the home in order to bring home a wage.

Qualities that are often associated with femininity are those of being passive, receptive, and yielding. These are not qualities that are valued in American culture. Even those of us who embrace the role of mother and choose to make it our vocation, at least for a little while, struggle to come to terms with that choice in a society that rejects all things feminine. We struggle to reconcile our own training, which has taught us to reject these qualities as well, with the primal and very fundamental urge to honor and continue the time-honored work of women. It would do us well to consider another quality that is traditionally associated with "yin": that of the eternal.

I will concede that most of the tasks involved in parenting young children are far from intellectually fulfilling. The physical demands of mothering often leave us with little time and energy for the academic pursuits which used to be so important to us. However, there are few careers that offer us better opportunities for personal growth, emotional fulfillment, and the chance to really touch the future. Aside from education and non-profit work, careers that may be intellectually stimulating are rarely meaningful in the long-term. Every time a woman chooses to use her time and abilities to build a home that is compassionate, peaceful, respectful, tolerant and loving, she revitalizes the feminine, caretaking energy that has become so lacking in our society. There is little that is more important that that.

This is not to say that I believe that a woman's place is in the home - far from it. I work, though I chose to leave a career whose demands would leave little time for the type of parenting I wanted to do when I had a family, and chose a job where I have the time and flexibility to be with my daughter. There are women who want to work, and women who have to work, and I believe every woman should have the freedom to make that choice for herself. However, I do believe that the way our society devalues caretaking on the one hand, telling "liberated" women that it is beneath us, while still expecting us to bear the bulk of the caretaking work on the other, leave us feeling either guilty for working, or unfulfilled at home. This schizophrenic attitude towards the work of homemaking cheats us of much of the joy of motherhood.

Many hunter-gatherer cultures are matriarchal. Before people had an understanding of the biology of reproduction, women were honored for the life-bearing and life-sustaining role that they played. It was recognized that we, like the Earth herself, are the givers and supporters of life. Now, we do understand the science behind procreation, but that does not make it any less magical or miraculous. Instead of mourning the life that we, as women, do not have - the freedom from the physical and emotional demands of motherhood that we sometimes envy our partners - we should rejoice in and respect the power that we have. We can break the cycle of violence, aggression and control that has taken over our society, and begin to cultivate the eternal yin that will sustain our species and our planet.