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.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
My Child is My Message
Several years ago at an animal rights conference, I was baffled by the near-complete absence of children, despite the fact that it was heavily attended by young couples. When I asked a friend who has been active in the animal rights community for many years about this, she shared her theory that people who become heavily involved with animal issues tend to be misogynistic – they turn to animals because they just plain don’t like people.
At the time of this conference, I was a young and childless newlywed. Since then, I have come to develop my own theory about why many activists, in many different fields, choose not to have children. After bearing witness day after day to the worst that humanity has to offer, these committed people often become bitter. Louise Hart said, “Bringing a child into the world is the greatest act of hoping there is.” People who are hopeless often choose to remain childless as well.
When we became pregnant with our daughter, I knew my priorities would soon change as my time became scarce and my energy drained. I worried that I would have to – or worse, I would want to – give up my studies and the activism that was so fulfilling to me. However, something else began to stir within me. Slowly, the issues I was examining took on a more personal cast. I began to imagine how it must really feel to be a mother in sub-Saharan Africa, going hungry so that I could put an inadequate meal on the table for my starving children. I felt the agony of the mother dying of AIDS, knowing that her young children would soon be orphans in a place that already had more orphans than healthy adults to care for them. I wondered about all the women who were also expecting a child, not because they chose the role of mother but because it was forced upon them by an abusive husband or anonymous attacker. I even feel more of a connection with the mama deer that shares the woods with us. I watch her fawns start at some imaginary predator and tear through the bushes after each other, leaping over fallen trees and rocks, and though she barely pauses from her browsing I can almost hear her thoughts: “Go ahead, run all you want. Maybe then you’ll sleep tonight!”
Sure, my priorities were going to change. I would have less time and energy for the type of activism I had been doing before as I became absorbed in my baby and nurturing my new family. I was grateful to have that luxury, unlike so many other women who had to work exhausting and dangerous jobs just to survive. However, I was also on the threshold of a very powerful chapter of my life, where my understanding of the issues I had been grappling with would become more concrete, more urgent, and more real.
It has been argued that instead of refraining from having children, people who have a deep awareness of the issues of human rights, environmental stewardship, animal welfare and the like should have children who will carry on a legacy of activism. This is certainly not a stance I would personally advocate – I am humbled by people who choose to fully dedicate themselves to a cause they believe in, and grateful for their devotion. That said, it is crucial to imbue the coming generation with the consciousness, creativity, critical thinking skills, and motivation to change the world for the better, and we as parents are uniquely positioned to do just that.
I recently read that the most rapidly growing market for organic food is among new mothers. These women presumably already knew something about the dangers of the various fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides that are applied to most of the fruit and vegetables grown in the United States, and of the various antibiotics, growth hormones, and other drugs routinely administered to livestock. What changed, I think, is that while the risk to themselves was one they were willing to take, they were unwilling to risk their children’s health and future for the sake of convenience or saving a few food dollars. I believe that many women experience this type of altered perspective upon entering into motherhood. Consider global warming, which suddenly seems much more imminent when we begin to consider it with respect not just to our own lives but to the lifespans of our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Through our children, we become personally invested in the future of this planet and all those who inhabit it. Parent have “skin in the game”, so to speak.
When a reporter asked Mahatma Gandhi what his message was to the world, his reply was “My life is my message.” For me, I would answer that my child is my message. The choice to bring her into the world was my statement that I believe sustainability and peace will win out over destructiveness and greed. I have made a promise, by having my daughter, that I will do everything in my power to create the just, beautiful, and sustainable world that I for her. Having a child requires great courage and commitment. I have come to see the act of consciously becoming a parent, and of consciously parenting, as an act of rebellion against the forces that are destroying our planet. Choosing to bring something beautiful into the world diminishes the ugliness. My parenting has become my new form of activism.
I may lack the time these days to do all the research and volunteer work that I used to do. What I lack in time, however, I believe I make up for in motivation – the motivation to build a community of supportive, loving and humane people to surround my family, to be aware of the example I am setting for my daughter, and to do the inner work required to become the kind of mother, wife, and human being I want to be.
At the time of this conference, I was a young and childless newlywed. Since then, I have come to develop my own theory about why many activists, in many different fields, choose not to have children. After bearing witness day after day to the worst that humanity has to offer, these committed people often become bitter. Louise Hart said, “Bringing a child into the world is the greatest act of hoping there is.” People who are hopeless often choose to remain childless as well.
When we became pregnant with our daughter, I knew my priorities would soon change as my time became scarce and my energy drained. I worried that I would have to – or worse, I would want to – give up my studies and the activism that was so fulfilling to me. However, something else began to stir within me. Slowly, the issues I was examining took on a more personal cast. I began to imagine how it must really feel to be a mother in sub-Saharan Africa, going hungry so that I could put an inadequate meal on the table for my starving children. I felt the agony of the mother dying of AIDS, knowing that her young children would soon be orphans in a place that already had more orphans than healthy adults to care for them. I wondered about all the women who were also expecting a child, not because they chose the role of mother but because it was forced upon them by an abusive husband or anonymous attacker. I even feel more of a connection with the mama deer that shares the woods with us. I watch her fawns start at some imaginary predator and tear through the bushes after each other, leaping over fallen trees and rocks, and though she barely pauses from her browsing I can almost hear her thoughts: “Go ahead, run all you want. Maybe then you’ll sleep tonight!”
Sure, my priorities were going to change. I would have less time and energy for the type of activism I had been doing before as I became absorbed in my baby and nurturing my new family. I was grateful to have that luxury, unlike so many other women who had to work exhausting and dangerous jobs just to survive. However, I was also on the threshold of a very powerful chapter of my life, where my understanding of the issues I had been grappling with would become more concrete, more urgent, and more real.
It has been argued that instead of refraining from having children, people who have a deep awareness of the issues of human rights, environmental stewardship, animal welfare and the like should have children who will carry on a legacy of activism. This is certainly not a stance I would personally advocate – I am humbled by people who choose to fully dedicate themselves to a cause they believe in, and grateful for their devotion. That said, it is crucial to imbue the coming generation with the consciousness, creativity, critical thinking skills, and motivation to change the world for the better, and we as parents are uniquely positioned to do just that.
I recently read that the most rapidly growing market for organic food is among new mothers. These women presumably already knew something about the dangers of the various fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and fungicides that are applied to most of the fruit and vegetables grown in the United States, and of the various antibiotics, growth hormones, and other drugs routinely administered to livestock. What changed, I think, is that while the risk to themselves was one they were willing to take, they were unwilling to risk their children’s health and future for the sake of convenience or saving a few food dollars. I believe that many women experience this type of altered perspective upon entering into motherhood. Consider global warming, which suddenly seems much more imminent when we begin to consider it with respect not just to our own lives but to the lifespans of our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Through our children, we become personally invested in the future of this planet and all those who inhabit it. Parent have “skin in the game”, so to speak.
When a reporter asked Mahatma Gandhi what his message was to the world, his reply was “My life is my message.” For me, I would answer that my child is my message. The choice to bring her into the world was my statement that I believe sustainability and peace will win out over destructiveness and greed. I have made a promise, by having my daughter, that I will do everything in my power to create the just, beautiful, and sustainable world that I for her. Having a child requires great courage and commitment. I have come to see the act of consciously becoming a parent, and of consciously parenting, as an act of rebellion against the forces that are destroying our planet. Choosing to bring something beautiful into the world diminishes the ugliness. My parenting has become my new form of activism.
I may lack the time these days to do all the research and volunteer work that I used to do. What I lack in time, however, I believe I make up for in motivation – the motivation to build a community of supportive, loving and humane people to surround my family, to be aware of the example I am setting for my daughter, and to do the inner work required to become the kind of mother, wife, and human being I want to be.
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