the reluctant malcontent

I sit on the piano bench early on a gray, drizzly morning, flanked by two not-yet-dressed children. I am playing Gounoud’s “Ave Maria”. It is delicate and beautiful. A prayer. The children beside me bang relentlessly on the high and low keys, until there is no way for my music to be heard. I stop, sigh, and look behind me at the house they’ve already trashed…again.

As a little girl, I was asked what I wanted to be someday. I always gave the response that I had been carefully taught to give, “I want to be a mom”. That satisfied everyone within my circle of acquaintance. As I grew, though, I began to realize that my parents expected me to go to college. I never asked why I needed a degree to be a mom. Suddenly my simple answer was no longer appropriate. You can’t go through high school saying you want to be a mom. So I layered over my childhood response a new one. “I want to be a landscape architect.”

I was the recipient of an odd sort of double injunction we give to little girls. "You can be whatever you want. But it would be best if you were a full-time mom." In this way we satisfy the feminine-rights part of our conscience, assuage the family-first part, and completely confuse a child.

When I did graduate from college, I stood outside the assembly hall in the beautiful spring day with a degree in one hand and a baby in the other. At that moment, there was a choice to make. Or was there, really? I could pursue a career in landscape design, coming home to my family at the end of the day, as millions of women do every day. To my family, and to myself, because I had been taught so from my cradle, that would have been a failure. On the other hand, I could choose to turn my back on the career world and become a full-time mother. Despite the difficulty and privation attendant to such a career choice, this, I was assured, spelled “success”.

Having walked neither of these paths before, I had to take the counsel of those with more experience. I chose to stay home with my child, and future children. Every day I do the work that it takes to raise a family. Every day I wash laundry, make meals, change diapers. And every day I think about the other women who had the same choice to make that I once did. How did it turn out for them? Did some of them choose, in the face of discouragement, to take a career, and discover that it wasn’t the hell everyone had said? Did some of them find another balance, perhaps part-time work, and still find the happiness that I had been promised?

Some days with my children are so difficult that I gaze longingly at the grass over on the other side of the fence. Some days I wish I were leaving the house to face challenges of another sort. My own challenges seem so threadbare sometimes. I don’t know anything about the lives of women before the “women’s lib” movement, but I wonder if having fewer options made them more or less content. Some days the grass seems so green over there I have my hand on the fence ready to jump over.

But I have a little box of treasures, for the trouble taken to be “just a mom”. There are long afternoons spent sitting on the porch doing nothing, petting the cats and discussing life. There are the comical faces of my little boys when they know they’ve been caught doing something they shouldn’t. There are all the hurts kissed, all the arguments settled with a hug, and all the naps taken with a snuggly baby face-down on my chest. Now, with the benefit of a few years’ experience, I choose for myself to be here, at home with my children. I choose these treasures.

So I turn back from the fence, put my fingers back on the piano keys, and begin again to play. I am accompanied by the exuberant poundings of my future virtuosos. We are squeezed together on the bench, our elbows banging, fingers tangling together. And I know, once again, that this is the place for me. The sun breaks through the clouds, filling the room with light, and our prayer ascends to heaven.