Mommy Moped

Lately we've been watching a British TV show, an espionage series called The Sandbaggers. In this series, when the boss wants to send one of his agents off on a special op, he picks up a red telephone and says, "Agent So-and-so, you're on your bike." Such has been an accurate job description for me lately.

It's almost 8:30 and I'm just sitting down to dinner. Today I was lucky because I made time for a nap, but since I got up at 5:30 pm I've been feeding, bathing, and putting to bed kids. Pushing me through the day is this sense of urgency, that if I don't get up within the next 5 minutes, my schedule will be thrown off 15 minutes or more. Today my schedule has been thrown off by only 45 minutes, so like I said, I'm lucky.

Last night we were visiting friends we hadn't seen for six months, letting them meet the baby. I felt honor-bound to confide in the woman, a fifty-something who I know has never had children. "You know, I've been saying it's easy, but the truth is it's hard," I said, intending to insert an additional comment about the redemptive aspect of motherhood. But she broke in and said, "Oh, that's why I never had children." I shut my mouth.

For the past eighteen months I've seen myself as a sort of walking advertisement for motherhood: not frumpy and overweight, not stressed, not strapped for time or money, my house in order, my kid in line, et cetera. And every opportunity I've had to open my mouth I've expounded on the joys of motherhood, the pity that in today's society more people don't have children, and more of them--that I've discovered how being a stay-at-home mom has become a bona fide vocation for my life. I wonder how many experienced mothers overheard me, thinking, "She'll learn better someday."

Well they're right. It's wrong to try and convince people that they should have kids because, like home birth, "It's really not that hard." The Catholic church claims that, in the sacrament of marriage, the husband and wife are given special graces to enable them to carry out the endless, arduous task of parenthood. Because it IS hard. More so now than ever, because there are no support systems. Oh, there's day care for women who want to work (nearly everyone), and welfare for those who can't work (presumably everyone else). But for the woman struggling through the dense tangle of overgrowth that has come to choke the road to traditional motherhood, there's no one to help--outside of her church.

So what am I saying? Am I saying that I was wrong, that motherhood isn't worth it? On the contrary. Sometimes the harder a thing is, the more worthy it is of doing. And that's definitely true of motherhood. I used to want to be a famous writer, but now I'm not so sure. My kids are going to live forever. That's what souls do. And there's nobody who's going to have more influence over them than me. Not even their dad. Each one is going to be his own person, but he will bear the unique stamp of having been my child. No one else on earth can say that.

How many books can you remember that were "hot" in their day--whether it was five, twenty-five, or fifty years ago? What about a hundred years? Five hundred? How many trendy and timely tomes now sitting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble are going to be remembered in thirty years? I've shopped enough sidewalk sales to know the answer to that question. Fact is, no matter how invisible, unremarkable, or ordinary raising kids seems, that's where the action is--and there's nothing the big, sexy, worldly world offers that can match it.