Listen, I don’t want to chastise my father here. I love that man with all my heart, and I must say in his defense: Regrets have since been expressed. But just as my mother had been a 1950s bride, my father was a 1950s groom. He had never asked for, nor had he ever expected, a wife who would work outside the home. He didn’t ask for the feminist movement to arrive on his watch, and he wasn’t particularly passionate about women’s sexual health issues. He wasn’t all that excited about my mother’s job, when it all came down to it. What she saw as a career, he saw as a hobby. He didn’t object to her having this hobby-just as long as it didn’t interfere with his life in any measure. She could have her job, then, as long as she still took care of everything else at home. And there was a lot to be taken care of at our home, too, because my parents were not just raising a family but also running a small farm. Somehow though, until the chicken pox incident, my mother had managed to do everything. She had been working full-time, keeping the garden going, tending to the housework, making the meals, raising the children, milking the goats, and still being fully available to my father when he got home every night at five-thirty. But when the chicken pox hit and my dad would not give up two days of his life to help out with his kids, suddenly it was too much.
My mother made her choice that week. She quit her job and decided to stay home with my sister and me. It wasn’t like she would never work outside the home again (she would always have some part-time job or another while we were growing up), but as for her career? That was finished. As she explained to me later, she came to feel she had a choice: She could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn’t figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband. So she quit.
Needless to say, it was a low point in her marriage. In the hands of a different woman, this incident could have spelled out the end of the marriage altogether. Certainly a lot of other women in my mother’s circle seemed to be getting divorced around 1976, and for similar sorts of reasons. But my mother is not one for rash decisions. She carefully and quietly studied the working mothers who were getting divorces, and tried to gauge whether their lives were any better off. She didn’t always see tremendous improvement, to be honest. These women had been tired and conflicted when they were married, and now, divorced, they still seemed tired and conflicted. It appeared to my mother that they had maybe only replaced their old troubles with a whole new set of troubles-including new boyfriends and new husbands who perhaps weren’t such a big trade-up anyhow. Beyond all this, though, my mother was (and is) at her core a conservative person. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. What’s more, she still happened to love my dad, even though she was angry at him and even though he had disappointed her deeply.
So she made her decision, stuck with her vows, and this is how she framed it: “I chose my family.”
Am I making far too obvious a point here if I say that many, many women have also faced this kind of choice? For some reason, Johnny Cash’s wife comes to mind: “I could’ve made more records,” June said, later in her life, “but I wanted to have a marriage.” There are endless stories like this. I call it the “New England Cemetery Syndrome.” Visit any New England graveyard filled with two or three centuries of history and you will find clusters of family gravestones-often lined up in a neat row-of one infant after another, one winter after another, sometimes for years on end. Babies died. They died in droves. And the mothers did what they had to do: They buried what they had lost, grieved, and somehow moved on to survive another winter.
Modern women, of course, don’t have to deal with such bitter losses-at least not routinely, at least not literally, or at least not yearly, as so many of our ancestors had to. This is a blessing. But don’t necessarily be fooled into thinking that modern life is therefore easy, or that modern life carries no grieving and loss for women anymore. I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried-in neat little rows-the personal dreams they have given up for their families. June Carter Cash’s never-recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother’s modest but eminently worthy career.
And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways-often invisibly-and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.
My father had none of that elasticity. He was a man, an engineer, fixed and steady. He was always the same. He was Dad. He was the rock in the stream. We all moved around him, but my mother most of all. She was mercury, the tide. Due to this supreme adaptability, she created the best possible world for us within her home. She made the decision to quit her job and stay home because she believed this choice would most benefit her family, and, I must say, it did benefit us. When Mom quit her job, all of our lives (except hers, I mean) became much nicer. My dad had a full-time wife again, and Catherine and I had a full-time mom. My sister and I, to be honest, hadn’t loved the days when Mom worked at Planned Parenthood. There were no quality day-care options in our hometown back then, so we’d often find ourselves having to go to the houses of various neighbors after school. Aside from happy access to our neighborhood televisions (we didn’t have the stupendous luxury of TV in our own house), Catherine and I always hated these patched-together babysitting arrangements. Frankly, we were delighted when our mother gave up her dreams and came home to take care of us.
Most of all, though, I believe that my sister and I benefited incalculably from Mom’s decision to stay married to our father. Divorce sucks for kids, and it can leave lingering psychological scars. We were spared all that. We had an attentive mom at home who met us at the door every day after school, who supervised our daily lives, and who had dinner on the table when our dad got home from work. Unlike so many of my friends from broken homes, I never had to meet my father’s icky new girlfriend; Christmases were always in the same place; a sense of constancy in the household allowed me to focus on my homework rather than on my family’s heartache… and therefore I prospered.
But I just want to say here-to lock it forever in print, if only to honor my mother-that an awful lot of my advantages as a child were built on the ashes of her personal sacrifice. The fact remains that while our family as a whole profited immensely from my mother’s quitting her career, her life as an individual did not necessarily benefit so immensely. In the end, she did just what her female predecessors had always done: She sewed winter coats for her children from the leftover material of her heart’s more quiet desires.
And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I-as a beneficiary of that exact formula-will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives-instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”-be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?