Free Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong Page B

makes me wish I had a household full of noisy kids, but the truth is I know now that even I, with all my prodigious energy, can’t do everything. Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and pediatric visits may also be done by fathers (and surely we could make life easier for mothers than we do), but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do. A mother is a mother is a mother, as Gertrude Stein surely would have said had she become one.
    Certainly children need dozens of parental figures: mother, father, grandparents, nannies, cousins, teachers, godparents—but still, nothing substitutes for good old Mom. Am I a female chauvinist? So be it. The power of being a mother is actually quite awesome when you think about it. Who but a megalomaniac would be willing to take on such power without a backward glance?
    Years after giving birth, I became a mother against my will because I saw that my daughter needed me to become one. What I really would have preferred was to remain a writer who dabbled in motherhood. That felt more comfortable, more safe. But Molly would not permit it. She needed a mother, not a dabbler. And because I love her more than I love myself, I became what she needed me to be.
    â€œEarth to Mom: Space in. You’re zoning out again,” says she. Molly hates it when I wander through the house (the store, her school), writing in my head. So I space in—the hardest of all things for me to do—and I try to be present for her. Can I delegate that to anyone else? No. Would I want to? Sometimes, yes. (So I’m not a perfect mother—who is?) But I do attempt to focus on her needs above my own. And I know in my heart (as I know I will die) that Molly is more important than my writing. Any child is. That’s why motherhood is so difficult for writing women. Its demands are so compelling, so clearly important, and also so profoundly satisfying.
    Who can explain this to the childless? You give up your self, and finally you don’t even mind. You become your child’s guide to life at the expense of that swollen ego you thought so immutable. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything. It humbled my ego and stretched my soul. It awakened me to eternity. It made me know my own humanity, my own mortality, my own limits. It gave me whatever crumbs of wisdom I possess today.
    What do I wish for Molly? The same. Work she loves and a child to lead her to herself. Why should any of us settle for less? We know why: because the world has deliberately made things difficult for women, so that they could not have motherhood and also the life of the mind. Mine may be the first generation in which being a writer and a mother is not utterly impossible. Margaret Mead says somewhere that when she finally had her only daughter in 1939, at the age of thirty-eight, she looked at the brief biographies of famous women and discovered that most of them had no children—or only one. This has only recently begun to change.
    But it is still hard. And the battles are far from over: The abortion battle, the “family values” battle, the “should mothers work outside the home?” battle—all are symptoms of an incomplete revolution. And incomplete revolutions produce passionate and angry feelings.
    Those women who have given up work, art, literature, the life of the mind, for nurturance naturally resent those women who have not had to. The privilege to create is so new for women. And the privilege to create and also nurture is newer still. Those women who have given up nurturance feel resentful too. Perhaps they could have done things differently, they feel, when it is already too late. Is it possible they blame Roe υ. Wade for the newness of choices their mothers did not have to make?
    Motherhood is an awesome choice. Who would make it lightly, knowing all that it entails? Perhaps some women still