TheBanyanTree: Motherhood

[JMoney]

My middle boy turns 19 in about two weeks.  He's up there in the Solomons
doing 4 hour watches, getting his warfare officer qualifications, moving
forward in his life.

When I was 19 I became his brother's mother.  That was, as near as makes no
difference, the end of my worldly career.  I went on and went to university
and all that jazz but I've never been able to see a career as more important
than my children.  And it hasn't been allowed to me.  Standard,
old-fashioned sex discrimination saw to it that someone, such as I am, who
having borne children wishes to care for them herself, could have no
regular, established place in the work force.

When I was at university doing my undergraduate degree there was a woman
there who was  a Professor of Anatomy.  She, being Catholic, had produced a
large brood of children.  Nine she had, I think.  Or maybe it was seven.  In
any case, she obviously didn't sit at home looking after all these children.
She was a Professor of Anatomy.  She made sure we treated each particle of
dead human tissue with respect.  Any dissociated fleck of tissue was to be
returned immediately from our gloved hands to the formalin bath from which
the specimen came and to which it would return.  But she must have left her
babies in the care of one or more relative strangers.  It's an odd thought.
Ironic?  Maybe.

When any set of rules changes there will be winners and there will be
losers.  I've come to the stage of accepting that, as far as being enabled
to have a fabulous career goes, I am a loser.  On the other hand I'm glad
that I was born early enough that I could choose to stay at home with my
children and not generally be considered to be very odd indeed.  Then again,
if I'd had my children at a younger age I might have been able to, as they
say, have it all.  I might have been able to get the childbearing and
rearing out of the way while I was still young enough to be acceptable as a
relative junior and move on from there to success after success.

But that's not the way it turned out.  I take at least as much time to learn
important things as anyone else does.  So perhaps it's what one starts out
with that matters.  Should I say that, sadly for me, I started out with
disapproval, condemnation and insecurity?  I don't think so.  Not if we
truly are individuals in each of whom God takes a particular interest.

He could have started me off otherwise but I have to believe that there is a
reason, or that there are reasons, why I was born into that particular
family at that particular time and in that particular society.  Now I must
do what I can with all that baggage in view of what I believe is the reason
for being alive, which is to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with my
God.  (Micah 6:8)

Strange.  That was my high school motto.  It's a good one.  I can live with
it.

Janice