fly me to the moon

A friend handed me last Sunday's New York Times Magazine folded open to an article by Judith Warner entitled "Fear (Again) of Flying." I read it that evening, curled up next to a mountain of unfolded laundry while my husband talked about Middlemarch, one of my favorite novels, in seminar at St. John's. Notwithstanding Warner's convoluted arguments, had I read this a year ago, I might have felt - rather painfully - like a nail hit squarely on its head. She suggests that women today, in rebellion against their 1970s mothers who took flight to work, second husbands, and journeying into the wide world, have turned inward. We apparently seek self-realization in shallow, private pursuits like yoga and taking care of children. Public life no longer beckons as a route to liberation.

Don't get me wrong. I still wonder about my inward focus over the past few years. In earlier days of stay-at-home mothering, I felt a sense of anxious urgency about my professional future. If I grope around a bit, those feelings are still there to be found and stirred up whenever complacency threatens. But it's different now.

Working fifteen hours a week, which I began nearly a year ago, provided me with the opportunity to exercise parts of myself that I feared had ossified into stone, to collaborate with adults I respect, and to get a break from my kids and their unceasing need. It has also had the unexpected effect of helping me to appreciate the time I do spend at home caring for my family, and to realize that I love it. I don't want to leave them for fifty hours a week. I don't want to give up bread-making and crafting and reading together. I choose this.

This criticism of inward-looking mothers helped me to stand back and realize with some surprise - and gratitude- that I possess an unusual degree of peacefulness about where I am and what I'm doing right now. How did this happen? My anxiety about work and the future was becoming habitual for awhile there. But finding small ways to reach out beyond the walls of this rainbow-hued split level house has provided some balance, allowing us a life in which we can at least imagine prioritizing what matters most.

Judith Warner suggested that our tendency toward inwardness and the banalities of yoga is a sad regression to an earlier time. Our second wave mothers at least had the chutzpah to ditch their kids and embark on journeys away from the shackles of home. Neither extreme here is particularly appealing. The way she characterizes each generation suggests there is something madness-making about the lives of women in general, and each cohort must seek escape in its own way.

What she misses is a more moderate approach, one that requires a bit of compromise and creativity, and one I feel I am meandering towards, slowly but surely. There are ways to assert oneself in a public way while embracing the pleasures and quiet joys of life at home. Being a homemaker sounds ridiculous, anachronistic. But add a hyphen for me and it shifts. Being a home-maker? A maker of a real home? That seems an essential and honored function, one that need not wholly define us, and one that ideally we do with our partners, each contributing as he or she is able and inclined. As my children get older, and my public self begins to emerge once again, I understand how being a home-maker naturally leads into being a community-maker. We are called to so many things in life, and each moment allows for its own form of response. Right now the social worker in me is advocating for better food at Annapolis Elementary School via involvement with the PTA. It sounds quaint, I know, but in this moment it satisfies that yearning to help create healthier communities.

I feel particularly grateful to be raising young children at a moment when movements for local food systems, sustainable living, and a general return to a more intimate relationship with the material world around us are growing and expanding their influence in our culture. I never have to look far to seek validation and support for what I intuitively feel is important for me and my family: cooking and eating together, allowing open time for creative expression and play, developing our relationship to the natural world, limiting our exposure to the grand marketplace forever buzzing around us (see the Carol Flinders quote here). This creative work of making a home doesn't feel escapist. It's too hard for that! In its best moments, it feels like the opposite of escape. It feels like opening my arms to all the pain and joy life can deliver.

I'm not running an innovative new health care center or advocating for immigrants in Congress. I know I'm not going to be making headlines any time soon. My ambitions have brought me here, to this moment. I feel certain they'll carry me on to more public pursuits as we all grow older, though I have no idea what shape these might take. I hope then, as now, I can find time for a little yoga here and there. I recently learned a new asana, introduced to me as poet's pose. You find your balance in half-moon pose, then lift your lower supporting hand and rest it lightly on your heart as you gaze toward the sky. It's not like flying. Rather it feels like floating gently, swaying with one's breath - one of those amazing paradoxical yoga moments when being very strongly rooted creates a sense of lightness and motion. Yoga metaphors probably make Judith Warner gag. Not so this author! Deep, strong roots are the only place from which I can imagine taking flight.