Can a mother be true to herself?

A thoughtful post on blue kimono about the state of women’s happiness raised some familiar questions that still have no clear answers, despite years of debate and exhaustive analysis.

The essential issue was about whether women can succeed on multiple fronts – career, family, personal growth – without compromising the quality of any one of them. A recent article in a Canadian newspaper about women in law is an illustration of the hostile environment that can face women who try to combine motherhood with professional success, but even for those of us who don’t deal with this level of challenge, the underlying issue is the same. If we are mothers, can we also be true to ourselves?

I can’t count myself among those who had difficulty establishing a balance, mainly because I had neither the ambition nor the education to be driven to a profession that demanded more than I could give. But on a much smaller scale, I have struggled to determine the formula that would allow me to define myself as a good mother without losing what I need to maintain my individuality.

Several years ago there was an excellent series in that same newspaper about women who did not fit the conventional slot society has reserved for mothers. One woman’s story was particularly unusual. Mother to two children, she had realized when they were still very young that she just didn’t have the nurturing personality that she felt was essential to good motherhood. Simply put, she had not been made to have children of her own.

With the valiant understanding of a husband she loved and wanted to stay married to, she moved to a house of her own a few streets away. The children visited whenever they wanted to, and she dined at the family home on a regular basis. Her relationship with her children was much better, she believed, and she was released from the overwhelming stress of trying to play a role she felt completely unqualified for practically and emotionally. The children were learning to adjust to their mother’s new situation.

The liberal, non-judgmental person I’d like to think I am admired her for her honesty and her creative solution. The critical, product-of-my-society person that I am more often couldn’t comprehend how a mother – a mother! –could leave her children like that, even if they were just down the street. Could she not have just stuck it out – taken some parenting classes, got a nanny – for their sake?

This is an extreme example of a dilemma that women with children face on a regular basis. When is what I want detrimental to what my children need? The lawyers who work punishing hours, the clerk at Wal-Mart invited to a quilting retreat that conflicts with her child’s sports tournament, the full-time mom whose dream of getting a master’s degree means a lengthy separation from her family – these women have to decide where to place the line separating self-fulfillment from flat-out selfishness.

A few years ago I began to spend significant amounts of time an ocean away from my children, who then ranged in age from 18 to 23. They coped with my absence with varying degrees of relief, resentment, and grief, and although I frequently went back to be with them for lengthy periods, guilt kept a strong grip on my gut. Did I have the right to put my desires ahead of their feelings, which I could not separate from their needs? Did I feel at ease with my decision? Yes, and no. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

No matter how many friends encourage us to ‘do it for you’ and despite all the articles we read telling us that it’s okay to look after ourselves, that self-care is the essential component of other-care, many of us do not easily make the decision to follow our own path. We may be in complete theoretical agreement with the idea of putting ourselves first, but when it comes down to the crunch, few of us shift our priorities away from our families without a little or a lot of accompanying angst.

And therein lies the rub. What we accept intellectually as reasonable is not always so comfortable emotionally. And for every time that we are able to draw the line, it shifts and resists on countless others.