Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.

Kim Brooks

Categorized in : My Life Life Motherhood Sacrifice

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.

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I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

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'Did our parents really let us do that?' is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.

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In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.

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We're contemptuous of 'distracted' working mothers. We're contemptuous of 'selfish' rich mothers. We're contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don't need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don't have to look very hard to see the common denominator.

look you selfish work

I have no choice but to admit that, for a while, I was a casual viewer of 'American Idol.' By 'casual viewer,' I mean I watched every episode aired between 2004 and 2007.

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I wonder if all love affairs, all marriages, all lifelong partnerships, aren't in some ways a turning away from the world.

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All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.

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I love my husband. I love my family.

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I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.

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I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.

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A lot of my friends aren't parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don't like to talk about my kids, but if I'm socializing, I don't want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.

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I grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.

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Virginia, like most states, has few guidelines about how closely parents are expected to supervise their children. As a result, I was charged not with leaving my son in the car, but with the misdemeanor of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

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This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.

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We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

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As a teenager, I'd longed to get my driver's license so I could get away from my parents. Then I'd longed to go to college to get away from the people I'd called my friends.

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In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.

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Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.

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People don't think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.

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