Maternal Desire 1 The "Problem" of Maternal Desire It would seem that everything it is possible to say about motherhood in America has already been said. Beckoning us from every online platform, beaming out from every news satellite is a solution or a revelation or a confession about mothering. Yet in the midst of all the media chatter about staying on track, staying in shape, time crunches, time-savers, and time-outs, there''s something that remains unexamined about the experience of motherhood itself. It sways our choices and haunt our dreams, yet we shy away from giving it our full attention. Treated both as an illusion and as a foregone conclusion, it is at once obvious and invisible: the desire to mother. The desire to mother is not only the desire to have children, but also the desire to care for them. It is not the duty to mother, or the compulsion to mother, or the concession to mothering when other options are not available. It is not the acquiescence to prescribed roles or the result of brainwashing.

It is the longing felt by a mother to nurture her children; the wish to participate in their mutual relationship; and the choice, insofar as it is possible, to put that desire into practice. Maternal desire is at once obvious and invisible partly because it is so easily confused with other things. Those fighting for women''s progress have too often misconstrued it as a throwback or excuse, a self-curtailment of potential. Those who champion women''s maternal role have too often defined it narrowly as service to one''s child, husband, or God. Each view eclipses the authentic desire to mother felt by a woman herself--a desire not derived from a child''s need, though responsive to it; a desire not created by a social role, though potentially supported by it; rather, a desire anchored in her experience of herself as an agent, an autonomous individual, a person. I juxtapose maternal and desire to emphasize what we still feel uncomfortable focusing on: that wanting to care for children, even with its difficulties, is an important source of meaning and identity for many women. We resist reflecting on its implications because we fear becoming mired in clichés about women''s nature, which will then be used to justify gender inequality. But when we avoid thinking about maternal desire or treat it as a marginal detail, we lose an opportunity to understand ourselves and the broader situation of women.

Clearly, not every woman wants a child and not every mother finds meaning in caring for children. But for those who do, or wonder if they do, it''s time to have a deeper conversation. * * * LIKE SOME WOMEN and unlike others, I had always imagined being a mother. When we were young, my sister and I whiled away our afternoons in an ongoing saga of siblings with four kids apiece, each with a set of twins. In our imaginings, we withstood car crashes, camping disasters, hurricanes--this was Motherhood as Adventure. Despite our awareness of the upheaval in contemporary thought about women''s roles in the sixties and seventies when we grew up, we enjoyed this game, in part because our own mother made it clear that she loved raising children, and we happily modeled ourselves on her example. If my childhood fantasies bore out later in my life, they didn''t predetermine my path toward motherhood. I don''t believe that early maternal feeling is a prerequisite for becoming a mother or being a good one.

Rather, I now see these early feelings as a kind of seed of potential, one that gradually developed into a physically involving, emotionally complex, and psychologically transformative desire to care for children. The realization of that desire began with the birth of our first child, when I was several months shy of completing my PhD. Overnight, motherhood became thrillingly and dauntingly real, filled with our newborn daughter''s suckling, her startle, her drunken contentment after nursing, her nocturnal waking, her nerve-jangling cries. As I moved from the abstractions of expecting a baby to the absorbed bodiliness of infant care, I still loved my work as a psychologist. While pregnant I''d been committed to building a psychotherapy practice for children and adults, and I looked forward to continuing my research projects on childhood trauma and gender development. Yet, something about taking care of my child changed me. As a new mother, devoting long hours in the library or at my therapy office didn''t feel good, and I held my work in abeyance. I was fortunate to have a profession in which I could make my own schedule, but the more hours I spent with my baby, the better I felt, in myself and with her.

Whenever I was out of the house for more than a few of hours, I felt an invisible tether drawing me home, and then, when I was with our baby, I couldn''t imagine a worthwhile reason for leaving her. Yet, when I took account of my values and my enduring sense of social responsibility to continue my work, I experienced an inner conflict, questioning whether these new feelings were something that I could fully endorse and embrace. During feedings at 4:00 a.m., an hour ripe for morbid rumination, I would wonder if my reluctance to leave my daughter revealed some sort of weakness that I couldn''t quite acknowledge or pin down. I''d probe the nature of my seeming lack of willpower, but despite my background in thinking through psychological issues, I couldn''t find clarity or even a satisfactory vocabulary for describing how I felt. This led to some vaguely disorienting conversations with friends, each of us struggling to explain our different choices and different constraints, each of us finding ourselves both defensive and exposed. Yet what was the nature of this defensive posture? Where did it come from, and why couldn''t we talk about how motherhood had changed us, or hadn''t, without getting bogged down in the kind of stock generalities ("work''s so much easier than home," "kids need their moms") that so often stymied such conversations? As my desire to spend time mothering gathered force within me, I kept noticing how hard it was to talk about.

Usually comfortable expressing myself in words, I found myself strangely inarticulate on this topic. The only time distress ever drove me to shop was after a respected mentor bemoaned over lunch my post-motherhood lack of professional productivity. Rather than find a way to explain to her my shifting priorities, I responded, as if in a trance, by purchasing a hideous mauve suit as a sop to my vanished professionalism. I never wore it. A few weeks later, my obstetrician genially asked what I was up to, and I muttered something about having turned into a fifties housewife. It was as if the moment words began to form in my mouth, they instantaneously tumbled into the well-worn groove of cliché. I was aware that my conflicts and fear of judgment bore the stamp of my own idiosyncratic psychology, and eventually I stopped expecting this complex of feelings to dissipate; I simply learned to live around it. Over the next five years, it sat in the background of my thoughts, familiar enough to be regarded as an uneasy companion, flaring up when I faced a difficult choice about how to allocate my time.

Things took a turn, though, when I became pregnant with our third child five years later. I remember taking a walk in the first few weeks of pregnancy along a bike path near our house and feeling a surprising sense of lightness. It surprised me because I''d imagined that, though the child was very much wanted and planned, my spirit of welcome would be weighed down by an array of practical worries and the old familiar psychological concerns. Instead, though mindful of the challenges that lay ahead, I felt an almost giddy sense of freedom. Poised as I was in that sliver of time between becoming pregnant and the descent into nausea and bone-tiredness, I knew that soon even thinking would exhaust me, so I was impatient to figure out what was making me feel so light. Suddenly, a childhood sense-memory of learning to ride a bike came to mind--in particular, the feeling of being at the final stage of not knowing how to do something and tipping overnight and without conscious effort into the most elementary stage of knowing. It captured a transition I sensed within myself, from a model in which children were fitted into the mold of my previous life to a new sense in which mothering was the center from which my other priorities flowed. My feeling of freedom didn''t diminish the real economic, emotional, and practical demands of having another child.

Still, I found it compelling, in part because its source--my shift of emphasis toward mothering--felt so transgressive. How was it that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the ancient imperative that women mother their children felt somehow liberating and new? Those thoughts led me to reflect on the complexities of women''s experiences of mothering young children in America today. They stimulated me to reconsider questions I had long pondered about the place of motherhood in the psychology of women. Eventually, they drove me to use my training as a psychologist, my practice as a psychotherapist, my sympathies as a feminist, and my ongoing experience as a mother to try to understand how we evaluate and live out, socially and individually, the desire to care for children. And ultimately, that exploration became this book. * * * NO MATTER WHAT our differences may be, every mother I''ve ever known has grappled with her own ver.