Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0)

by Anna Quindlen

  Fat chance, Freudians. Whether querulous or imperious, attentive or overbearing, warm or waspish, surcease or succubus, she is as central as the sun. During our lifetime motherhood has been trashed as a deadend no-pay career and elevated as a sacred and essential calling. It is neither. It is a way of life, chosen in great ignorance, and the bedrock of much of what we are, and will become.

  The flowers sent under the auspices of that gauzy pink second Sunday in May have browned now, and the cards that stood in repose on the mantel have been consigned, with their elder sisters, to the bottom of the jewelry box or the bureau drawer. All this has as much to do with mothering as a blue spruce lopped off at the trunk and strung with glass has to do with the message of Christianity. Mothering consists largely of transcendent scut work, which seems contradictory, which is exactly right. How can you love so much someone who drives you so crazy and makes such constant demands? How can you devote yourself to a vocation in which you are certain to be made peripheral, if not redundant? How can we joyfully embrace the notion that we have ceased to be the center of our own universe?

  There is the roof, growing larger and stronger, one small piece after another making a great whole, until it can withstand winds and heat and blizzards and downpours. It is a utilitarian thing, and a majestic one, too. There are ghosts beneath its eaves, ghosts yet to be born, the ghosts of my children’s grown children, saying, “Our grandparents put that roof on the house in the year 2000.” And if I could speak through the opaque curtain of time I would say, “We did it to keep you safe and warm, so that you could do your best by you and yours, just as we have tried to do.” Perhaps I would be talking to myself, because the house had been sold, the roof given over to shelter other people’s children. That’s all right, too. It’s the thought that counts, and the metaphor. In the sharply angled gray lines against the lambent sky I can read reports of my own inevitable passing. But I see my immortality, too, the part of me that will live forever.