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Wild Thing
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But a mother is what I became, and what I learned from my mother and grandmother is this: When it comes to raising the children, the buck stops with me. I've hired help here and there, but no full-time third-party parents, no surrogate moms. Returning to a part-time position with a law firm a year after my first son, Sam, was born, I made the mistake of proclaiming to my mother that the Panamanian nanny I'd hired was "wonderful." There was a dark pause on the line before she tartly replied, "Well, she couldn't be as wonderful as you."

So I'm riven by the conflict between serving my children and serving the movement that gave birth to me. I can't escape the sense that, like Chloe, I abandoned the cause. In time, I found I wanted the safe harbor of a husband and children, not just to have, but to experience and enjoy. I wanted a home where I had nothing to prove and nothing to fear. I realized that I could not live up to the demands of the revolutionaries I so admired.

This revelation produced guilt as well as anger. If I was formed, in part, by political movements, I am also their prisoner, unable to make choices uninfluenced by the dynamics of race and gender. Unlike the white members of my book group, I am judged harshly for every choice I might make. When people discover that I, an Ivy League-educated black woman, have stayed at home to raise her two boys, they are smug, as if I am proof of the failure of affirmative action. I believe they assume that I probably don't work because I was never really good at anything, not because I chose to put my children first. It infuriates me.

Even worse is the knowledge that by staying home I have undermined the ideals of the movements I hoped to serve. Catching sight of myself cleaning out the garbage disposal or plucking action figures from the floor, I feel like a Backlash poster child. "Look at this woman," the caption might read. "She didn't need that fancy education; she doesn't even need the vote!"

An educated mother at home has no peer in the contempt that she can heap upon herself. There is something about taking care of children that appears to wither the self. That's why patience is so dangerous: It's so easy to become Chloe, who will fight for a cause only to the limits of her personal safety.

There are some who protest that mothers are authentic revolutionaries. This is true. As mothers we make our most lasting mark. I believe -- with ruthless, irrepressible urgency -- that I count in the world, not less because I've been a mother at home, but more.

One day, Sam came home from kindergarten and asked what I did for a living. He was anxious because his class had discussed other mommies' jobs and he was a little embarrassed that he didn't know what to say about me. Ashamed, even. So was I -- shamed into silence.

That evening, he called me excitedly to the television: "Mom, if you call this number," he said, "you can study for a career in your own home!" The next morning he awakened me: "Mom, I have an idea: Why don't you be Dad's secretary!" Wisely, my husband refrained from comment.

After breakfast the next day, I sat Sam down and tried to explain to him what I had done and why. As we walked to the bus stop, he reviewed: "So you're a lawyer and a writer, but mostly you just take care of us, right?" He looked at me with such genuine concern that suddenly I laughed. "Just say it's complicated," I told him.

He climbed aboard. I waved to the departing bus. Inwardly, I shook my head. I thought about my own mother and how long it took me to realize that she was a revolutionary.

It occurs to me that I will feel doubt again, shame even, but I will always be loyal to her cause.
salon.com | Sept. 29, 1999

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