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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 magazine rack, beaming out from every channel, 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 is something unvoiced about the experience of motherhood itself.

It sways our choices and haunts our dreams, yet we shy away from examining it with our full attention. Treated both as an illusion and as a foregone conclusion, it is at once obvious and invisible: our 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 her 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 too often misconstrue it as a throwback or excuse, a self-curtailment of potential. Those who champion women's maternal role too often define it narrowly in the context of service - to one's child, husband, or God. What each view eclipses is 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.

As common wisdom would have it, "mother" and "desire" do not belong in the same phrase. Desire, we've been told, is about sex. Motherhood, we've been told, is about practically everything but sex. A century ago, sexuality was repressed; blooming young women in Freud's day contracted odd symptoms - paralyzed arms, lost voices - as a way to adapt to social mores that inhibited women's awareness or expression of their sexual desires.

Today, sexuality is everywhere, and the desire to mother is more prone to obfuscation. Partly owing to five decades of feminist writing, women's sexual desire no longer comes as much of a surprise. Maternal desire, by contrast, has become increasingly problematic. It is almost as if women's desire for sex and their desire to mother have switched places in terms of taboo. The taboo against wanting to mother operates as a strange new source of inhibition for women. Some try not to think about motherhood while they pursue more immediate professional goals. Others deny the extent of their maternal wishes, which become clear only after hard-won insight in psychotherapy.

Still others try to minimize their desire to nurture their child, setting up their lives to return to normal after their baby is born, never fully cognizant that there may be no "normal" to return to. For one woman, wanting to stay home with her child is an embarrassing reversal of previous priorities. Another can't decide whether caring for children is a choice or a trap. Another feels she needs to maintain earning power and professional status if she wants to safeguard her self-esteem. For Freud's patients, sexual desire was frustrated by a restrictive model of decent womanhood, which emerged from complex social and economic forces. Today, maternal desire is constrained by a contemporary model of self that has developed in response to more recent economic and social realities.

Fifty years ago, women who wished to realize professional ambitions dealt with gender inequality by refusing or relinquishing motherhood. Twenty years ago, mothers evaded gender inequality by keeping up their professional pace and not letting motherhood interfere with their work. Women continue to recognize the impediments to earning power and professional accomplishments that caring for children presents, and some adapt by deferring or rejecting motherhood. But the problem remains that for many women, these approaches to attaining equality don't deal with the central issue, namely that caring for their children matters deeply to them.

What if we were to take this mattering seriously, to put it at the core of our exploration? Even to pose the question is to invite almost instant misconstrual. It's as if this would recommend to women to live through others, forsake equality, or relax into the joys of subsidized homemaking. But that reflexive misinterpretation is itself evidence of how difficult it is to think about maternal desire as a positive aspect of self. The problem is on view in the ways we talk about motherhood and work. Defenders of mothers' employment often begin by enumerating its benefits to children, families, and above all mothers themselves.

Then they abruptly switch to the claim that mothers can't afford not to work, so we may as well spare ourselves the unnecessary pain and guilt of even examining its potentially troubling aspects. This rhetorical one-two punch appears designed to fend off a candid consideration of the whole complicated arena of mothers' competing desires, and especially the desire to care for their children. It is not the stay-at-home mother whom this evasion hurts most, but the working mother who longs to spend more time with her children. For her, the need for a frank, legitimizing public discussion of maternal desire is particularly acute.

I juxtapose "maternal" and "desire" to emphasize what we feel oddly uncomfortable focusing on: that wanting to care for children is a major feature of many women's lives. We often resist thinking through its implications because we fear becoming mired in clich?s about woman's nature, which will then be used to restrict women's rights and freedoms. But if we resist thinking about maternal desire, or treat it as a marginal detail, we lose an opportunity to understand ourselves and the broader situation of women. To take maternal desire as a valid focus of personal exploration is not a step backward but a step forward, toward greater awareness and a truer model of the self.

THERE ARE MANY HISTORICAL REASONS why the desire to mother has rarely surfaced as a point of inquiry. For most of human history, women exercised relatively little choice about becoming mothers. "A woman can hardly ever choose," the novelist George Eliot, n?e Mary Ann Evans, wrote in 1866.

"She must take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach." In the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization irrevocably changed patterns of work and family.

The work of production moved outside the home, and child rearing became mothers' dominant focus. This shift in maternal activity, prompted by economics, soon shaped standard ideology as well: raising her children was a good mother's sacred calling. If she wanted something different or something more, then something was surely wrong with her.

In the twentieth century, gender roles were transformed. Betty Friedan's 1963 call for women to become whole persons, actualizing themselves in public and private realms, catalyzed the expansion of opportunity that had begun earlier and spearheaded the feminist political movement that would begin dismantling gender discrimination. Although "glass ceilings" and insidious gender biases persist, educated women are omnipresent in the once male precincts of medicine, journalism, and law. Women at all class levels are out working, as sales reps, firefighters, and civil servants. Mothers work outside the home in record numbers.

Many would agree that the problems of access Friedan and others decried - of admissions to schools, colleges, and corporations - have largely been redressed. Yet all the access in the world doesn't solve the difficulties that arise when women become mothers; for if a mother wants to spend time caring for her children, her relationship to work necessarily changes. In the 1960s and 1970s, spending time with children was viewed as a roadblock to pursuing personal aspirations. Today, women's successful integration into careers creates a roadblock to spending time with children. Regardless of the decade, it seems, "there is never a 'good' time to have a baby."

In a 1999 New York Times piece, the feminist writer Naomi Wolf lamented the lack of political will among very bright college women. One Yale student was quoted as saying, "Women my age just have to accept that we can't have it all." Wolf discerned in this young woman's attitude an apathy toward social change and an indifference to the history of women's hard-won struggles. Yet I suspect that if we delve more deeply into what young women like this one are saying, we will find a rather realistic appraisal of the ways that women's integration into the workplace has not managed to adequately address a fundamental concern. That concern is less whether one can squeeze procreation into one's life than how to be the kind of mother one wants to be.

The conservative critique of feminism has offered one perspective on the conflicts contemporary mothers face, questioning the benefits to mothers of egalitarian marriage, universal day care, and feminist-inspired ideals of self-actualization. Too often, though, any useful observations they make are undercut by an urge to lay at feminism's door just about every problem women encounter. The French critic Roland Barthes decided to analyze contemporary mythologies because he "resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn," prompting him to dissect the "ideological abuse" hidden behind the "decorative display of what-goes-without-saying." Feminism's critics frequently settle for the "decorative display," the attractive but unfounded claim that nature is nature and always will be. They ignore the fact that feminism has inspired constructive changes in women's lives in areas that just a generation ago appeared as intractable "nature." Feminism, more than any other social force, has helped us question the view that our history is our nature.

At the same time, feminists concerned with the rights and opportunities of women can fail to appreciate the positive motivation - the authentic expression of self - that many women bring to the task of caring for their children. Some voice frustration at women's repeated "retreats" to the world of child rearing, seeing them as a personal or political regression. Others blame baby care experts who advocate spending time with children for trying to impose self-sacrifice on mothers. These critics seem unwilling to apply their critical acumen to their own assumption that mothers experience caring for their children as self-sacrificing.

The view that caring for one's children amounts to self-sacrifice is a very tricky psychological point for women, and a confounding point for theory. It is confusing partly because the term "self-sacrifice" is potentially applicable to two different aspects of experience, the economic and the emotional. When it comes to their economic well-being, it is all too true that women sacrifice themselves when they become mothers. Time taken out of the workforce to nurture children, lost years accruing Social Security benefits, and a host of other economic factors result in unequivocal economic disadvantages to mothers. At the same time, from the point of view of emotional well-being, a mother often sees her desire to nurture her children as an intrinsically valuable impulse, and as an expression of what she subjectively experiences as her authentic self. This inconsistency presents contemporary women with one of the core paradoxes of their lives as mothers.

Considering for a moment the issue of self-sacrifice strictly from a psychological point of view, what is trickiest for women is the fact that some of what they find meaningful about mothering can be construed, from some vantage points, as self-abnegating.

There are moments in the day-to-day life of every mother when the deferral of her own gratifications or aims is experienced as oppressive. But a narrow focus on such moments and the belief that they adequately capture, or stand for, the whole experience of mothering fail to appreciate the overall context in which those deferrals take place. When she relinquishes control over her time, forgoes the satisfaction of an impulse, or surrenders to playful engagement with her child even as she feels driven to "accomplish something," the surface quality of capitulation in these decisions belies their role in satisfying her deeper motives and goals. These deeper goals have to do, ultimately, with the creation of meaning. In the seemingly mundane give-and-take of parenting - playing, sharing, connecting, relaxing, enduring boredom, getting mad, cajoling, compromising, and sacrificing - a mother communicates with her child about something no less momentous than what is valuable in life, and about the possibilities and limits of intimate relationships.

This process can be one of extraordinary pleasure. There is the sensual, physical pleasure of caring for small children; the satisfaction of spending most of our waking hours (and some of our sleeping hours) with the people we love the most, taking care of their needs; the delight in being able to make our child happy and in being made happy by our child. There is the pleasure of being "alone together," of doing things near one another, feeling comforted by the presence of the other while attending to our own activities. There are also the enormous gratifications of watching children develop, grow, and change, and of being involved in the people they become.

Devoting time to caring for children is not, of course, all about pleasure and good feeling. It is also grounded in a sense of meaning, morality, even aesthetics. The choice to do so can express, for example, a value about time, having to do with the desire to create an atmosphere where time is not a scarce commodity and children's sense of time has a place. It can express an ideal about service, to one's immediate community and to a range of broader ethical and political goods associated with raising children well.

It can express a value about relationships. Managing one's rage, quelling one's desire to walk out the door on squalling children and dirty dishes, and feeling one is going to faint of boredom at the sheer repetitiveness of it all and yet continuing anyway are some of the real emotional and moral quandaries that caring for children routinely presents. Many mothers believe, for all their daily struggles with irritation and fatigue, that there is something intrinsically meaningful about managing and overcoming those states in the process of caring for one's children.

When the activities of mothering are interpreted as self-limiting, they tend to be treated dismissively. In Susan Faludi's book Backlash, the value of mothers spending time raising their children is articulated either by right-wing ideologues who are trying to suppress women's freedom and equality or by disaffected feminists lapsing into a defeated sentimentality. Author Myriam Miedzian comments that life at home with children amounts to "shining floors and wiping noses." Time with children is often framed in feminist analyses as a form of drudgery unfairly allotted to women, remediable through shared parenting or better day care. It is as if the day-to-day practice of mothering places unreasonable or unjust demands on mothers and is part of the oppression of women's gender-based role. Yet in an era of unparalleled choice for women, spending time caring for children cannot be glibly interpreted as a deficiency or inhibition.

One of the goals of feminism in the last twenty-five years has been to dismantle the ideal of the all-giving, self-sacrificing mother, an ideal with which previous generations of mothers did battle. But we can better understand the situation of mothers today if we don't view this image of the mother as an eternal ideal, because, in fact, for the current generation of mothers, the ideal has shifted. More recently, the ideal of the supermom has been by far the more vivid and immediate. This cultural ideal pressures mothers to perform excellently on all fronts, in a job, with their children, with their partner, at the gym, and in the kitchen, making those fifteen-minute meals.

The supermom ideal plays into people's fantasies that if they work hard enough to get everything "right," they will not lose anything, that nothing will have to be sacrificed. What we had in the previous ideal was a woman who lost herself to her children and her mothering. What we have in the supermom ideal is a woman who loses nothing. But in fact, the problem with trying to do everything is that it changes radically your perception of the time you have. Anyone who has tried to "fit everything in" can attest to how excruciating the five-minute wait at the supermarket checkout line becomes, let alone a child's slow-motion attempt to tie her own shoes when you're running late getting her to preschool.

Most women today are not struggling to break out of the ideal that instructed them to sacrifice everything for their children. They are more likely beset with the quandary of how to break out of the "do everything" model so that they will have more relaxed time for their relationships. Whereas the past ideal may have hindered women's search for autonomy and self-determination in the wider world, the current ideal makes it harder to express their desire to care for their children.

It may be the supermom ideal that Naomi Wolf's seemingly apolitical college women are rejecting when they say they can't "have it all." These young women may intuit, well before their mothering years, that life may require them to make a conscious and planned departure from the "do everything" model that preoccupied the generation of women that preceded them.

HUGE SHIFTS IN WOMEN'S LIVES - brought on by the availability of birth control, educational and economic access, and the possibility of diverse life choices - have finally created the potential for mothering to be a chosen activity in ways unimaginable for the vast majority of women throughout history and still in many parts of the world today. At the same time, the proliferation of choices presents new challenges, as it creates expanded arenas for conflict, indecision, and doubt.

In trying to understand our conflicting goals and desires from the inside, we might begin with that science of desire, psychoanalysis.

The psychoanalytic method is a powerful means for understanding the desires women bring to mothering. It is, after all, a method designed to elucidate what we feel and what we hide from ourselves. It reveals to us that our desires, motives, and beliefs never have a single fixed meaning, and that they are not always what they announce themselves to be. Listening to patients in the clinical consulting room discloses the obvious fact that every woman brings to mothering her own personal history, temperament, and sense of herself. For any given woman, the desire to mother can be a heartfelt longing, a fantasy, an excuse, something to be denied - or all of the above, at different times. One woman extols the value of being an extremely attentive mother. She worries that if she doesn't make her kids' sandwiches every day and watch all their sports games, she's a bad mom. Meanwhile, her own work as a graphic designer languishes. At this time in her life, her notion of being a good mother keeps her from expressing other important aspects of herself.

Another woman has little time to attend to her children's daily routines and takes pride in raising children who are as self-reliant as she is. For her, finding the time to help her children constitutes a healing liberation from her own exacting standard of self-sufficiency. Each of these mothers seeks a greater sense of vitality and meaning, but they differ in where they started and where they are going.

The personal meanings of mothering are endlessly complex, and the particular conflicts vary from person to person. Yet it seems that today, a mother's desire to care for her children is the side of the conflict that gets the most simplistic public airing, even by its partisans, and the side that mainstream feminism has done the least to support. Consequently, it is not uncommon for mothers to have a hard time seeing how their desire to care for their children is playing a role in their dilemmas.

For example, a thirty-five-year-old professional woman who was employed full-time dwelled on the potential inadequacy of her child care arrangement, worrying that her ten-month-old was unhappy, even though she could not think of any specific reason for concern. She attained greater clarity when she realized that the real issue was that she was missing her baby, and her sense of anxiety over child care then gave way to a more intelligible sense of yearning. It was hard to become aware of missing her baby, because she had operated with the assumption that if the baby was all right while she was away, she would - or should - feel all right about being away too.

For this person, it took psychotherapy to make her aware that she was missing her child; but her quandary points to a more general cultural phenomenon. In the current milieu, women rarely perceive their desire to care for their children as intellectually respectable, and that makes it less emotionally intelligible as well. On a broader social level, mothers' need and desire to work and its importance to their self-sufficiency and self-expression get a strong public hearing, but mothers' needs and desires with respect to nurturing their children receive comparatively little serious discussion. Maternal desire tends to be treated as back-ground noise or unspoken assumption rather than as something explicit, valuable, and important to include as an issue relevant to women's lives.

Our national discussion of child care, for example, understandably focuses on the reality that most parents need to work.

Because the discussion appears to deal with an immutable fact of life, it is sometimes viewed as impractical, even elitist, to raise questions concerning the feelings of the parents and children involved.

But progressive calls for universal affordable day care ignore a jumble of inconvenient emotions, including parents' desire to take care of their own children. Many mothers feel torn up inside being apart from their babies and children many hours a day, yet they feel realistic or mature when they are able to suppress those feelings. The terms of the discussion don't admit the possibility that pleasure is a reliable guide, or that desire tells us anything about truth.

Developmental psychology is one domain that studies the impact of pleasure on human growth. In the past two decades, it has undertaken an increasingly nuanced investigation of mother-child interaction, revealing the central role of shared emotional states and shared pleasure in healthy human development. The research on mother-infant interaction teaches us about the making of mutual meaning, and about the roots of emotional complexity and richness. Yet, for the most part, these findings remain marginal to our public debates about day care. Their perceived irrelevance hints at our difficulty in making the mutual parent-child relationship a focal point in our reflections on child care.

The importance of the mutual parent-child relationship and a mother's desire to participate in that relationship are masked by the rhetoric of children's "needs." When exasperated callers to talk-radio shows insist on children's "need" to be taken care of by their parents, they are making a statement not primarily about facts, but, rather, about values. Children are not all alike; one two-year-old may happily trot into day care while another desperately protests. Children survive, and some even thrive, in a range of circumstances, including circumstances they wouldn't choose for themselves if given a say in the matter. The emphasis on children's "needs" represents an attempt to create a socially sanctioned arena for children's "wants" and what we want for them. In a sense, "needs" are a post-Freudian way to talk about values, a way to demarcate and honor those things we consider of greatest importance to human well-being.

The oft-heard question about day care - "Does day care hurt children?" - turns children into the repository of our mutual desire for human connection. If the studies show that children do fine in day care, we independent adults are supposed to go about our business without remorse. On this view, mothers' feelings simply aren't relevant; the only issue is day care's effects on children. But what is good for parents and what is good for children are equally relevant in a moral evaluation of day care. And adults' desire to nurture their children is much more passionate and complex than the opposition of dependent child and independent adult would have us believe.

MOTHERHOOD CALLS FOR A TRANSFORMED individuality, an integration of a new relationship and a new role into one's sense of self. This is a practical and a psychological transformation. It is screamingly evident that as a society we are grudging and cramped about the practical adjustments required by motherhood, continually treating them as incidental and inconvenient. Like an irritated bus passenger who is asked to move over and make room, we appear affronted by the sheer existence of mothers' needs. The disheartening, thorough analyses of this problem by feminist economists cannot be improved upon and are there for all to read.

But these practical difficulties, not to mention the views that underlie them, also have far-reaching psychological implications. They affect how we appraise and experience the whole issue of inner maternal transformation, the "space" we will allow motherhood to occupy in our psyches. If everything around us seems designed to obstruct our integrating the full force of our maternal devotion into a life responsive to our prior commitments, our outlook and values about what we should "do" with our maternal desire can come to be subtly shaped.

This conflict is not lost on young women. Naomi Wolf's Yale student's "we can't have it all" response reflects one resolution among many to a question that confronts virtually every young woman at some point or another: namely, how she will integrate her maternal potential into her mature identity. The first stirrings of this question accompany a girl's sexual development in adolescence, for that is when she not only becomes capable of sexual and maternal expression but also meets up with cultural norms and ideals of successful adulthood. Cultural ideals about control, in particular, resonate with girls' psychological need for self-control at this stage, with both constructive and problematic effects. On the one hand, educated and upwardly mobile girls in contemporary society face a decade, perhaps two or even three, between their sexual maturation and childbearing, a span that gives them enormous opportunity for self-development and self-definition. Contemporary female adolescence is a time when a girl can optimally find a balanced perspective on the issue of self-control, one that will help her arrive at an integrated sense of herself as an individual woman and potential mother.

On the other hand, in our culture the very idea of control is laden with gender implications. Control, conceived as an aspect of adult autonomy, is at odds with our image of motherhood.

The whole arena of pregnancy, childbirth, and the daily activities of mothering involve decreased personal control, and loss of control is among the cultural and personal anxieties that maternal desire raises. For some young women struggling toward a sense of identity, it is not surprising that motherhood comes to symbolize everything antithetical to the independent life they want to pursue. And the pressure on women to aspire to a certain model of control as a signature of adulthood is one of the social factors that can riddle maternal wishes with conflict.

It is true that the satisfying, somewhat predictable march of "progress" in one's life without children is replaced, when children arrive, by a messier, more ambiguous process of "becoming."

In this sense, motherhood can seem an agitating distraction, even a threatening derailment. Yet the sense that motherhood robs us of individuality derives part of its power from a cultural definition of individuality that pits the "serving the species" script of procreation against the notion of giving birth to oneself. This definition asserts itself in adolescence, when girls observe the difficulty in integrating the desire to mother with the idea of a work life. It rears its head at the end of college, when it can be an embarrassment to admit that one would like children sooner rather than later. When women move into the workforce, they observe the correlation of motherhood with a loss of power, pay, and prestige. External conditions resonate with internal anxieties, making it difficult for many women to evaluate their own desires with respect to mothering.

The prevailing notion that motherhood and individuality are in pitched conflict may also play into what some women writers have described as their obliviousness to mothers and babies before they began considering motherhood themselves. In the old days, women lived out their years in dense webs of female relationships, presiding together over birth, nurture, and death; women couldn't avoid children even if they tried. But today, smaller families and freedom in charting our own course mean that women can choose to live in relative isolation from children.

There are plenty of women, of course, who simply aren't interested in children, for a host of reasons. A friend spent her youth raising her siblings; she'd seen all the "becoming" she could take and was liberated by the prospect of living her own life. Yet, I detect in the obliviousness described in these writings neither a simple response to changed social realities nor a lack of interest in motherhood, but rather a motivated sense that preserving one's selfhood depends on shutting out an interest in children. That outlook can foster a kind of self-development, but it can also contribute to a deferral of childbearing that later, if it contributes to infertility, can be tinged with almost unbearable regret.

The incompatibility between motherhood and individuality has perhaps nowhere been more reflexively presumed than in the pro-choice rhetoric surrounding the issue of abortion. There, it has been perceived as dangerous to emphasize either the moral ambiguity of abortion or women's desire to mother, for fear of fueling a politically regressive view of women's place.

The resulting approach has been to frame the issue almost solely in terms of a woman's right to govern her own body. But for many women, including many proponents of reproductive choice, the wrenching ambiguity of abortion has to do with how difficult it is to place in clear opposition one's interests as an individual and as a potential mother, or one's interests and a potential child's interests. Their intuition is closer to that which Gwendolyn Brooks captured in her poem about abortion, "the mother": "oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? / You were born, you had body, you died. / It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried./ Believe me, I loved you all./ Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you /All."

The tension between motherhood and individuality also surfaces in the seeming split screen between our cultural fascination with babies and the less articulated desire to care for them.

Just as there are thousands of falling-in-love stories but many fewer tales of slogging to make a marriage work, there are countless media images of the miracle of pregnancy or the adorableness of babies but little that represents the day-to-day care of children. Perhaps it was ever thus. History provides a wealth of examples, from Cleopatra onward, of women who birthed babies, delegated caregiving, and emerged with their freedom of movement intact. And certainly from a psychological point of view, the desire to have a child and the desire to care for that child may coexist in the same person, but they are not the same thing. One woman captured the difference when she said, "My mother thinks I should try to spend more time with the children I already have, but I can't get the idea of having another one out of my mind."

Still, it is striking how the desire to have a child is today the object of such intense focus and, increasingly, extraordinary measures, whereas the desire to care for children is singularly unriveting, even a bit d?class?. A woman may believe that caring for children will express, rather than compromise, her individuality or her valued goals, but she regularly meets up with social and economic incentives that pull her in a different direction.

In the course of educated young women's lives, for instance, it is usual to acquire training and jobs before children. A couple marries, both members work, and without giving it much thought, they develop a lifestyle predicated on two salaries.

When they have a child, the mother may find that as her maternity leave draws to a close, she isn't itching to get back to work. Instead, she yearns to be with her child. Her change of heart presents the couple with the need to rethink their relationship and their decisions about lifestyle and money. They may conclude that it is going "backward" to give up one salary; and anyway, decisions made on the basis of two salaries, like buying a house, cannot be easily reversed. Rueful acceptance overrides her yearning: spending time caring for their children is a "luxury" they can't afford. Suddenly, like so many things in American life - health care, good schools, fresh air - motherhood has turned into something of a luxury. You have time for it only if you are very lucky.

Margaret, a lawyer, left a rewarding job at forty to stay home with her second son. She had worked fifty hours per week during her first son's infancy. Wisecracking by nature, she is uncharacteristically solemn when discussing her decisions:

I'll never get over the regret I feel at missing my first child's babyhood. What amazes me still - you'd think I'd get over it - is how completely taken off guard I was by wanting to be with him. Before you have kids, you have the almost swaggering attitude that you won't fall into the mommy trap. You don't believe that once you're there, you'll genuinely want to be with your kids.

Now whenever I'm in a position to counsel younger associates, I tell them, "Set up your marriage, finances and domestic life so that they don't depend on your continued wage earning, because hard as it is to imagine, once you have kids, you may not want to do what you're doing anymore."

Today's young women face a different social landscape from that of women a generation ago, and thanks to the struggle of the women who preceded them, they can take for granted access to work and public attention on work-family balance. The softening of rigid trade-offs has given younger women more latitude in assessing for themselves the relative satisfactions of work and family. To some older women, this can look like a regression to nonfeminist values. For others, it can lead to reflection on the choices they made and the social climate in which they made them. Elisa, a therapist with a college-age child, recounted that when she was a young mother, she left her child to go back to work with great sadness and trepidation, but she felt sure that it was the progressive thing to do. She and her friends "were looking at our own mothers as frustrated and depressed, and we had a clear sense of the importance of learning from their situation and making a life for ourselves. Now I look back with an incredible sense of longing; but I can't say I would do it differently, because that is who I was." Intergenerational discussions, potentially difficult as they are, can offer a rich opportunity for reflection to women at all stages of life.

I HAVE BEEN ARGUING THAT we do not know how to think about the desire to mother. We have trouble understanding it - within ourselves, in terms of our psychological and feminist theories, and in the public debates and institutions that structure our lives. The critical issue that has eluded theory and social debate is that caring for young children is something mothers often view as extraordinarily important both for their children and for themselves.

Reframing the mothering role in this way calls into question a number of views that hang in the cultural air. We are all familiar with these views: mothering is a sacrifice of the mother for the sake of the child; mothering will not be valued until it is paid work; careers enhance personal growth, while caring for children breeds stagnation; children disrupt, rather than foster, the realization of individual goals. Such views contribute to the emphasis some mothers place on "returning to normal" after children are born. They may also help to explain the surprise some women feel when they realize how much they want to spend time caring for their children.

In the popular American mind-set, there's always a second chance. So it comes as a shock to realize how fast children grow up, and how quickly they no longer crave your company or respond to your influence in the ways they once did. The time-limited nature of mothering small children, the very uniqueness of it, itself seems almost like an affront to women's opportunity, demanding as it does that mothers respond at a distinct, unrepeatable moment with decisions, often radical ones, about how to spend their time. Unfair as it may seem, the fleetingness is real. In that light, the fact that childbearing absorbs but a small portion of women's adult life span - often seen as a reason to "stay on track" - should point us toward prizing this brief period of our lives, and not just on a personal or individual level; as a culture, we need to express our recognition of its value through our laws, our policies concerning work and family, and our theories of psychological development.

Caring for one's children at home is sometimes dismissed as a choice open only to privileged women. But in fact, mothers at all socioeconomic levels face difficult decisions regarding the time they spend with their children. Moreover, the devaluation of mothering operates at various levels of social and economic reality and in many intersecting ways. If we open our eyes to the commonalities in mothers' experience, we might begin to develop some political consciousness, even solidarity, about the larger-scale problems that the devaluation of mothering inflicts upon everyone. It should not be acceptable to any of us, for instance, when politicians maintain both that middle-class children need their mothers at home and that welfare mothers should be joining the workforce when their children are four months old.

Economic necessity is always a fact of life, and economic privation affects those who suffer from it in every sphere of their lives. The mothers least likely to find fulfillment in their low-wage jobs are also those least likely to have time to enjoy being with their children. This group of mothers and children suffer a disproportionate negative burden. But for those people with some choice, an emphasis on economic necessity can itself be used to obscure the realm of feelings on which wise and satisfying choices draw. No one can banish economic need; but being aware of how we feel about time apart from our children, and being attuned to our children's feelings about it, are central to clarifying our priorities.

Why is this a book about mothers? Because caring for small children is compellingly central to many women's sense of themselves to a degree still not experienced by many men. If current research is correct, this may be changing, as more men place value on family time. From custody rights to employer policies, fathers are increasingly questioning the givens that have framed men's life courses in the past. But for the moment, the care of children remains a predominantly female occupation. Some argue that this is a problem in need of correction - that true equality of the sexes cannot be achieved until child rearing and work responsibilities are equally shared. But whatever position one takes on this matter, and whatever one's social ideal for the division of labor, the idea that equality between men and women - or fairness between any two partners - can come about only through similar life courses and a parallel allocation of labor may constitute an abstraction by which few people actually want to live.

We need to speak accurately about the character of maternal desire, resisting its caricature either as sentimental false consciousness or woman's nature. Teasing apart the psychological and ideological strands of maternal desire can help individual women consider its role in their lives and make choices based on a conscious awareness of their own conflicts and wishes.

Maternal desire is not, for any woman, all there is. But for many of us, it is an important part of who we are. And among such women, it is time to start a conversation.