Not with me, per se, but two articles I read today that are very different (and opposite in many ways) in their thoughts. Basic gist is that mothering seems to completely take over some womens' lives and while others seem to integrate in a different way. The original article was about those whose lives are completely taken over when becoming a mom and end up being obsessed, in a sense, with it. I then read an article that was in response to the original article.
Honestly, this is something I think about now and again, and from both sides of the equation. Not sure where all of my conclusions lie, but I think in the end it's at least good to think about and to get another's perspective.
Interesting point - The first article was written by a woman who does not have any children. The reaction article was from a mother who, obviously, did not agree. What I think would be really interesting is to add the perspective of a woman who has children and agrees with the original article and a woman without kids who agrees with the mom in the article responding to the first. Not that it would help one "side" or the other, but bring even more perspective and thoughts into it :).
You can find the original article here and the second here.
I love this quote from GK Chesterton about homemaking/mothering (from girltalk.blogs.com):
ReplyDelete"[Woman is surrounded] with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't...."
"[W]hen people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge [at his work]. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean…. I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children [arithmetic], and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness."