Chief Executive Mom

Visit me at my new website - anniecrawford.com After wrestling with my posts on family planning, and just this morning feeling peace about my conclusions, I came across the following passage in my reading of Walking on Water. It may help to know that L'Engle was a devoted wife and mother to whom family was very important.

The moment of inspiration does not come to someone who lolls around expecting the gift to be free. It is no giveaway. It is the pearl for which we have to pay a great price, the price of intense loneliness, the price of that vulnerability which often allows us to be hurt; the less readily understandable price of hurting those we love . . . And I am not sure it's a choice. If we're given a gift - and the size of the gift, great or small, is irrelevant - then most of us must serve it, like it or not. I say most of us because I have seen people of great talent who have done nothing with it and who mutter about getting down to work "when there's time".

For a woman who has chosen family as well as work, there's never time, and yet somehow time is given to us as time is given to the man who must sail a ship or chart the stars. . . . I am often asked how my children feel about my work . . . [my firstborn said] "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us lately, and we've noticed that you haven't been writing, and we wish you'd get back to the typewriter." A wonderfully freeing remark. I had to learn that I was a better mother and wife when I was working than when I was not.

When I consider what L'Engle means by "work" I do not consider "oh I want to get out of the house and away from the kids and do something else, anything else, work". For myself, I do not even consider finanical necessity work. I am so greatly and undeservedly blessed for that not to be a factor. However, I do consider the weight of my mind upon me which is restless and depressed unless I do the work of writing, though my gift may be, as L'Engle says, small. My thoughts are formless and heavy upon me, my heart is confused and cranky, unless through the art of writing I give them form and external expression, an expression that I can return to and gaze upon. For some women, I believe converstaion fulfills a parallel need, but for me, my spoken words usually leave me with the feeling that something learned has fleeted from me and is gone, without being birthed into a creation to share and reflect upon. I adore a well written sentance of lovely thought as much as a Monet. My books and journals are as important and artistic to me as any piece of art I have displayed on a wall.

If I sacrifice my writing in order to raise my children, in truth I have robbed them of the mother God intended for them to have. I have no plans to ignore my children all day and to sit in front of the computer ignoring their cried, or forcing my husband to pay for extraneous child care so I can have hours of quite time. I do plan to be disciplined and pursue my passion, so that I may be a passionate, artful, creative mother who knows the joy of sharing with her children the gifts God has given.