To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma

by Molly Millwood

The assumption that motherhood is unfolding relatively seamlessly inside the walls of homes besides our own is a damaging misconception held by too many of us.

Immediate joy and fun in parenting are scattered stars in the great black sky of strain, boredom, and unrelenting responsibility in parenting. But when the joy comes, it comes insisting. And when we take the long view and ascribe meaning to our life’s activities, little else competes for first place with raising our very own human beings.

I have been in a hurry ever since I became a mother.

For many—perhaps even all—new mothers, there is a desire to be more present with our children, coupled with what feels like a total inability to fully embrace the moment.

When children are under age six, mothers with full-time jobs clock just ten fewer hours per week directly caring for their children than their stay-at-home-mom counterparts,18 and working moms today spend as much time with their kids as stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s!19

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Parenting is one of the most difficult challenges we will face in our lives. It is way, way harder than pedaling a bike up a steep hill. We never know when the terrain will level out, and when it does, it doesn’t stay level for long. Sometimes we’ve only just caught our breath and then we must embark again, without choice, on the next climb of indeterminate length. Sometimes, there isn’t a long enough rest period for the fond feelings toward our coparent to return, or for us to take in the sweeping vista. Instead we are mired in negative feelings, with righteousness and confusion and helplessness and worries and exhaustion obscuring our view of the bigger picture.

That our virtues in one context may be vices in another is but one of the many profound lessons our children teach us best. They teach us that with fierce love comes deep fear, and that we cannot have joy without also inviting sorrow.

There is no competition between love and hate, no tension between exhaustion and invigoration, no mutual exclusivity between the grief of lost personal freedom and the joy of a new tiny human we love more than we ever thought possible.

Motherhood transforms us. It is not that we become different people or that we lose ourselves. It is that we discover feelings, impulses, thoughts, and wishes within ourselves that we likely never would have encountered had we not become mothers.

Everybody is very much alive in this house. Love is not contingent upon the disavowal or suppressing of aspects of self, for any of us. Love is not a finite resource. There is enough for everyone, and there is room for everything—emotions of any and every kind, mishaps and messes, creative endeavors and dreams, failures and successes, longings and fulfillments.