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

by Molly Millwood

I like to imagine what could happen if just a fraction of social media posts were replaced, or at least supplemented, with time spent writing a few pages in a journal. Or with intimate, unhurried, brave conversations with friends and partners. In those mediums, we are far more likely to remove our masks and begin to connect to the current of our deeper emotions.

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.

Like other Buddhist thinkers, Kabat-Zinn suggests that peace can be found in embracing things as they are, rather than preoccupying ourselves with how things ought to be, or might someday be, or should have been, or could have been. Mindfulness, as a practice of noticing and (here’s the hard part) accepting without judgment all of what the present moment brings, was first integrated into mainstream medicine for its stress-reduction potential.

As scholars Carmen Knudson-Martin and Anne Rankin Mahoney write in their book Couples, Gender, and Power, U.S. public policies designed to protect mothers and help equalize some of the pressures on women created by their child-bearing capacity lag dramatically behind other high-income countries and even behind many middle- and low-income countries. Out of 173 countries studied, 168 offer guaranteed paid leave to women in connection with childbirth, over half of which offered 14 or more weeks. In contrast, the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act, enacted in 1993 and heralded as a major piece of legislation designed to help families, guarantees 12 weeks unpaid leave for family needs. Many family members find it irrelevant because they cannot afford to take it.6

Peter Breggin, who, in The Heart of Being Helpful, writes about the nature of unconditional love.2 We love them not only warts and all, but nasty, self-centered intentions and all. We love them despite, and even because of, the inherent flaws and contradictions that plague all human beings. We love them when they are feeling generous and when they are feeling selfish. We love them when they are brave and when they are cowardly; when they are brilliant and when they are stupid; when they are physically beautiful and when they are ravaged by illness and age.