My first pregnancy occurred when I was twenty-seven. It was planned.
A young minister’s wife had said, after hearing my lament the emptiness I was feeling then in the fourth year of my marriage, “You need a child.”
This was probably an easy response for her to make in that at twenty-eight she was already mother two four.
She was a full-time wife and mother, her husband a graduate student studying at Divinity at Harvard Divinity.
And yet she did not take her role lightly. I respected her for that. Even now, I am strengthened as a write for having her speak to me in that wake.
I did not realize then what pioneers we were, Ivy, and lower-Ivy educated women who valuing family, had and would choose marriage and children over careers that would limit how our time with those we love.
Feminism seemed to have taken a back seat in the ordering of our lives. We were in love, not madly so, but committed to seeing our husbands through their education and we standing by their sides.
We never once considered, “What if they grow tired of and leave, divorce us, fifteen, twenty, thirty years down the road?”
The amount of time they gave to work left us proud even though we missed them.
We, the minister’s wife and I, had married in our early twenties just out of college. Very much unlike my mother who had married at thirty-two years of age. For the early 1950’s, when she wed, this was rather late.
My mother, like many of my and comrades of the minister’s wife, was looking for security and freedom.
My mother had sought education and work to escape what she saw as the poverty of marriage without the right partner.
I, her lower-Ivy educated daughter, had sought marriage to escape her.
(to be continued …)
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