I like to suffer and, really, there is no better time for suffering than when one is on the brink of decade-marking birthday anniversaries.
Ten years ago now, when my first child was a quiet, serious one-year-old and I was approaching 30, I received in the mail one of those ubiquitous alumni publications from the university which Jan and I attended together some six or seven years earlier. As I leafed absentmindedly through its glossy pages, preparing to defrost a bowl of frozen peas in the microwave for Abby’s dinner, a page caught my eye. It was a personality profile of Jan, written by our former college advisor and mentor. She had been 
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series of investigative pieces exploring questionable financial dealings within the ministries of a prominent evangelical preacher. She had been threatened, called a lesbian and otherwise harassed and intimidated by his thugs for her reporting. It was all very glamorous.
I stood there, suddenly immobilized, with the small bowl of peas pressed hard against my chest, entranced by this evidence that, yes, someone I knew, someone I had worked closely with, someone with whom I had once shared a goal – that someone had pursued her career dream and had “made it.” I, on the other hand, was occupied with little more than the logistics of transferring frozen peas from one home appliance to another without cooking them to the point that they became dimpled, arid, inedible.
How was it that Jan had ended up before the Pulitzer committee and I before the gently used Panasonic microwave oven? It really wasn’t difficult to come up with the answer to the question; it was surely this lack of mysteriousness that hurt worse than the awareness of our wildly divergent career paths and my own sudden and keen dissatisfaction with the path I had chosen. Jan, a talented writer and reporter, had made the choice to relentlessly pursue a career in print journalism, following a traditional course from weekly to semi-weekly to metro daily.
Following a traditional path from dating, to marriage I, at age 28, had developed a consuming desire to have a child. My biological clock had prematurely run amok, little and big hands spinning rapidly round the dial like those upon the timepieces in time travel movies. I pursued my goal with a ferocity that shocked my new husband, he himself not being -- beyond the sex -- as behind the effort as was I. When I phoned him one afternoon, from the basement office of my new job running a mentoring program in a blue collar New Hampshire town, to casually tell him of my new plan and his role in it, he just got confused.
“You want to do what, maybe?”
“No,” I said, emotion choking my voice, “I want to have a baby.”
“Okay then,” said Ben, and even then I could picture the pained look on his face, “Let’s talk about this when you get home.”
I did, finally, convince him that childbearing was an undertaking he wanted to be part of. I was convinced, utterly, of this myself. It could take a year, I told Ben, two or three even to get pregnant if we were infertile and, thus, forced to undergo treatments at one of the high-end Boston fertility centers I had read about. I had, naturally, already been to the reproductive and childrearing section of the local bookstore, where I purchased a number of books that I would pore over during the, exactly, two months it took us to conceive.
So then we were en route to parenthood. I was 28 years old. Ben was 29. Jan was 26. My 
cousin Julie, a writer living in New York City, was horrified.
“You’re what?” she shouted into the phone, after I had delivered the news.
“What? You’re stagnant?” she shouted again, once I had repeated the information.
She then had this to say about my pregnancy in her book about turning 30 ( 29 and Counting, read it; it's funny!) that was published shortly after I myself aged out of the 20s.
To say that she dropped a bomb with her news would be an appropriate cliché in this instance, since it left me speechless, nearly blind, and unable to move my small appendages for many minutes. I had never before heard a woman in my age range admit she was pregnant in anything but the most hushed and horrified tones…
And then, “When I regained the ability to speak, I asked her if her current state was a good thing. “Oh yes,” she chirped. “We’ve been trying for about a year.”
I was still naïve enough to not have known that intelligent, urbane women in their 20s did not choose to get pregnant, but when they did, they “chirped” the news with a Simple Life kind of breezy nonchalance that one would expect out of Nicole Ritchie. Since I had not merely chosen this state, but rather pursued it with a relentless and dogged vigor, I guess that made me, de rigueur, more mock-worthy than Britney Spears as keynote speaker at a positive parenting convention. I immediately -- emotional and pregnant with my second child -- fired off a fairly decent !!@# you letter and received, in reply, a note from Julie containing remorseful expressions of chagrin at my anger, an assertion that she was merely prepping readers for a later admission of her jealously at my knocked-up condition, and an invitation to hurl my glass of wine upon her person at an upcoming family event.
So within a matter of months of turning 30, a college friend had been nominated for the Pulitzer and my cousin had sneeringly referenced my premature embrace of pregnancy and childbirth. I was but 30. I went through a brief phase wherein I examined my life choices with some degree of hand-wringing and a hefty dose of self-doubt. But, again and again I came to the conclusion that I was content with my place in the universe. I loved being a mother to Abby, born in fall of 1993, and I had a whole life ahead of me to pursue personal fulfillment beyond motherhood, wifedom and family.
Ten years elapsed and during those years came a second, then a third baby, a new old house, a mini-van, gardens, schools, a life-changing bout of postpartum depression -- all of the trappings of modern motherhood and, save for the mini-van, heirloom motherhood too. And yet, there was still no more than that for me, motherhood, and there I was, teetering on the brink of another decade-marking anniversary, one that was harkening in (despite the frequent aggravating but altruistic assertion of friends and relatives that 40 is the new 30) middle age. So I Googled Jan.
Those of us who stay at home are told that the exalted state of motherhood should be enough because “raising children is the most important work.” We’re repeatedly admonished that we’re so very lucky to be able to stay home with our children while they are little and that aspirations above and beyond this are self indulgent and 
futile. But these are the same people who seem to be content playing tennis four mornings a week in ladies’ leagues or who are wearing long pastel dresses and bonnets and bearing 17 children for one man who has several other wives.
At the same time, maybe in reaction to the tennis players and polygamists, we women who are wasting our educations come naturally to be aware of those others who tell us not to embrace motherhood wholeheartedly. That to do so means we forfeit financial and emotional independence. That to do so leaves us vulnerable to a man’s evolutionary 
tendency to go off and boff his young, hot co-worker and drive off into the sunset in a late model sports car.
Young, hot co-workers notwithstanding, the truth is that the culture speaking directly to educated women doesn’t assign relevance to mere motherhood. Only motherhood plus – plus a Pulitzer, or teaching skilled labor in sub-Saharan Africa, or toiling as a highly-paid CEO – counts toward a Whole Female Life. Do we believe this because it’s true, or do we believe it because the culture says it is so? When our children cease to need us in that particularly soulful and whole way of babyhood, does guilt kick back in – guilt that we are squandering brains and education on what is generally viewed as work beneath us, caring for children? Guilt that our daughters and sons need a female role model who has a "real" job? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the vision of Jan, sitting quietly in the jungles of Africa and snapping photos of mountain gorillas for her job as an information specialist with the World Wildlife Fund (for this is what she is doing now) left me awash in paroxysms of self-pity and envy so dizzying I was forced to flee my free-form household for the 
comforting confines of the movie theater. I was, after all, the woman who had spent a lifetime imagining herself in various Jane Goodall- or Dian Fossey-like scenarios. I was the woman who had dreamt of sitting, quiet and still, among the trees and bushes of Tanzania or Rwanda to study the habits of chimps and gorillas. Christ, I’d have been happy sitting pretty much any place wild in Africa, getting attacked by army ants, studying garden-variety monkeys. So as hard as I tried 
to convince myself that Jan’s WWF job isn’t as glamorous as it sounds, the reality of knowing someone with a job in which my triumvirate of satisfaction is met – animals, writing, and helping – set me back a couple weeks in my goal of not behaving like a shallow, self-loathing twit in the twilight of my 30s.
Once again, I mined the inner recesses of my junior varsity soul to fashion what passes today for correspondence: the e-mail note. I had Jan’s e-mail address from the WWF website and so, in another rash and ill-conceived moment I sent what I considered to be a witty and congratulatory note but that, I see upon a retrospective review of it, contained references and thoughts better kept to oneself when one has not seen or heard from the addressee in more than 10 years.
I started it with a wholly unimaginative swear word (Had Jan been born again?), proceeded to detail my housewifely coveting of her work (Did she hate it?) and then, in an e-mail coup de gras, begged:
“Please, please tell me about your solitary existence, perhaps your enjoyment of a toke or a cheap glass or wine at night. Tell me how you are missing out on marriage and motherhood. Tell me about having to remain still to capture the quintessential gorilla photo while vermin swarm around you, or that you must endure weeks, months even, without showering. Tell me about nasty food and heinous sleeping conditions. Tell me about privation. Please try to make it as horrible as possible.” (Was Jan infertile? Was she a lesbian? Had she run off to Africa to escape to escape some tragedy here?)
In a last breathtaking and presumptuous moment, I clicked the send key without regard to any of these questions. Predictably, I never heard back from Jan. (Was there another Jan V. out there, one receiving deranged e-mails from angst-filled housewives? Or better, was Jan still incognito, sans laptop, in the field?)
I have tried, lord knows, to accept the popularly accepted adage that a woman can’t have it all. Some of us who sacrifice family for careers end up sad and lonely and some who sacrifice career for family end up feeling inconsequential and unfulfilled. I’m convinced, however, that there is an army of us who are unable to exist wholeheartedly in either life. If I had a rockin’ writing career and had never had my children and this life of domesticity, I would be pining away for that too. But, here at 40 I’ve been forced to confront the reality that nevertheless I want it all. I want to spend time here at my rural New England home with my three children and my husband. I want to ski in the winter and garden in the summer. I want to spend quiet mornings when the children are all at school engaging in a leisurely reading of the newspaper, then writing. I want to jet off to New York alone for power lunches with editors from large publishing houses who want to write me checks for large sums of money for my books. I want to weigh 125 pounds and spend a year in Indonesia. I want Jan’s job. I got the family I wanted 12 years ago and now, true to my malcontent leanings, I want the career back.
But for now there is still a chasm-like disconnect between what I want and the vast realm of reality. The requirements of engineering the lives of three children precludes any sort of bona fide attention to my own. Writing for 20 minutes a day (my daily maximum most days) will not get me very far very quickly in my efforts to write my first book. At best, these simple daily literary efforts may be helping me to fend off the potential ravages of Alzheimer’s. At worst, I will be forced to run for the shelter of bookstore clerkdom come the day of reckoning with the young co-worker and the late model sports car.
All the fear and self-doubt gives rise to a number of chicken/egg sort of questions. Do I crave a life outside of motherhood because it’s necessary to me or because it will render me relevant once more? Is it a natural inclination to long for what might be 
missing from life’s repertoire when one reaches that middle age milestone or is this just cliché, contemporary western woman’s cultural cross to bear? No matter the answers, I would happily become the standard bearer for desperate housewives everywhere should Oprah, in one of her moments of munificence, decide to publish and publicize all my cerebral ramblings in a collection of essays that nets me several million dollars.
How, at the same time I am scoffing at it, can I be so aware that I am, indeed, a lucky woman to have the life I do? I remind myself daily of this and thank a higher power, just for good measure. I’ve found both thanks and self-flagellation to be useless though; I’ve been at both for years and still my moods are inextricably tied to the raging hormones that one month find me competing on a national level for the title of heavyweight mother/housewife of the universe, and the next finds me raging against the machine of domesticity.
Perhaps, then, investigating Jan upon decade-marking anniversaries will become a crisis-craving tradition. Because, in the grand scheme of things, it’s clear that only the marking of the 20th birthday is truly acceptable, cause for happy celebration (I’m still young! I can legally drink in one year! I can be whatever/whomever I want to be!). At 10, one isn’t fully formed as a human and is only peripherally aware of the significance of these events, determined by some Gregorian monk two thousand years ago. Thirty marks the end of the 20s and 40 represents the obvious vexatious birthday moment; half of one’s expected life has evaporated into the mists of time. Fifty, 60, 70, 80: these birthdays all pass with a degree of futile irrelevance until 90 and 100, when just being alive is cause for happy celebration. So there it is.
I see myself now in the nursing home, knitting away determinedly on a complicated sweater of 8 colors. Future technology allows me to click a small button at the bottom of a computer monitor attached to my wrist, upon which I see Jan in her nursing home 
rocking chair, knitting a sweater of 20 colors while simultaneously solving the Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle and learning to speak Mandarin Chinese. Am I destined to exist in this sort of woman’s life purgatory forever, feeling regret about the paths I could have taken, but didn’t? Shouldn’t I be satisfied with this regular life? Wouldn’t I be a more serene person were I not agitating to have it all?
Probably. Probably. And probably. Fifty, however, is a mere six years away. Before me are a few moons of relative complacency until the dissatisfaction starts to bubble in my brain like magma in Pinatubo. The best I can hope for is to keep my wits about me long enough to channel the predictable envy and agitation into something – anything, really -- more akin to Motherhood Plus.
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