In the newspaper the other morning was an advice column with the following eye-catching lead: “After 23 years of marriage, looking after the family while my husband worked, I feel I have earned the right to change my life and begin a career of my own. But my husband is not being supportive.” I was irritated and amused. Not because her husband wasn’t being supportive, but because she’d “earned” the right to change her life. It seems such a completely absurd notion that by being a stay at home mother for 23 years she had sacrificed and toiled long enough to be in a position to change her life and begin a career of her own.

I have been a stay at home mom for the best of 10 years. I’ve worked a very part-time job at the VA hospital in Albuquerque, done a bit of webpage design to justify my mom giving us money when things were tight, and I was very briefly an editor for a Japanese physical anthropologist. But really, for the past 10 years I’ve been looking after the family. In those 10 years, except for the bit of money I earned working, I’ve got bupkis; no bank account, no pension, no 501k. I can’t barter those 10 years against David supporting my potential future decisions. But I don’t feel that those years have been some sort of sacrifice to set me up with a future bounty. I love my life, I love being the primary care giver to my two amazing people who still need me and who definitely want me. And I feel lucky to have David willing and able to support my choice to stay home.

A few days ago an old Bramley apple tree at the bottom of our garden fell down. Over the past couple of days I’ve been working at sawing off the branches so that I could clear out the tree and make a path to the greenhouse. Simon came down and pulled off a piece of bark from the tree. It smelled of apples. I’d never really thought about that before. How a tree would smell of its fruit, or, really, how a fruit would smell of its tree. He took a piece to David so that he could smell it and then to Linnaea and her friend so they could smell it. The bottom of the garden filled with their voices as they all came down to peel off more of the bark.

The tree had been overloaded with apples. When it fell over, and as I took branch after branch away, apples fell everywhere making walking a bit unsteady. Linnaea and her friend, who share a love of snails, discovered the apples and they began to collect them up to offer to the snails, only the apples that were beginning to turn pink. A very small percentage of the apples strewn about the yard managed to hit pink. Using thick branches and a bucket they worked to squeeze juice from these still very hard apples to offer as a party punch for their snails. They found branches with leaves which they set up like umbrellas to keep the sun off the party guests. They climbed to the top of the summerhouse and threw off apples to see if they would be easier to juice. They labored at this, chatting and giggling and comparing results, for at least an hour, while I worked on the tree trunk.

I didn’t earn anything yesterday. Well, other than the cleared space where the fallen tree was, a path to the greenhouse, and the pile of potential arrows and spears and bows that Simon and I are going to harvest sometime soon. But I wouldn’t trade the smell of apple wood and the sound of my children exploring their world for a steady income and a pension. I have a friend who is growing weary of nursing her youngest child. She will say that she has been either pregnant or nursing for 10 years and she feels like she has earned a respite. Maybe she has. But it seems such a strange understanding of the gift of holding your nursing toddler in your arms and having little hands exploring your shirt and your hair and your face, your nipple pulled to its fullest extent while they look around to see whatever is going on. That is a pleasure that I miss when I see mother and toddler snuggled together sharing that moment of intimacy that goes so quickly.

It seems to me the problem with feeling that you are earning something, that the act that you do now is to be offset by some payment at a later date, is that you somehow are negating the pleasure in that moment. It’s like seeing the value of a meal only in the poop it produces. Completely ignoring the pleasure in the conversation, in the community of cooking it, in the dance between the stove and counter, in the smells that fill the house, in that first bite, that second bite, that last bite, in the full up feeling; ignoring the pleasure in the clean up, the wiped countertop and dishes drying on the rack, or, if you are so blessed, the purr and clunk of the dishwasher.

If I were to answer this woman’s request for internet advice, I would begin by arguing with her sense that 23 years of mothering have bought an entitlement to starting up a career. Her 23 years of mothering bought her just that: 23 years of being the joyfully present mother to her children. I can understand the desire to move on with life, to begin to explore this new stage of life, but it isn’t about earning the right—it is about aging and growing.

Schuyler Waynforth lives joyfully in the wilds of East Anglia having returned to the backwaters from which her ancestors came in the early 1600's. She knows far more about the local fauna by rescuing the creatures from the cat's mouth and which end up in either the aquarium, the rabbit hutch, or the plant propagator at the insistence of either Simon or Linnaea, and occasionally who get buried down at the bottom of the garden. Linnaea does sing a lovely dirge. You can read more about this life at waynforth.blogspot.com, or, to contact Schuyler directly, s.waynforth@btinternet.com