For the past few years, I’ve been a part of a wildly ambitious ward project that my friend, Lia Collings, spearheaded. It started out as a modest collection of essays, one that was doomed to remain un-read by anyone but our immediate families, and now it’s a book, dust jacket and everything, called Choosing Motherhood.
Lia found the inspiration for this book when her husband started law school at Yale. She became a part of the greater Yale community — a bright, diverse, group that was setting sail to change the world, but not necessarily a group that embraced the idea of motherhood. As one of the only twenty-somethings on campus who drove a minivan, Lia grew tired of the way people often dismissed her for being a mom. She bristled when someone suggested that she was wasting her talents. She became worried that the pressure she was feeling might be affecting other women, too, invalidating paths for them that might lead to a family. Lia wanted to counter that trend with her own voice. . .and the voices of her friends.
She sent out a call to the mothers of the New Haven student ward, asking them to contribute essays about the importance of mothers. She invited me to help the writers revise their essays, along with another editor named Rosalyn. In retrospect, opening this project up to anybody in the ward should have been an editor’s nightmare, but what I found, even in the earliest drafts, were thoughtful, articulate stories about the decision to become a mother. These women had a lot to say.
There was Sarah, a former White House aide who felt more comfortable flying around the country with the First Lady than she did contemplating the idea of a family. She wrote about a time when she wondered whether she would succeed as a mother at all, or whether her time was better spent concentrating solely on her obvious talents.
There was Jenn, a FroCo at Yale (or Freshman Counselor in cool-speak) who enjoyed her position and its status until one day she had an embarrassing confrontation with a Yale college dean. She wrote about how that experience actually prepared her to be a mother.
There was Keely, an actress and director who learned that her daughter-in-embryo had a rare, debilitating disease. Keely had to decide whether to join the 95% of parents who had chosen to abort their child with the same diagnosis or the 5% who had opted to keep the baby and risk the consequences.
There was Gretchen, a self-professed brown-noser who aimed to please people her entire life. She learned the hard way that most people looked on her pregnancy with concern rather that congratulations, and had to find her own strength.
And then there was Lori, who just didn’t like kids very much, at least not other people’s kids. She wrote about the way she felt when she had her own daughter.
These women (and many others) were each part of the Yale community in some way. They had to make sense of their roles as mothers and find the value in them, often on their own.
Because the authors of Choosing Motherhood were decided by the geographical constraints of the New Haven ward, the book includes voices that you wouldn’t usually see in your typical “Mother’s Day book” for Mormons. There are nurses, teachers, and mothers of fourteen (yes, fourteen!), although of course, we couldn’t cover all the different kinds of mothers. Many of our contributing writers are now stay-at-home moms. Some of their voices may reinforce your take on motherhood and some may challenge it, but they all defend motherhood as a valid path for a bright young woman.
The stories give a close look into an LDS woman’s mind and heart at a time when she’s dealing with life-changing decisions. As an artifact or a slice-of-life, this book provides definite insight. To me, though, this collection is much more than an artifact. Editing this book has turned these stories into old friends to me — the kind that make me laugh, hand me a tissue when I cry during a hard day, and help me see things a little bit differently.
-Submitted by Elise Hahl