I did not dream of having children. I envisioned life as a ballet dancer, and later as an adventurous development worker, but being a mother was not one of my early aspirations. For one thing, I always lacked interest in teaching—preferring to remain in the role of active learner, looking constantly to move on rather than hunker down in what I already knew, eager to forge other paths and find new horizons. I also have never been good at routines, and as a child I resented my caregivers’ interference in my personal rhythms and activities. Though as an adult I admired the discipline of my maternal friends who seemed to be nurturing their babies exactly right, I personally felt nauseated at the thought of having to impose strict bath schedules, naptimes and bedtimes, or pressing pause on my own life to raise my children according to the prevailing progressive American parenting methods.
It was not until I spent time in rural Senegal that I had begun to picture the style of parenting that could appeal to me. In that Senegalese village, children were fiercely loved and treasured but also treated as capable and autonomous human beings. Parents retired to bed early, locking up their own rooms and leaving their children to talk and drum and dance outside until they were tired enough to bed themselves down. Children rose at dawn and without being asked, pitched in to fetch well water, feed the livestock and take turns pounding millet with child-sized pestles carved for the task. The children led their own lives during the day, too, walking to the village school if they were lucky enough to be enrolled, or venturing out as a small, multi-age group into the surrounding countryside to play amongst the baobabs. Mimicking their mothers who carried out their physically demanding days with babies on their backs to play and nap as they pleased, the village girls strapped their younger siblings (or substitute dolls) to their backs for their own day-to-day activities. I admired the way those Senegalese parents and their children tackled life together, side by side. If that was the kind of relationship I could have with my offspring, then maybe I would consider becoming a mother after all.
Still, I never would have taken the parenting leap without someone like Eirik. An only child, myself, I was enthralled by the lively cacophony of Eirik’s band of six siblings and admired his solid experience and patience with children. Eirik and his five younger siblings grew up in a hippy family parented by New York and California transplants to rural Arizona. The family cultivated corn for masa in their desert yard and pioneered the local health food store. The kids were homeschooled by their mother until they entered high school, because the local schools had racist and discriminatory tendencies that their parents did not want to normalize. Like me, Eirik is a passionate learner, always ready for adventure and challenge. This trait, along with his homeschooling experience, helped make Eirik an incredible auto-didact. He is the self-made guy from nowhere Arizona with a prestigious liberal arts degree in Art History who went from diving deep into the NYC feature film industry to deciding he wanted to be a computer programmer or a professional runner instead. So he taught himself to become an accomplished high-level software engineer and a competitive distance runner on the side. In partnership with Eirik, I suddenly longed to be a parent.
When Eirik and I decide to do something, we go all in. If we were going to parent, we agreed that we would apply all the best parts of our own upbringing, along with our lessons learned, to do the best possible job. We dove into parenting literature, consulted a therapist, hammered out our respective strengths, weaknesses and hopes. We decided we would raise our children to be bilingual, even though both of us had only English as our mother tongue. (I chose French since it was the most comfortable and most widely spoken of my languages, and I committed to only interacting with my children in that language.) We boned up on baby sign language and could successfully dialogue with our first child in over 200 signs before he turned two. We ground our own baby food from organic fruits and vegetables. I breastfed each baby for years while also working full-time and traveling abroad—even if it meant pumping breastmilk in the back of a 4x4 full of male bankers as we bumped down West African backroads so I could send it home on a plane to my newborn, borrowing a village mother’s baby to relieve my milk pressure during a long afternoon of field research, or crouching in a rural Indian outhouse to “pump and dump” breastmilk while children wondered aloud what the crazy foreign lady was doing in there to make that repetitive whooshing sound. Eirik and I thrived in the process of building our family, learning together to rise to the challenge of being engaged parents with busy careers (and leaning on some amazing, loving caregivers along the way).
The concept of work-life balance gets a lot of attention. For the longest time, I thought it was something that you aimed for and would finally achieve, like… struggle, wiggle, try harder and voilà: the holy grail of balance! Nobody ever talks about what happens after you find your balance. I know from ballet that there are certain muscles and strategies to nail a beautiful balance on the tip-toes of one foot. But I also know that I have good days and bad days with no clear correlation to anything, and that no matter what, I cannot reliably hold that balanced arabesque forever and a day. What goes up must come down. So balance is less about aligning everything to reach that sublime equilibrium, than it is about the capacity to keep picking yourself back up and going for it again. Eirik and I may have achieved balance a few times, but as time went on, we were increasingly slaves to the grinding routine and too far out of whack to realign ourselves.
Ultimately, if my prime focus in life was about empowering people to realize their dreams, then my own children and our family life were key. By the time Eirik and I found ourselves pondering graduation to a bigger house, we had to admit that we were not thriving like before. We peered into the decade-plus future of this status quo, saw that the two of us were not going to achieve our dreams, and recognized that if we were unhappy, then our children would be too. We decided to take a step back and sketch a new dream together—a dream centered on what inspired us as individuals and as a couple, about constructing meaningful relationships with and among our children, about educating them and supporting their passions while also fortifying our marriage—a dream of living the experience of being a family to its fullest.
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