Not everyone is creative

There is a spot in Killing Wonder -- which I left at home, damn it, so I can't quote it directly right now -- where the narrator, Jessamyn Posey, in a burst of "newly-enlightened" feminist enthusiasm, tries to commiserate with her mother for "having" to give up a career and a life of the mind in order to raise children and care for a family.  Jessie doesn't even seem to see how patronizing and insulting this is, though the author (Dorothy Bryant, of course) clearly does.

Her mother replies gently and kindly that Jessie is mistaken to see the path of householding as somehow inferior or degrading.  She points out that not everyone is creative, and indeed not everyone can be creative even given all the necessary support -- education, income, and "a room of one's own".  She adds that she made a conscious decision in her own life not to chase after literary or intellectual pursuits, and instead to devote her energies to what she conceived as the greatest benefit she could bestow on humanity: rearing good human beings as her children.  And she remarks that this is no mean accomplishment, nor a valueless one.  (Of course she says all this far better than I have said it here.)

It's an important point.  And I guess it resonates with me because it is very like the conscious decision that I took, too.  There was a time, early in my marriage to Wife, when I had a clear and simple choice.  We had both been in graduate school together, and she left.  I could stay in graduate school, or I could follow her and stay married.  I chose to follow her, and I have never seen the inside of a university again, or not as anything but a visitor.  I suppose I had a lot of reasons, and some day I will sit down and list them all for you.  But at the heart of it what I saw was a choice between seeing life (watching it, analyzing it, writing about it) and actually living it.  I had spent more or less all my life up till that time inside academic institutions, and I knew it wasn't enough for me.  I was good at playing that game, but it wasn't a game I cared about.  I knew that the other road would be harder, that it would involve a lot more pain and suffering [God, I wish I had made book on that prediction!], but I chose it anyway.  And in the end, while some of my little mini-essays here or elsewhere might interest one or two people, my real contribution to the world will have been Son 1 and Son 2.

I still don't think it was the wrong choice.