A Role to Cherish -- and Balance

It's 2006. Women have led space shuttle flights. Women advise the president of the United States and hold high political office. Women are chief executives of huge corporations.

Yet the question still looms large: "Who will care for your children?"

Women are supposed to have equality in terms of career and family life, but the question always surfaces. We can assume leadership in the workplace and pursue more ambitious positions, but the question of a woman's role and responsibilities is still problematic.

This issue took center stage for me recently when I received word that I had been selected for a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in San Diego. For six weeks, I would be immersed in a scholarly enterprise.

As much as I bristled when people would ask about the arrangements for my three children at home, I, too, had asked myself the question, even before I applied for the program. I always felt strongly that my obligations toward my children preempted my personal ambitions, and I had made career and life decisions based on that belief.

Then, last year, something happened that shook that belief. My father died.

In piecing together his life, I could not make a complete picture that would honor him. Those missing pieces haunted me.

My dad was smart. He was well educated. He had gone to law school. He had written for newspapers and taught journalism.

But somehow he had wandered into city government and never returned from what was, for him, a dead end. He never fulfilled his calling. I'm not sure he even knew his true calling. There was no evidence of his life work.

I didn't want my life to be like that.

I didn't want my children to have to vainly assemble broken, ill-fitting pieces into a picture frame and pretend it was a whole picture, worthy of display.

I wanted them to know that their mother had gifts and used them.