By Em Hunter
Saturday, July 22, 2006; A17

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.

So I began writing with more purpose. I also began to explore other areas that could be part of my life work. During this exploration, I realized that I had been given a second chance. As long as I was breathing, I could sculpt some kind of life work that my children could recall after I was gone.

This sculpture didn't have to be a Michelangelo. It didn't have to be admired by an adoring crowd. It didn't even have to be displayed in a museum.

When I received the letter of notification for the seminar, however, something strange happened.

All of a sudden, those poetic visions of sculptures and life work seemed extravagantly idealistic. A mocking voice in my head spat out question after question: "Who do you think you are to pursue your life work?" "Don't you know that your children are your life work?" "What kind of mother leaves her children for six weeks?" "What kind of selfish person would do this?"

And other voices joined in. They were from other people:

"What if your husband can't take care of your three boys by himself?"

"What happens if your husband doesn't miss you? Or what if he misses you too much?"

It struck me that most people would not have blinked an eye if a man left on a work trip for six weeks. Yet, despite the "advances" in women's rights, I felt like some kind of pariah. "Mother-women" aren't allowed to have life work besides their children.

As the seminar drew closer, I was excited about the possibilities. I was excited about a reunion with the woman that I was going to become 20 years ago, before an unexpected pregnancy in college. And yet I was afraid.

My safe life, a life that didn't cause controversy, a life anchored on the premise that my family came before a career, might evaporate.

Could I still be the mother-woman described in Kate Chopin's "The Awakening"? Or if I chose to be the artist-woman in the novel, Edna Pontellier, could I avoid her tragic end?

The issues posed by Chopin in 1899 still reverberate today:

Why is it so hard to be a mother and an artist? Can a woman be both?

I began to wonder if the question "Who will take care of your children?" is a way for people to remind women of their traditional role and strip them of their motivation to develop all of their talents.

Perhaps we'd all be better off if "the question" for all women was: "What are you doing with your talents and God-given gifts?" Certainly, being a mother is one answer to that question. It is one of the hardest and most rewarding uses of one's talents.

But there is more than one answer, and all women deserve the right to deal with that question in their own way in their own time.

Em Hunter is a writer and the mother of four children.