Young Women's Education
The Liberty of Choice and Commitment
I recently read an article about a married woman who discovered
that she wanted to be a mother after all. Diana Abu-Jaber articulates her
self-discovery in a brief article entitled: “Not What She Expected” which
was published in the September 2009 edition of Real Simple. What is so
fascinating about Diana’s article is not actually her final decision to
adopt or even her gradual knowledge of her deepest desires, but rather, her
understanding of choice and commitment.
At a young age Diana says she thought to herself: “I could
dedicate myself either to meaningful work or to having kids, but it would be
nearly impossible to do both.” Thus, she began to dedicate her self to
making her dream come true: a “satisfying career—and the freedom to move and
to take risks, to be unencumbered […] Kids didn’t seem compatible with these
goals.”
Diana had a goal, she knew it and she chose to pursue it, but
somewhere in the mean time she realized that she may have overlooked other
desires in her staunch support of just one of her loves. Her passion was for
writing which she believed “subsumed” all other forces in her life; she held
that choosing a career over a family meant that she would then have the
freedom she had always wanted.
But Diana did want to have it all.
However, she knew that she couldn’t. But none of us can really
claim to “have it all” anyway. The children but not the responsibility, the
job but the total flexibility, the marriage but at the same time the
opportunity to waltz along on our own as if our decisions don’t impact one
another.
Commitments, whether to a spouse, a child, an employer, or even a
service opportunity all necessitate a letting go of some of our time and
therefore also some of our desires. For example, when I commit to be at work
every morning at 8 am that also means that I let go of my much loved pillow
and awake with sufficient time to get to work on time. I don’t think I can
claim that my work commitment is robbing me of my freedom; I, after all,
chose to accept the job. Just because a commitment is inconvenient for our
schedule or something we’d rather not do does not mean it is bad to make it.
People cannot have everything they want and always at the time
they want, otherwise there would be no commitments, that is, no lease
contracts, no vows for marriage, no signed bank loans, etc. The choice to
commit to something (be it motherhood or not) does not actually hinder one’s
innate freedom. Sure, it does mean you can’t go out whenever you want; you
do have to stay home and tend to your little one. But parents are still free
in so far as this is a choice they made freely and daily choose to live out.
In short, the choice to commit is freeing because it provides the
security that man, by nature, craves and so it enables one to thrive without
worrying that life could shatter at a moments notice. Life is full of
choices and commitments and, at the same time, full of letting go of
ourselves and spending ourselves for something or someone far nobler than we
had first imagined.
Margaret Monaghan – Choices Atlanta