Parker defines identity as "an evolving nexus where all the forces that constitute my life converge in the mystery of self" (13).

I used to argue with a friend about whether we are mothers or whether mothering is something that we do. For her, parenting was  activity that occupied but did not define her. Whereas for me, mothering hit the very core of my inmost identity. Indeed, mothering remains my metaphor for teaching.

So let's visit that first. I am a woman who has long defined herself through mothering, a woman whose children have grown. Is this what they used to call "empty nest"? That always spoke to me of the busyness of mothering, the lack of which leaves an empty space in which a woman no longer knows who she is. And busyness was not what my mothering was about.

My own daughters' departure from the home was not so very traumatic for me. It was inevitable. Indeed, my mothering was designed to empower them to exist without me.

But is this, perhaps, a source of my discontent? I was mother. I created life within me, sustained it through the milk of my body. I spent my best energies on mothering, my time and talent and treasure. Indeed, mothering became the core of my true vocation. I began to publish because I believed so completely in the La Leche League message that I wanted to transmit that truth to all those whose children had left infancy and moved on to become little boys and girls. They still needed "loving guidance which reflects acceptance of their capabilities and sensitivity to their feelings" (LLL Philosophy #10). We all do.

Ah, let's look at this again. "My true vocation" was writing, publishing. Is that another core of my identity? I remember as a small child, in a light-filled room at the back of our old house, writing. Mother was cutting and pasting the pages of the newspaper she edited and she asked what I was doing. "Writing" I pronounced, and she laughed. I looked at my work and saw it for what it was, scribbles across a page, meaningless lines that wavered up and down, and I knew shame, for that was not writing.

But it was my vocation. My identity. As a young girl, I filled journals with adolescent truths. As a woman, I spent hours examining, refining, revisiting until the words on paper sang some revelation that I finally recognized as truth.

And so I now recognize one source of my discontent as a teacher. My students are not my children. There are too many of them to form that bond. Recognizing this, can I develop a new bond, one that honors the uniqueness of each individual who enters my classroom while holding a sacred space for the daughters of my body?

I recognize another source. I quit writing. There were parts of my life too painful to express. And just as I destroyed my old journals when I became pregnant, wanting to protect my infant from the pain recorded there, so I have deleted my illness from my life. And since I could not write dishonestly -- I learned that lesson long ago -- I did not write at all.

I lost part of my identity. But now, with the help of this blog, perhaps I begin to regain it.