Okay, my life is pint-sized right now--2 little cups of energy, problems, and love, filling my  every day.  Well, make that a pint and a quart, if a 6-foot-three man can be personified by a quart.  Why is my life this tiny size?  Well, I chose it--maybe it chose me--who knows?  The fact is, that marriage and children are two supreme values in my life--stuck right below my Savior, Jesus Christ and His Word. 

At the start of our marriage, I took the unusual stance of drastically cutting back my career to make room for a fabulous relationship with my husband.  As a young (well, young-ish), single music teacher, who was passionately involved in my work, two things were clear:  I was not interested in just any marriage--only an awesome, amazing man would do.  Such a marriage and my work would be competing passions that could not be simultaneously be fulfilled in a satisfying way, so work would have to be subordinate.

When I met John, he was that good; he still is.  I have stuck by those ideas of mine.  What has amazed me is the powerful pressure of our culture to define my personal worth in terms of professional success and dollars earned.  I thought applied peer pressure ends after high school, but it only becomes more subtle and stronger.  I am thus forced to define my boundaries and personal value by counter-cultural means, because nothing I do is validated by the larger culture. 

My choice to stay at home was probably unconsciously made as a small child, basking so securely and freely in the rock-solid commitment of my parents to each other, their joy and delight in being one in purpose, mind and body; by my absorbing the amazing selflessness of my own mother,  drinking deeply and unashamedly of her love and patience, and observing her ensuing joy and powerful influence for good. 

It was solidified as a young adult, as I worked after college in a day care--I witnessed the daily miracles of young infants and toddlers and vowed I would not miss these if ever I were to have children.

As a middle school teacher, that vision was cemented from knowing my students--wandering aimlessly through life, experimenting with fire, with parents busy, uncool, and excluded from their problems.  I suppose you can't really force your children to choose one way or the other, but over my dead body would I not be available for them.

These things I hold dear are under attack--have been under attack for a long time.  Marriage has become culturally meaningless first by  wide-spread stale commitment held together only by social mores; by the revolutionary fallacy that sex can be "free";  then by routine, commonplace, no-fault divorce--the obvious result of the broken trust of sexual freedom; and now by the logically sequential victory of gay marriage. 

I am battered and broken.   I ache for the majority of children who will never know the joy and security I have known--to have the audacity to know that I am worth the full attention of my mother's life; to know what it means as a woman to have a father who faithfully and passionately loved my mother to give me hope that waiting for such a man is worth it.   I am broken for one of my young tween students who wept and sobbed uncontrollably when she found her father in a compromising situation with another woman, and who now, though beautiful and intelligent, lives with a loser because she cannot believe that faithful love is possible;  my heart breaks for the children deprived of the necessary diversity of male/female relationships.   I am torn and tattered.  I loathe to confess that I have wasted time regretting my "loss of status" in the eyes of the world, that sophisticated conversations divert around me because my world is too small, but now I only weep for generations who will bear the cost of the self-absorbed choices of this generation. 

Part 1