As yesterday was Mother’s Day, I thought I’d share a story about learning that labor and delivery has many meanings.

Years ago, I was having some issues over what to do with my life. Now, it was nothing dramatic or weird. Nothing huge enough to be called an existential crisis (a term I dislike intensely: you already exist, just deal with it pretty much sums up my attitude), but it was a little more than a grumpy mood.

Conundrum is the word I’m looking for. I was in a conundrum because at the time I was a stay-at-home mom, up to my neck in diapers and formula and Sesame Street, and I wanted to be back doing a job and getting paid.

The trouble was I couldn’t find work making enough to clear daycare for three kids, and every time I thought about leaving them with someone else, I had major mom-guilt, plus going back to work meant I would miss Reading Rainbow and a day without LeVar Burton is a day without books and singing. (Butterfly in the sky … I can go twice as hiiiiigh … take a look … it’s in a book … Reading Rainbow!)

I wanted to stay at home with my kids. I loved it. I also wanted to go back to work. I loved it.

See the conundrum? Round and round I went.

I took my conundrum to my pastor, and she listened to me chase it round and round like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (“… but on the other hand … but on the other hand …”) and never once rolled her eyes at my blathering, not even when I blurted out, as I was championing the cause of “the other hand”:

“If I’m not being a mother and taking care of kids, what would I do? Who would I be?”

(Part of me cringes at those words. But they came from a place of truth. At that time and place, that’s what was in my heart.)

She thought for a moment and said, “There are many things to labor over.”

Which stopped the chase.

She was right. There are many things to labor over, many things to give birth to and love and care for. Ideas to generate. Things to create. Even the general notion of creating is a birthing process.

I’ve thought about that conversation many times. And I’ve given thanks for it many times.

Yes, I did eventually go back to work, after the kids were a little older (two of them in school, one in daycare). And then a few years later I came back home to be a freelancer – for two reasons: 1. Because the corporate world wasn’t the greener pasture thought it was (I’m glad the “other hand” didn’t win out years earlier, because then I would’ve had yet another conundrum, squared); and 2. Because there are many things to labor over and give birth to and those things, for me, include creative works.

It should come as no surprise that when I dream about having babies or being in labor – which I do quite often – it’s always about a creative work. A novel. A screenplay. A series of ebooks. Something I’m laboring over. Something I’m giving birth to.