PERSPECTIVE ON MOTHERHOOD : Just Being There Is a Full-Time Job : An unexpected choice to give up a career and stay at home brings rewards to mother, child and society.

I am considered a highly educated woman, holding advanced degrees from two East Coast universities. I had my first child at 32, after knocking around the country working various jobs including, among many others, cocktail waitress, college instructor and janitor.

I fully expected to go back to work after my baby was born. I had worked since I was 18, and I wasn’t particularly “into” babies. I had in mind to find good child care and resume the life I knew.

My expectations met a shocking reality when my son was born. I was completely unprepared for the change of heart that happened in me in the first weeks of my child’s life.

Here was my child. Mine, not in the sense that he was a possession; rather, that something wonderful had been entrusted to me, this perfect tiny person with his own integrity, his own life. And I was his only mother. The only woman on earth who stood in that relation to him. I had never faced a responsibility that seemed so obviously crafted for me and me alone.

At that point, nothing seemed more senseless than exchanging this singular adventure for some job that any number of people could do, just for money. I could not put my baby in the arms of a stranger and go off to work.

So I didn’t go back to work. It meant financial sacrifice, and still does. And yes, there were days when I felt that my education was going to waste, my very life was going to waste. There were times I thought I could hear my brain cells withering. As the years went by, I wondered if I would “measure up” if I ever had to go back to the working world.

But from the earliest days with my first child, the priorities had changed; I had been shoved off center stage. My world no longer revolved around me and what I wanted--or even needed, sometimes, as I surrendered to two-hour sleep cycles. I did not always accept this with great grace, but it seemed a self-evident truth that my children’s needs came first. Those needs centered on me. My chief function in life, once I had given birth, was a long season of meeting the needs of this new life. First, the needs that sustain life itself--food, warmth, touch, cleanliness. Then the needs that make for healthy personality development.

What also seemed obvious was that, just as my womb had served as the place where my child could grow until he was ready to live outside of my body, so did my function continue in that mode: I was there for whatever was needed, until he didn’t need it any longer. I offered my hands for balance until he grew strong enough to walk unaided. He began to feed himself. He walked into the kindergarten classroom and sat down with a toy, forgetting that I was there. In each case, he decided to leave me. To me, that’s being “mother.”

What it has come down to is: I’m there. Good, bad or indifferent, but solidly, predictably there. My kids know me, and I know my kids. There is a continuity, a dailiness, that has built trust among us. Not a perfect family, just four people learning to live together. I’m not cooking gourmet health-food meals, the house is not spotless and we don’t do enrichment activities eight hours a day. I’m just a fixed point, good old Mom. As I see it, that is my job: to be straight and still, to give my kids a solid launch pad for their lives.

How does a woman hand over her infant to child care and go back to the working world? I don’t understand it. To me, it bespeaks an estrangement from one’s self, from one of the most basic aspects of human experience, and maybe inability or unwillingness to put another’s needs ahead of one’s own.

I believe that children need their mothers, that women need their babies, that the individual and the culture gain much when a mother is faithful to the myriad small attentions required by her young child. A woman who is capable of dumping her child to pursue career goals seems to me the opposite of the kind of “nurturing” woman that the feminist movement holds up as so necessary to bring balance to our government and business institutions.

My kids are 15 and 11, confident and happy young men. The end of my mother-season is in sight; I am planning a little business venture of my own. For all my years at home, I haven’t missed anything--in fact, I’m functioning better than ever. Youthful fears are gone; I’ve been tested and tempered. I’m strong, resilient, resourceful. I’m a mother; I can handle anything.