I represent the generation of women who came of age ignited by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. These angry and articulate matriarchs taught us that our power and identity should come from the world, and not solely from our husbands or our children or our homes. When I was a college student at Stanford in the 1970s, the sight of my own stay-at-home mother wearing her red-checked dish towel slung over one shoulder used to rile me as a symbol of the oppression of wives stuck in their kitchens.

Determined to create a life far beyond the shackles of housewivery, I became a journalist who interviewed celebrities for United Press International, people like Yoko Ono, Billy Graham, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Queen Noor of Jordan.

Then came marriage, the birth of four sons in rapid succession, and a departure from daily journalism to raise children and become a free-lance writer at home. Ironically, when I now wear a red-checked dish towel over my shoulder as my mother did, I don’t feel oppressed; I feel happy and free. After years of racewalking past the moment to reach somewhere higher and better in my career, I am relieved to have slowed down and be in a kitchen with kids. This me called Mommy feels like who I was meant to be all along.

In November of 1993, I gave birth to twins and became the mother of four sons under the age of three. That cataclysmic event, which shook up my career and my concept of self, eventually led me to great clarity on what really matters. It comes down to this: family is, quite simply, everything. And the building of a solid family takes a lot of time.

Being a good journalist requires intense energy and devotion; being a good mother takes at least the same commitment, if not more. To succeed, I knew that I would have to work harder than I’d ever worked on anything in my life. And that meant whittling down my Herculean To Do list—childrearing is not something you can do in between deadlines and meetings.

Ultimately, our greatest power as human beings is how we spend our time. And I know now that I never again want to spend more time in an office with strangers than I do in my home with my family, the people I love the most. I know that I never want to turn into that friend of mine who drove her 18-year-old off to college and sobbed the whole way home because she realized that during all those weeks and months and years while she had been tied up at the office, early in the morning and late at night, her baby had been turning into a young woman who was now gone. "Where did all the time go?" she lamented. "And now I can’t get it back." No, we can’t get it back. This day comes but once.

That’s why I savor moments like the magical afternoon my toddler son Jack found a Lillian Vernon catalogue and began flipping excitedly through the pages, pointing to item after item. "What’s this, Mommy? What’s this, Mommy?" he asked over and over, pointing to pottery, windsocks, candles, building blocks. I thought about how Jack will only be tiny enough to tuck into his mother’s lap for a short spell longer. I was reminded of his innocence, and that soon, too soon, I would have to let this boy free into a world that could harm him, make him cynical, perhaps even make him bad. I let my magazine drop to my feet and buried my face in Jack’s hot, chubby neck.

I can’t stop little boys with silky cheeks who cling to their mother like monkeys from changing into reticent adolescents with stubble and body pierces. I can’t stop four brothers who now loop limbs on the floor as if they were one creature from venturing off some day in four different directions. In an eye blink, our sons won’t need me to wrap them in their tattered yellow blankets and sing them to sleep. So right here and right now I thank God for this moment of this day.

When I became the mother of a puppy pack of boys I discovered that all those long debates among ambitious women about ways to balance our lives are fruitless. The task is insurmountable—with small children there can be no balance; they get the most of you, time and time again. When I surrendered to that fact, then real balance came — having my soul and heart and mind in sync.

This doesn’t mean I think mothers should be home all the time. I am not home all the time. Our youngest children are now in preschool; so with more time on my hands, I teach a journalism seminar at American University. I love staying involved in the field I’ve been in since graduating from college two decades ago. But teaching journalism rather than hacking out stories every day means I have a career that revolves around my family, rather than a family life slapped together around an all-consuming job. When I was the woman trying to Have It All, Having It All felt exactly like having nothing.

I was struck hard by an interview that ran in Life with former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater. As he lay dying of brain cancer, his body flooded with radiation, Atwater had this to say:

I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends. It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions, can learn on my dime.

Choosing to be a mother who spends most of her time with her sons is actually a convergence of the feminist ideals my era of women embraced—power, freedom, self-expression, and independence. Nothing ever felt so powerful, so free, so spiritually right, as becoming a militant mother who organizes a home and fights for her children on every front.

I think of the blurred weeks and years that whipped by when I was a supersonic journalist, intoxicated by the chase. The days often now break down into subtleties-in-the-second that leave me breathless from all there is to do during one minute and one hour in the Here and Now. Tangled in my children’s wonder, I am constantly made aware of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

This feeling of freedom and rightness shows up in all parts of my life. Feminist pioneer Simone de Beauvoir (who was herself childless) once wrote that becoming a mother means the death of your erotic development. I have found exactly the opposite to be true. A woman’s sexuality plays out to its peak in a period of your life when you are nursing and nuzzling and rocking babies, and sleeping with the committed father of your children.

I was a person who blossomed into womanhood at Stanford University in the middle 1970s. I drank deeply from the movements emanating from the Bay Area playground, looking for spiritual fulfillment and the meaning of life. My journey took me through Buddhism, est, Transcendental Meditation, macrobiotics, weightlifting, the Grateful Dead.

Today, I am no longer desperate to have a head-on with divine self-realization; that ended when I had a head-on with four sticky little boys. They have filled my soul with the serene knowing that God has come through for me. Having young children is like the last day of summer vacation, the sun on your face, the sand at your feet.

I’m aware that I am lucky to be a writer, a vocation that easily transfers to the home. But although I’ve had more choices than many women, I believe women in most fields have more choices than they think they have. A friend of mine in Annapolis, Maryland, has switched her baking shift at a catering company to 4 a.m. through 11 a.m so she can add to her husband’s middle-class wages and still have days free for her kids. Another friend left her post as a buyer for a department store and now runs a flourishing business selling children’s clothing from her living room, using her young daughters as models. I know lots of lawyers who have gone off partner-track and cut work weeks in half so they can be there to pick up their children at 3:15 p.m. If you want it badly enough and push hard enough, it is possible to forge work-family solutions that favor your children.

Spending a quantity of quality time with our children not only bolsters them; kids keep us connected to our finest selves. In our home in Maryland, I often sit in my kitchen and watch the amber of sunset on the river while my husband Chuck is upstairs scrubbing four boys in one bathtub. And I go over my day—wiping banana off the TV screen, scraping mud off sneakers with a Swiss army knife, reading Pocahontas to four boys who are looking at their mother with reverence. And I am reminded that This Is As Good As It Gets.

On those days when I yearn to be dispatched on some exotic journalism assignment, I think of my interview some years ago with Zelda Fichandler, the then-65-year-old founder of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, one of the finest regional theaters in the country. As she spoke about her extremely successful career, I asked if she had any regrets in a remarkable life. She stared at me, her eyes black and piercing, then answered: "If I had a perfect life to live over again, I would spend the first five years of my children’s lives at home. At the time, I never felt guilty about leaving the kids. I kept feeling ‘this is worth it.’ Now I give advice to young women to be very careful whether it’s worth it. I’m not absolutely positive now that it’s been worth it. Because of life not lived, books not read, art not seen, vacations not taken, conversations not held, flowers not smelled." Fichandler paused, then added: "I never had enough of my kids. I do feel that I was always there when they needed me. But I don’t think I was always there when I needed them."

Other powerful women have voiced similar regrets about letting work overshadow their family lives. In a wonderful interview conducted by Oriana Fallaci, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir reflected on trying to run a country and run a family at the same time:

Such a struggle breaks out in you. Your heart goes to pieces. It’s all running around, trying to be in two places at once, getting upset. All this can’t help but be reflected in the structure of the family.

I know that my children, when they were little, suffered a lot on my account. I left them alone so often. I was never with them when I should have been and would have liked to be.

Oh, I remember how happy they were, my children, every time I didn’t go to work because of a headache. They jumped and laughed and said, "Mamma’s staying home! Mamma has a headache!"

If you only knew how many times I say to myself, "To hell with everything, to hell with everybody, I’ve done my share, now let the others do theirs, enough, enough, enough."

I like to be with nothing to do, even just sitting in an armchair, or wasting time with little things I enjoy. I should be the master of the clock, not the clock the master of me.

When we choose to become mothers, we make the most elemental commitment you can make as a human being, an irrevocable promise to take care of our offspring. We are not forced to reproduce. We become mothers because we want to, often because it’s what we want more than anything else in the world. I respect my friends who choose not to have children because they admit to being too selfish. But I am saddened when the act of willing procreation doesn’t cause selfishness to wane.

One Wednesday I went to visit an advertising executive who had given birth the Sunday before. She was propped up in bed talking on the telephone. With one hand she was holding her child to her breast, in the other hand she was clutching a newly arrived fax. The phone call about a client dispute was riling her, and she started swatting the air with the hand that had been securing her newborn. The baby dropped into the sea of papers that covered her bed. As my friend ranted on, there her daughter lay, with black ink smudged on her cheek. This mother was planning to return to work the following week.

I have heard other new mothers one-up each other with stories of how quickly they took their first business trip, how quickly they lost the 40 pounds of pregnancy weight, how quickly they were back chairing a committee, how quickly they returned to the jogging track. As someone who has been out that door too fast before, I now tell friends that their old bodies and old jobs and old social selves can wait. I tell them that their babies will be in first grade tomorrow, and that they shouldn’t miss out on this glorious fingersnap of time. And when I am accused of being a hardliner who has abandoned her feminist ideals, I tell them there is nothing we can do as women that’s more powerful than refusing to abandon motherhood.

I think of my artist friend who recently had a request from the Maryland governor’s office to be considered to paint a portrait of the First Lady of the state. My friend didn’t even pursue this lead, nor does she follow up on the stream of offers to show her work that she receives from prestigious galleries. She regularly turns down requests to teach college courses. At this stage, she doesn’t want a bigger career, she wants to be with her children, ages seven and five. Although more money would make her life significantly easier—her husband is a horticulturalist — she opts to work only a dozen or so hours a week in her studio doing portraits for local clients while her kids are in school. For this decision, her family is "practically poor." Yet she wouldn’t trade her life for anybody’s.

"I never sit down and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get out there and make more money,’" she says. "I feel rich. I’m here all the time for these kids, and they are turning out well. They are not plunked in front of a TV by a baby sitter. They are baking and they are taking hikes and they are playing with me. You know, there’s nothing wrong with the way we were raised in the ’50s and ’60s."

Disillusioned by old heroes like Simone de Beauvoir who never married or had children and instructed me to avoid housewife duty, my primary inspiration today comes from like-minded mothers who are trying to be at home more than at an office. Women like Charlene Quinn, a former White House fellow who is the mother of seven- and two-year-old children. I spent a spring afternoon on the Chesapeake Bay with her, eating huge strawberries from her garden, drinking orange Hi-C, and watching our children hurl driftwood.

With the sun beating down on us, Charlene told me she had just turned down an offer to become a free-lance health advisor to Newt Gingrich. "I’m too busy," she explained, giggling over what she was so busy doing—sewing costumes for her son’s first-grade play. She said she loved to sew but hadn’t done it for years because she had been too engrossed in her job.

I thought about this word busy, defined by the dictionary as "engaged in action" or "occupied." In my life as a globe-trotting journalist perhaps I kept busy because I was running away from myself. Being busy with children means something entirely different: Engaged in their action, occupied by their limbs and needs. I feel joyful to de-accelerate and be where I am, and who I am. These wriggly little boys have me imprisoned in the fleeting moment that is now.

When the President and First Lady recently announced their plan to increase federal spending for day care by $22 billion over the next five years, they said such action is necessary to address a "silent child care crisis" that is afflicting the nation. Is there a child care crisis in America? What is it that parents want that they are not getting?

To help answer these questions, Wirthlin Worldwide recently conducted a national poll for the Family Research Council. A representative sample of parents were asked which kinds of child care they believed to be most desirable. The overwhelming first choice in child care: Care by a child’s own mother. The next favorite choice was care by a child’s own grandmother, aunt, or other family member, followed by care from a child’s own mother and father working in a tag team. Then came care by a church-run center, care by a trusted neighbor or family friend, care by a home day care provider, and care by a nanny or au pair. Ranking eighth in popularity was care by a commercial day care center, followed by care in a government-run day care center in last place.

This decided preference for mother care showed up among all families, regardless of race, age, political views, or income. Trailing family care in popularity were community arrangements involving churches and neighbors. Parents who must entrust their children to others clearly prefer someone with whom they have a relationship. The least-preferred options were those that extended outside the community, involving nannies or au pairs, commercial child care centers, or government centers.

A growing body of other polling data uncovers this same desire for parental care of children. In May 1997, the Pew Research Center found that 25 percent of women with children under 18 who were employed full time would have preferred to be at home with their children. Another 44 percent wished they could work part time instead of full time. Asked whether they thought their work and child care arrangements were good for their children, only 41 percent of working women said yes.

In 1996, the Independent Women’s Forum commissioned a poll which included the question: If you had enough money to live as comfortably as you’d like, would you prefer to work full time, work part time, do volunteer work, or work at home caring for your family? Thirty-one percent of the women replied that they would like to be at home with their children; another 33 percent replied that part-time work would be ideal; 20 percent expressed a preference for volunteer work; only 15 percent replied that they wanted to work full time.

These same preferences for mother care of children and flexibility in work arrangements showed up in a very large reader’s survey done by Parents magazine in May 1996. Among 18,000 women who responded, only 4 percent said they would choose full-time employment if they could do "whatever they wished." Similarly, a 1995 Harris poll found that only 15 percent of a scientific sample of women would work full time if they "had enough money to live as comfortably as they would like."

This polling data about what parents want is remarkably consistent with what Census Bureau figures tell us American parents actually choose. Contrary to the media-driven perception that most children today are in day care, the vast majority of American children are actually cared for by their own families. (See graph on page 47.)

Of the 20 million children under the age of five in America today, nearly half (48 percent) have mothers who are at home full time. And of the remaining children whose mothers work either part time or full time, most are cared for during those hours either by their father (an additional 10 percent of all children), by a grandparent (another 9 percent), by another relative (5 percent), or by their mother while she works (3 percent).

In all, only 26 percent of all preschoolers are in hired day care (a big chunk of them in home day care). Though you would never know it from press reports, three-quarters of all very young children in the U.S. are still reared by their own family. For babies, all of these numbers are even higher.

Mrs. Clinton has referred to a "silent child care crisis." But if there is any element in today’s day care debate that is silent it is the silent majority of parents who are making themselves available to their children without much recognition or support from society. The media repeat over and over that the dual-career family is today’s norm, leaving child-raising parents to feel they are alone. They are not.

But what about couples who can’t afford to have one parent stay at home? The common perception is that the decision to have one parent at home is a luxury practiced only by the well-off. Actually, quite the opposite is true: the median income of families with at-home mothers is $38,835. The median income of dual-earner families, on the other hand, is $57,637.

If helping poor families is the goal, Clinton-style day care subsidies are a very poor instrument. There are only 1.1 million preschoolers in this country who are poor and have working mothers, and most of these youngsters — 52 percent — are being cared for by family members. They aren’t in day care.

Since most low-income families don’t purchase child care, the federal subsidies in the Clinton plan offer them nothing. Benefits targeted to day care as the President has proposed (instead of to mothers and fathers as others have suggested) not only discriminate against low- and middle-income American families who are struggling to keep one parent at home, but also reach only the tiniest fraction of families with children in poverty.

Federal intervention in child care should be guided by what parents want and what children need. At the very least, the government should be neutral and avoid social engineering that skews the child care market toward the commercial, institutional, and bureaucratized solutions that most parents avoid.

Mothers and fathers all across this country have spoken through their personal choices. If there are going to be government efforts to aid families, these should center on helping parents care for their own children.

Charmaine Yoest, a Bradley Fellow at the University of Virginia and a mother of three children is the author of a larger paper on this subject just released by the Family Research Council.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, MAY/JUNE 1998