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Tomorrow Clay and I will celebrate our beautiful, brilliant daughter's first birthday. This has been the most extraordinary year of my life, and I reflect on it with a cocktail of emotions that not even I can fully express or even understand.

Sometimes I am still amazed with the realization that I am a mother. It is a wonderful and mysterious relationship. Motherhood is so common, and yet so miraculous. During my pregnancy, I could never completely grasp the sheer glory of carrying a living and growing child within me. I was watching a great documentary on childbirth the other day (The Business of Being Born, which I highly recommend as food for thought.) Every time a baby was born, my mouth dropped open in astonishment at the beauty of a baby emerging from a woman's body. I cheered, I wept...I couldn't comprehend it. I remember the first time I saw Alice, I thought, "I can't believe how beautiful she is. I can't believe this perfect baby just came out of me!"

Before Alice was born, I told Clay that we shouldn't try to have any expectations or even try to prepare ourselves mentally for Alice's birth. I knew there was no way we could ready ourselves for adding a child to our lives. There was no way to know what it would really be like. I was right. Nearly every aspect of my life has changed. The adjustment was a very difficult one for me, and it took me a long time to heal from the emotional and physical upheaval of childbirth. Everything was a challenge for me. It felt like I couldn't do anything right and nothing was going well. Everything seemed dark and frightening and irreparable. Sometimes I didn't think I would live through it. But I did live. And eventually, I thrived.  In spite of the rocky start, this has been the best year of my life.

The other day, I was chatting with a friend about the phrase "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." We both mocked this idea, and my friend said that there are plenty of things that may not succeed in actually doing us in, but leave us plenty worse for wear. This is true for many things, but not for parenthood. Parents are forced to face the uncomfortable truth that they MUST get stronger because they CANNOT lie down and give up! Though time may not heal all wounds, there is also a sense in which it does heal the cuts and bruises we encounter as we learn to parent. That is something I often tell new moms, although it sounds like dismal advice. After all, you can't rush time. You can't implore it or earn its pity. There's no way through it but through it. But I hope that my forecast will give new moms hope that help is on the way, that it will get better. A mother once told me that parenting gets better all the time. So far, she was right.

What I feel most today is pride and perhaps relief. I am so proud of Alice. I love to show her off, talk about her, and just be around her. I was surprised to find what great, fun company she is! She is growing and learning so much. I'm also proud of myself. I've taken some really hard knocks, but I have not given up. I'm proud that I kept nursing her even through the hard times. I'm proud that I am able to nurture her. I'm proud of how much I've grown as a person. But my pride is tempered by the knowledge that I still have such a long way to go. I never realized what a selfish, impatient person I was until I had a child! A dear friend told me that motherhood stretches you in ways you can't possibly imagine. Boy, was she right! I often feel that I've taken up a strenuous gauntlet only to trip and blunder at every turn. I am often so disappointed when I am revealed to be far less than perfect. Though I never will be perfect, I hope that as the years go by, I will strive to get better and better at mothering. I hope that Alice will always feel my love for her and that I will do right by her.

If you know me well, you probably have heard me talk about my great love of art. It is a love that spans many nations and eras. In the past decade or so, my appreciation of art has transformed from a mild interest to a full-fledged voracity. I recall walking the galleries of the Tate Museum at the tender age of 17, gazing stupidly at the masterpieces like a sleepy cat. At age 20, I tore through the Met one Sunday afternoon, trying to gulp in as much art as I could before my plane left. By the time I was 21, I had developed a academic language for art appreciation and was able to thoroughly enjoy the Louvre. In my adult life, I continue to visit galleries (large and small) whenever I can, and at this point, I have had the opportunity to experience a huge amount of art. I crave art, and I'm constantly refining my artistic ideals. I have the broadest range of artistic tastes of anyone I know. It's something I've worked hard on and am very proud of.

Being a art connoisseur has its frustrations, though. Usually these frustrations arise when I find myself insulted or even assaulted by a conceited artist. Time after time I have enjoyed a piece of art (usually a postmodern piece) and glanced down to read the artist's explanation of their piece. What awaits there is usually a sharp, stinging slap in the face. I have actually seen art that I initially loved, only to find out that the artist's work celebrated such things as bizarre sexual practices, excrement and other base subjects. This weekend, I visited a gallery and noticed a beautiful brocade fabric collage. The piece was somewhat abstract, so nothing could have prepared me when the artist testified that it was her desire to elevate the "lowered consciousness" of housewives with her art. As a housewife and stay-at-home mom, the statement wounded me and outraged me at the same time.

I can't tell you how many books, films, paintings, and other creative works that have been created to bemoan the plight of housewives. Artists have swallowed the juicy, irresistible notion that housewives are repressed, trapped, and, yes, desperate. The stereotype of the starched-but-stale 1950's family is one that artists have created and perpetuated with relish. Artists regard housewives with an odd concoction of sympathy and disgust. Surely these women must loathe their lives. Surely they must secretly despise their husbands and resent their children. Surely they long to escape, but find themselves paralyzed by a traditional society. So they dust the furniture, fluff their hair, and pretend that everything is just peachy. It is a cruel, untrue fantasy dreamed up by conceited people with no personal experience with housewives. It must stop.

Another painting in the collection noted the disapproval of the artist for what he called "the haves and the have-nots." It depicted several couples happily dancing with images of human sorrow swarming all around them. How could these rich people dress up and go out on the town and enjoy themselves in the world full of catastrophic despair? I suppose the artist wants us to permanently lay aside our joy and spend our lives moping for the sick and poor. More likely, he wants us to all "redistribute" our wealth so that everyone in the whole world is sick and poor. Because misery loves company. I am by no means rich, and I am by no means uncompassionate or uneducated, but that just doesn't seem like a feasible solution. I am not inclined to abandoning the things I enjoy. Nor is the artist, I am inclined to believe. It is a vicious, destructive myth that communism is the answer to our problems. In fact, when I think of communism, I think of widespread fear, hunger, disease, and poverty. Capitalism is not the enemy. In fact, it is the best path to health, wealth, freedom, and happiness.

These pieces and many like them display the current culture's disdain for traditional morals and values. In the art we view and the movies we watch and the books we read, we see the erosion of the qualities our nation was built on. Conservatives are mocked as brutish, unevolved clowns. Sexual restraint is mocked as prudish and impossible. Drug abstinence is mocked as a myth (even the president-elect admits to habitual drug use in his youth.) Family life is mocked as a bore or a dysfunctional circus. Hard work is mocked as greed. God is mocked as unwise, unjust, unreasonable, unloving, nonexistent or even dead. Meanwhile, violence is becoming more violent, rebellion more rebellious, and shock more shocking. Eventually, everything is revealed as meaningless, irrelevant, or morally ambiguous. It's a sucker-punch in the stomach that leaves you with empty and with no place to go.

My new heroine is Ginny Ruffner. She created magnificent, whimsical sculptures made from glass and metal. People ask her why she makes something so happy when she could use her art to bring attention to the world's problems. But who among us is unaware of the world's problems? In fact, who among us isn't relentlessly hounded and worn down by images of as world in trouble? Instead, her goal is to bring some joy into people's lives. She is such a ray of light. She doesn't come up with some vague, spiritual, pretentious artist's statement. She doesn't go on and on about "the human condition." She makes beautiful art that makes brightens people's lives. Beautiful, honest art is something of a rarity in the postmodern art world, and it is so refreshing to me.