Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

John's temporary job at Guideposts, meanwhile, was proving more intriguing than he expected -- meeting interesting people, learning about their lives, even if he didn't buy into their religious concepts. The small editorial staff was overworked, and by Scott's first birthday I was doing interviews for the magazine on weekends, writing them up at night.

In 1954, when our second son, Donn, was nine months old, we moved to a circle of identical small homes in Mt. Kisco, a New York suburb another twenty miles farther north. It was there in the fall of 1955, pregnant with our third child, that I reached the crisis point. Part of it may have been hormonal, part was certainly grief over my father's death the year before, part an ever-growing sense of inadequacy.

Already seeing myself a failure as a housewife, I began to believe I was failing as a mother too. As much as I hated ironing and mending and cleaning, I loved everything directly to do with our two little boys. Feeding, watching, teaching, learning from Donn and Scott, brought me the most intense joy I'd ever experienced.

But more and more often out of its cavern crept the old dragon of self-rejection. Me? Responsible for the nurture of these eager, shining, beautiful beings? As my depression deepened, it seemed to me that anyone and everyone else -- the passerby on the street -- had more to give our children than I did.

At last the dragon chased me upstairs to a small room in the partly finished attic, where there was a daybed and an actual door. And there I lay while a succession of baby-sitters managed, I was convinced, so much better than I could. In fact, to me, my death seemed the way to remove my potentially harmful presence. The memory he can't