Domestic Affairs:
      Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life
by Joyce Maynard

Copyright 1987, Joyce Maynard
Published by Times Books

From the Introduction:

I was a newspaper reporter in New York City once, and I wrote about fires and elevator operator's strikes and dog shows and murders. it was a pretty exciting line of work for a young single woman who'd grown up in a small New Hampshire town. I loved having a job that allowed me to earn my living doing what I like best anyway, which is observing life and asking questions. But I knew from the first that it was no life for a married woman with young children, and so when I met the man I want to marry and wiht whom I wanted to raise children, I quit my job and left the city.

We moved back to my home state of New Hampshire, to this two-hundred-year-old farmhouse at the end of a dirt road with no neighbors in sight, five miles outside of a small town with no stop light or movie theater, no elevator operators' strikes or, for that matter, elevators. Steve, my husband, is a painter, who sometimes paints canvases and sometimes houses. He built himself a studio; I got pregnant. At first it was enough simply to be together in our new home, and having a baby.

But when, after the first idyllic months up here, the reality began to hit us that we'd both have to do something about earning a living, I fell into despair. Truthfully, I guess I also missed the excitement and adventure of my former career in this new life of mine, in which the big news of the day might be the ripening of our first tomator or a trip to the town dump. I was a reporter without a story -- and where once I could always hop on the subway and find one, now I was seven months pregnant, with snow piled so high I couldn't see out my kitchen windows and our only car buried deep in the drifts.

I made bold plan that as soon as our baby was born I'd get righ back to business as usual, and from a tip I'd picked up I even got myself an assignment to do a story about houses of prostitution in midtown Manhattan. Six weeks after her birth, I strapped Audrey into the infant seat beside me and drove to new York to conduct my research. I made phone calls to an underworld character who could be reached only between three and four A.M. I even made it to one East Side town house, whose shades were all drawn -- where, I was told, there was a woman who would talk to me round about the same hour of night, if I'd meet her at a certain corner.

Only Audrey didn't cooperate: She needed to be nursed when I was supposed to be taking notes. She cried in the background while I attempted to carry on my interview with the underworld character. The problem wasn't confined to Audrey, either. I realized, once I left my hearth and home, that by my hearth, in my home, was really where I wanted to be with this new child of mine. By day two of work on my assignment I knew the whole thing was impossible. Not simply this particular project, but also the notion that having a baby would change nothing in my life but the number of exemptions on our income tax return. Walking down a particularly fashionable section of downtown the day before returning home, with my empty notebook and Audrey strapped on my chest in her corduroy front pack, I saw a chic-looking woman stare at us, stop, and then do a double take. "Oh," she said, seeing that I'd observed her. "I was just surprised to see you had a real baby in there. At first I thought it was just an accessory."

I had a real baby all right. And I had learned something from my ridiculous, impossible attempt at combining investigative reporting with mothering a newborn. Having a child changes everything. If I was still going to write, I'd do better to acknowledge and adapt to my child's existence than to preten she wasn't there.

So I made my child and my home my new beat. I set up my typewriter on my kitchen table and I began reporting on my own life and the little dramas that happened in the sandbox and the supermarket, and discovered that there was in fact plenty of action to be found without having to venture past the end of our driveway. Over the years there have been more characters added to the scene (Audrey's two brothers, plenty of friends, and strangers passing through). A few summers back, Steve buildt a little house for me to work in, out behind out own bigger one and his studio, so I no longer work surrounded, as I used to, by the smells of dinner cooking and sight of laundry in need of sorting. But my situation remains in many ways the same: My mind is always on the home front. I could get on a plane to New York City, by myself, and write about the goings-on of the big world beyond our little town a little more easily these days than I could have nine years ago. But the fact is, the adventure that occupies me now is making a home, making a marriage work, trying to have a career. And central among them all: the difficult, exhausting, humbling, and endlessly gratifying business of raising children, of ensuring the health of both body and soul.

In the excerpt from her memoir, At Home in the World, Joyce talks about the publication of Domestic Affairs -- and shares the story behind the photograph on the original, hardback edition of the book.

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