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This article contains
excerpts from Jane Clayson Johnson's new book,
I Am a Mother.
As
the co-host of “The Early Show” on CBS, Jane Clayson’s
face was familiar to America, her voice carried authority, and she
spent her time jetting off to be at the center of the big events
of the day and interviewing the world’s most fascinating people.
Admired by viewers, she was at the top of the heap, a place to which
a hundred thousand other journalists aspired.
“My life before was exciting
and intellectually stimulating and stressful and overwhelming and
sometimes all of those things all at once. I loved what I did,”
she said. Then she did something that surprised most of her colleagues
in New York and half of America — she left the world of journalism
to become a mother.
As she said, “I left one wonderful
thing for another incredibly wonderful thing.”
In
her new book, I Am a Mother, Jane Clayson Johnson, now
married and with two children, talks about something that every
mother needs to know — in some moments, sometimes desperately
needs to know — and that is why it matters. It is a delightful
book where she calls upon her own experience to enlighten and encourage
mothers. Hers is a voice we need to hear, someone who had all the
choices most people only long for, and opted for what she considers
the most important thing.
“So much of our society is about
measuring success,” she said. “I closed that deal, won
that case, got that contract. If we can’t measure it, we can’t
value it. As a mother, you can’t see the results of your work
for years. So much of it is intangible, but that does not mean that
it is any less important than any kind of job or title of any kind.
With this book I wanted to put my stake in the ground to say mothering
matters. It is more important than anything else we’ll ever
do as women.”
Not Sugar-Coated
 Her
expressions, however, are not sugar-coated. She acknowledges just
how tough the job can be, the moments of self-searching and wondering.
It is not just the middle-of-the-night feedings and the never being
off duty. She has a chapter in her book called, “Can I quit
now?”
“Sometimes,” she said,
“The challenges of mothering, the daily physical and emotional
exhaustion and occasional self-doubts causes us to devalue what
we do and to devalue it in the eyes of our children.”
She admits that once in awhile while
she is on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor and looks up to
the television to see one of her old friends doing a high-profile
interview, she has a pang, but it is far overshadowed by the sense
of satisfaction she has.
I
have interviewed Jane twice for Meridian articles. The first time,
I caught her in a rare quiet moment. She described her routine to
me as a television personality. Awake at 3:30 AM, she had to be
ready for the chauffeur to pick her up and take her to the studio
for make-up and hairdo. She skimmed four major newspapers as she
prepared herself to walk onto the set where she would viewed by
millions of viewers on “The Early Show.” During this
recent interview, her baby, Will, was squeaking and giggling in
the background, while she bounced him on her knee. Once she had
to leave to help him and came back to say, “I think my son
just finished throwing up for the morning.”
“The day-in-and-day-out of daily
mothering is invisible, because so much of what we do doesn’t
last, and we do it within the walls of our own home where it is
not noticed. I traded in fancy lunches and fancy restaurants for
something better. Still, there is no one to tap me or any mother
on the back and say, ‘terrific diaper change.’ There’s
no praise or recognition for the day in and day out of mothering.
“But it is the little things
that make the difference in our children long term. Because you
can’t measure those things, mothers are sort of relegated
to be considered as high-end babysitters. That’s not true.
Mothering is the work of the ages. It is the most important thing
that we could be doing.
“We pay a lot of lip service
to motherhood,” she said, “We give mothers awards and
we occasionally say, aren’t they great, but we don’t
extend them the same respect in reality. I have experienced that
first hand. When I told one executive that I was leaving New York
and moving to Boston, he said, ‘What are you going to do?’
I told him, ‘I have the opportunity and privilege to be a
mother.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what are you
going to do?’
“We have to change that paradigm,”
said Jane, and she hopes her book will play a role in that shift.
“I want every woman to feel for herself that mothering matters,
that nurturing matters, that we have to start valuing these skills
in our society and really most importantly in our selves.”
Jane and her family at Chirstmas
I’m Only a Mother
In her new book, Jane tells a story
of attending a dinner meeting outside of Washington D.C. two years
ago, a wonderful gathering of 75 Latter-day Saints from a variety
of professions, including law, business, and education. As each
went around introducing themselves, the men stood up and confidently
and appropriately stated their professional achievements. Then,
writes Jane:
Their
wives stood up — beautiful, intelligent, spiritual women.
Many of them had served on boards, held degrees, and were seasoned
in their respective fields. Each of them was also a mother.
But this is how many of the women
described themselves.
“Oh, I’m just a mom.”
“I don’t have any credentials;
I’m just raising our six children.”
“My life’s not very exciting
right now. I’m just a stay-at-home mom.”
… We heard some variation of
the phrase “I’m just a mother” repeated, almost
apologetically, over and over again.
"Their
words surprised me. I had recently given birth to my first child,
and I was on top of the world. My baby was a blessing that had come
to me a little later in life than usual, and I was excited and honored
to finally accept the mantle of motherhood. I felt an extraordinary
sense of responsibility. And power. Not as the world defines
the word, but from entering a sacred partnership with the Creator
himself. What a remarkable gift! I wanted to shout from the rooftops,
'I am a mother! I am a mother!’"
Other Plans
Motherhood didn’t always look
like a blazing possibility for her. As it is for all of us, Jane’s
life turned out differently than she supposed.
When she arrived at the doorstep of
Tingey Hall on the BYU campus in the fall of 1985, she had a plan
for her life — detailed, precise and perfect. “The wedding
colors were set (peach and teal). My dress was picked out (McCall’s
pattern #7847),” and she had compiled a list of baby names.
She never set out to have a career in television news, and in her
book she tells how it happened. However, she had cut out a Time
magazine article about Mother Teresa, where she answered the question
of a reporter about how she would describe herself. Mother Teresa
answered, “I am like a little pencil in [God’s] hand.
That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. Then pencil
has nothing to do with it. The pencil has only to be allowed to
be used.”
Jane with Bryant Gumbel
It
captured an idea that for Jane was simple, yet eloquent. The most
important principle in the gospel of Jesus Christ is to submit to
His will so that the Spirit can guide our lives. In her book, she
described how the doors continued to open to advance her career
in television news, but one door remained closed — the opportunity
to have a family and be a mother. The Lord was continually revising
her ideas about the plan for her life. She wrote:
As the days went by, my college years
seemed like a dream from an eternity before. I imagined that the
script I had written fifteen years earlier, but still never acted
out, was going to continue to collect dust as I followed a different
path, one with its own challenges and rewards. Then a poignant
moment initiated a series of events that changed the course of
my life.
I was at Ground Zero in New York
City on the one year anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on our country, anchoring with Dan Rather, CBS’s
coverage of that terrible day. I had returned from Washington
D.C., two days earlier, where I had interviewed First Lady Laura
Bush in the Blue Room of the White House. In many ways, professionally,
I was on top of the world.
But I vividly felt a certain emptiness.
The emotions of the day hit me quite
forcefully. I looked into the faces of those who had lost someone
the year before — a husband, wife, mother, father, brother,
sister, best friend — and thought, over and over, Life
is so fragile. The most important things we have are our relationships
with our families and those we love.
I could not put those feelings aside
… It hit me that there will always be another project. There
will always be another high profile assignment. Make no mistake,
I was grateful for the many tremendous experiences I was having.
I was passionate about my work. I even felt that I was
fulfilling a particular mission that I had been called to serve.
But I also felt that one of my deepest longings had not been met.
And that was to be a wife and a mother.
Tender Mercies
Soon after, Jane met Mark Johnson,
and she experienced one of the Lord’s tender mercies in the
timing of some events that “seemed more than interesting coincidences.”
Mark proposed to her on a Thursday night and the next day, Friday
morning, she got a call from her long-time agent in New York City.
He was excited because “he had brokered a lucrative four-year
network contract, working in New York City, on some very interesting
and exciting projects.
“At that point,” said Jane,
“it could not have been more clear to me that the Lord was
laying out two very distinct choices, two vastly different paths.”
For weeks, she and Mark prayed about
these options, weighed the pros and cons of this demanding opportunity
that would bring travel and time away from home. During this time,
she remembered a quote she loved, “If it looks good to the
world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at
all.” I couldn’t help wondering, Will taking this
new opportunity ultimately feel good in my soul?
She realized that she might not just
be putting her career on hold, but abandoning it altogether,
but she reflected often on these words from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland:
In those crucial moments of pivotal
personal history [we must] submit ourselves to God even when all
our hopes and fears may tempt us otherwise. We must be willing
to place all that we have — not just our possessions…but
also our ambition and pride and stubbornness and vanity —
on the altar of God, kneel there in silent submission, and willingly
walk away.
Jane gathered her faith, turned down
her new contract and walked away, and she experienced another of
the Lord’s tender mercies. She said, “The first workday
after her CBS contract expired, after I had moved to Boston and
Mark and I had settled in, I will admit that I was a little nervous.
After fifteen years and a very different pace of life, how would
I feel? It was on that day that I found out Mark and I were expecting
a child. Another coincidence? I don’t think so. The Lord,
in his love and tender mercy, sends signs and confirmations in the
most wonderful ways.”
And it felt good in her soul.
A New Journey Begins
So
a new journey began for Jane, one where she is learning the soul-stretching
and edifying lessons of what it means to be a mother and delight
in the faces of the children who look to her for love and nurture.
She is also hoping that she can be one in a movement to re-instill
the importance of motherhood in the hearts of the nation, beginning
with the women on the frontlines at home.
She had New York publishers pursuing
her to write a book like this for them, but she chose to write for
Latter-day Saint women because, she said, we have to support, not
judge, each other in our roles as mothers.
“Whether you are single, whether
you are married, whether you stay at home, or whether you are working
three jobs just to get by, I want women to be strengthened by this
book and to feel that what they are doing matters to them, matters
to their children and matters to women everywhere who are making
the world a better place because they are mothers,” she said.
“We are starting to see the cracks in our culture because
we have downplayed and denigrated motherhood for too long.”
Because the recognition they receive
is too often hollow, mothers have to be reminded how important their
stewardship is. She was given such a reminder at a critical juncture
of her life. She wrote:
We were sitting in church on the
Sunday after Thanksgiving, when my water broke. Three days later,
our little baby William was born — more than three months
early, at only twenty-seven weeks gestation. At his tiniest, he
weighed just over two and a half pounds…
William was in the NICU for eleven
weeks. Almost every day, I would travel back and forth to that
hospital to deliver breast milk and to hold him. Some days the
doctors would not allow him to come out of the Isolette. And so
I would sit and look at him through the glass, with all the tape
and tubes and wires hanging from his frail little body. There
was barely a place to touch his bare skin.
On the good days, I would hold William
while he received his fortified feedings through a tube in his
nose. I had read medical research that showed that premature babies
who were consistently held and nurtured by their mothers were
healthier than those who were not. The hospital recommended “kangaroo
care” — putting babies skin-to-skin with their mothers.
It was supposed to help with bonding. The doctors said it actually
made the babies stronger.
For weeks I did this. But for weeks
it seemed that William still did not know I was there. He didn’t
respond to me in any way. He didn’t open his eyes. He would
hardly move. I remember so distinctly thinking: Am I really
making a difference?
A very perceptive neonatologist must
have sensed my sadness. One afternoon, she came over to our little
corner of the unit, put her arm around me, and with such kindness
said, “William can’t express it right now, but in
his behalf, let me say Thank You for being here. These
babies know their mothers. And even though it doesn’t
feel as though you’re making a difference … you
are.
Later, with both arms through the portals
of his incubator, Jane said, “The feeling came over me so
strongly that as a mother, the Lord needed me.”
At that
moment, she said, “I realized in a very tangible way that
mothers matter and that the anguish I was going through was for
a reason. What I was doing mattered for this little boy. Even when
our children cannot or will not express it, we’re making a
difference, and I realized it that day in the hospital, being next
to my son who was really on the edge. We didn’t know what
was going to happen.”
“All
of what we have is fleeting,” Jane said. “A career,
the physical things around us, our possessions, our titles —
they mean nothing. They will go. What we do for our children will
last forever. The love we show them and what we teach them, that
lasts, that carries on. I don’t regret not doing another interview.
I know there will be another high profile assignment. There will
be another big story to jet off on. But I have one chance with my
kids. I have one opportunity to teach them and be with them. You
don’t get this time back. While everything else will go away,
this is for eternity.”
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