In my 20s, I longed for what Virginia Woolf in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939) called ‘moments of being’ – those exceptional experiences that stand out in memory. There was the time I fell from a cornice, snow exploding as my body dropped through the air. The time a grizzly bear chased me down a mountain, jaw opened wide as she roared in my face. The time a pack of eight wolves surrounded me and my husband as we walked across the tundra, the lucid gaze of one fixed in my direction as he trotted just a few yards away. In each experience, time expanded and each little instance became dense with memory. I was utterly awake and aware, wondering what might happen next.

In the same autobiographical essay, Woolf also discusses moments of non-being. She writes:

Moments of non-being lack the crisp details of more indelible experiences and often coincide with activities we repeat in our everyday lives, which makes it hard to remember their granular details. Rita Felski, professor of English at the University of Virginia, describes this distracted perception of daily life in her introduction to New Literary History Vol 33 (2002): ‘We act without being fully cognizant of what we are doing, moving through the world with the uncanny assurance of sleep-walkers or automatons.’

I’m in my 30s now, and my days often pass in a smear of non-being, marked by the rhythms of daily life. Take today: I nursed the baby, changed her diaper, made oatmeal, went for a short walk, trying to lull the baby into a nap, then gave up and carried her home on my hip. I watered the plants in the greenhouse, water bottle in one hand, baby in the other as she grabbed the leaves of squash and cucumber plants. I heated up a sweet potato and red lentil soup, which I ate from a mug. I nursed once more, thinking she might nap now, and when she didn’t, I tried to hand the baby off to her father so I could write. I was quickly recruited back when she cried. I folded laundry, fried two eggs, ate several disks of chocolate, refreshed my email. By tomorrow, or tonight, most of these details will be gone, the specifics of today’s nursing and laundry-folding and oatmeal-making melding into all the other times I’ve done the same thing.

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I used to believe that ordinary, forgettable experiences were canaries in a coal mine, warning of a complacent life. Most of the time, the acts that sustain us loop endlessly, yielding nothing that lasts: so soon, the baby needs to eat again, nap again, have her diaper changed again. The plants need more water; the clothes and dishes need another wash; we all need dinner, then breakfast, then lunch. There’s a relentlessness to daily life, an unceasing erasure of our toil and renewal of the need for more of it. In my 20s, I didn’t trust that there could be meaning in that kind of repetition. I was eager for novelty, for my world to grow large. Challenge in the outdoors was often my chosen route. On one backcountry trip, my now-husband and I split one bite of oatmeal per day after running out of food. Another time, I stayed up all night resting on spruce boughs spread over the snow, feeding a fire with branches, after a friend and I got lost in the forest. One summer, when I was commercial fishing, I lived in a wall tent. I kept my food in a cooler, but a ground squirrel kept chewing his way inside. A moment of being that has stuck: waking up to find the squirrel inside my sleeping bag. These unpleasant moments generated something for later: a story, a memory, a bullet point on my toughness résumé.

But there was something unsustainable in all that chasing. I was running on a masochistic treadmill: each cabin I lived in needed to be more rustic than the last; each bout of solitude more isolated; each trek longer and more arduous. At some point, I realised it would never be enough. The horizon would continue to recede in front of me as I lunged after ever more intensity, never getting any closer to the transcendence I sought.

I was more concerned then with having an interesting life than a good one. Now, I have a child with an intoxicating eight-tooth smile, a snug home with running water that squirrels can’t break into, a partner who, in the early postpartum days, fed me salmon-burdock soup while I nursed. But life is not as interesting, even if remote living offered me plenty of moments of non-being, too: I still baked lingonberry pie, washed dishes, swept the floor – albeit with a certain exotic ruggedness that came with the setting: I did laundry in a bucket, hauled water from the river, tended the hearth with logs I’d cut and split myself. After I married and moved to town, though, domesticity took on a different hue. I grew kale, pickled turnips and baked cookies, but now as a wife. I felt unsettled pulling long shifts in the kitchen – a discomfort that only grew when I became pregnant. I bristled when I fulfilled traditional gender roles. Was I even a feminist any more? Or was I becoming a Victorian phantom, what Woolf called the Angel in the House?

I’m often hesitant to admit how much joy motherhood has given me. Finding satisfication in domesticity feels somewhat shameful, as if I’m betraying feminism by doing what so many women fought to stop doing. Or maybe I’m afraid of betraying the more interesting, exciting person I once wanted to shape myself into. These days, I am self-conscious about using the words stay-at-home mom when someone asks what I do. Usually, I fumble and talk quickly, evasively, telling them instead about the graduate degree I’m slowly completing before changing the subject. I am afraid of seeming regressive, and perhaps boring, my mind now occupied solely by the constant calculations of nap schedules and wake windows, and questions of how much applesauce to add to a muffin recipe to replace the sugar.

Throughout my life, I’ve been guided by the principles of a lean-in kind of feminism that insists that transformation, intellectual challenge and meaning can’t happen in the home with a child. I’ve been haunted by Betty Friedan’s description in The Feminine Mystique (1963) of suburban housewives living in a ‘comfortable concentration camp’. And troubled by Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that true

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