By Suzanne Allmart

Bahíyyih Baker, 31, is a wife, mother and Bahá’í. She’s lived all over the US, did a year of volunteer service in Guyana, South America, and now lives in Urbana, at the heart of Illinois. In her last year of graduate study toward a Master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second Language, Bahiyyih and her husband, Billy, found out they were having a baby. Now with their third child, born in February, Bahíyyih continues to work at home with her children—as a mother.

Mothers have a unique role as the primary educators of children—”no nobler deed can be imagined.” Yet Western society often leaves mothers unsupported and neglected. One usually discovers these shortfalls only after becoming a parent. Can you describe what it was like for you to transition into motherhood? To what degree did you feel supported?

I started out the work of mothering with a lot of desire to have children and very little knowledge or wisdom about what it means to raise them. Maybe this is just how life is, since there has to be a starting point where you go from not knowing to knowing, but I think preparation that really focused on the real issues, meaning development of spiritual qualities and even just recognition of the spiritual qualities involved, would have helped me not flounder and struggle so much at the beginning. So first, in order for mothers to be supported, I want training. Motherhood is a spiritual battlefield, as perilous as any physical one because of the weight of responsibility for shaping a human being that it entails. The enemies are my own ego, ignorance, and self-absorption. My weapons are virtue, love, and reliance on God. These things are not just nice ideas to think about while praying, they are real powers that I need to know exactly how to use every day in mothering. I finally found a great training, when I was pregnant with my second child, in Bahá’í parenting training. That gave me access to key ideas in Bahá’í texts about mothering.

Can you give an example of how this training has guided you in your parenting?

If we take the idea of training for spiritual challenges and enlarge it to the family level, we have a manifesto already written very succinctly by ‘Abdul-Bahá. With other family members interacting with mothers and their work, we have the issues of equality, rights—implying justice—and unity. These are huge ideas but they are played out in little ways all the time in the workings of a family.