Motherhood

One

Is the life of a mother restricted, narrow, or truncated?

We have been meditating on the fourth commandment and the importance of the father in a family.

Now as we begin to reflect on the role of a mother, do not misinterpret me. When I highlight the vital role of a mom, I am not saying the only place for women is in the home. I have a brilliant daughter who is a fantastic lawyer and an equally great mom. 

In his encyclical on the family, St. John Paul II stated clearly, “There is no doubt that the equal dignity and responsibility of men and women fully justifies women's access to public functions.”

In other words, it’s a good thing that women now have access to all kinds of careers and elected political offices. We need to reject any temptation to indulge in the absurd idea that women are incapable, or incompetent, that they should be kept at home because that’s all they can handle.

But it is not uncommon to hear people talk about getting “trapped” in motherhood, imprisoned in the home. They talk about the need for women to be “liberated” from family life, as though family life was a small, claustrophobic cell.

It is not unusual for someone to say to a mother, “I could never be a stay-at-home mom. I couldn’t handle the tedium.” Sometimes they’ll be even more astoundingly rude and say things like, “Do you miss using your brain?”

But think of what’s implied by this attitude, all these utterly thoughtless people are acting like a house is a narrower, less exciting, less multifaced world than, say, an office cubicle. Seriously? 

Two

Working inside or outside the home

Our post-industrialized economy still needs a lot of people to do specialized work outside the home. But of course, specialization is just a fancy word for developing one, narrow, specific skill-set.

When you have a career, you work really hard at getting good at one thing. Just one thing. You develop one part of your personality, doing the same kind of thing over and over. And the people you work with maybe think you’re really good at what you do, but of course, that overdeveloped, narrow, specialized part of your personality is all they see.

In other words, work is a narrow part of human experience. It engages less of your humanity. It demands less from you, and you really don’t do as many different kinds of things. 

If you want a job that demands everything of you, engages all your faculties, keeps you on your toes all the time, and makes you develop in new ways to meet new challenges constantly…then be a mom.

Three

Engaging the full person

There’s a mom who used to print out cards that described her professional activities: educator, administrator, conflict management, logistics, sanitation engineer, director of procurement, chief medical supervisor, dining services, day-care provider, cleaning service, law enforcement…you get the idea.

A mother doesn’t need to use less of her brain than professionals outside the home. She needs to use a lot more. A mother doesn’t have less excitement, less stimulation, less professional areas of expertise. She has a lot more.

Working in the home is a difficult job, maybe the most difficult, but not because it’s not stimulating enough. It’s difficult because it’s overstimulating.

The home is way more multifaceted and adventurous than an office, which has been artificially designed to limit, and reduce, what a worker does, or what a worker thinks about. 

G. K. Chesterton puts it magnificently, “The place where babies are born, where men die, where the drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or a shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size and much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that it is the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the division of labor.”

That’s why being the primary care provider for your kids is, in fact, not only the most important job but the most interesting one.

Four

The full experience of the human person

There’s an enormous difference between serving customers and raising children.

As we’ve already said, raising children is more multifaceted, more complicated, and more stimulating. 

A mom serves her kids in a thousand ways. A job means basically serving your boss or your client in one or two ways.

But it’s also the case that a parent’s job gives you the full range of human experience.

With a job, you make a contract with someone else. After the contract is fulfilled, you can both walk away. You maybe deal with the other person for a few minutes or maybe a couple of days. Maybe it’s years before one of you changes your job. But in any case, you only see part of their lives. You only get a very small window into their human experience.

The home, if you invest the time in it, is where you see the whole of the human experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You experience the whole world of your child, the whole life of the child. You’re there for all of it: when the two-year-old wakes you up in the morning, when the seventeen-year-old gets in trouble with the cops, when the twenty-six-year-old walks down the aisle, and when the thirty-year-old asks for your help with the kids.

What job puts you in touch with the whole of human experience like the job of being a parent? 

What job shows you the richness of what it is to be human, not just at one passing stage or in one limited project but for all the stages of the entire project of life?

Anyone who thinks home life, family life, is boring, these people have refused to engage with the thrill, excitement, and kaleidoscope brilliance of what it means to be human. And at the center of all that excitement, at the center of all the shifting, multifaced changes, at the center of all that there is always the mother.

Five

Bigger on the inside than the outside

In C.S. Lewis’ famous children’s book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, three children discover an entire world inside a small, portable closet. Then in the last book of the series, the children go into a shed, and inside it is the infinite glorious land of heaven.

This is, in many ways, a metaphor for the truth of our lives: the inside of some things is larger than the outside.

So too, inside the cave of Bethlehem, Christ was born of the perfect woman, cared for by the best father and husband of all time. Inside that cave, there was more than the entire universe outside that cave.

Again, the tabernacle in each Church is a relatively tiny box. Yet, inside it is the Infinite, Eternal, Immeasurable God. What’s inside is bigger than what’s outside.

And that’s how God has made the family and the home: just a few people, inside a relatively small building. 

But there is more between those few people, and there is more action within those four little walls than all the bustling crowds and office buildings of the largest cities. The inside is bigger than the outside. And a mother who gives herself to the inside of her family, she becomes a more interesting, more multifaceted person, than those of us who are mere professionals can ever fully appreciate.