Mommy / Me

Lately I've been thinking a lot about motherhood and specifically what it means for me to be a mother who works outside the home.  I was raised by a stay-at-home mother who was very clear that she had not enjoyed working, and who felt that her vocation was to be, in the truest sense, a homemaker. During my childhood, the dominant cultural attitude toward employed mothers was that their children must by default be suffering from neglect.  As a fourth-grader, I read a Weekly Reader article about the sad social phenomenon of "latch-key children" who let themselves into their homes after school because no one was there to greet them, and I could hardly imagine such a fate.  My mother was at home, actually baking cookings many days, when I arrived to sit at the kitchen table, have an after-school snack, and do my homework.  At 5:00 on the dot, my father walked in the door as my mother was putting various entrees and side-dishes onto serving platters.  This routine was established with absolutely no deviation (I don't remember my father taking a single sick day, nor vacation except for the family vacation week took each year) throughout my childhood.

Naturally, coming from this highly stable, highly ordered environment, I could envision no other way of conducting my life. When I first graduated from college, I also cooked full meals for myself in the evening. Some evenings I would make all the food and then be so tired that I'd just cover the plate and eat it the next day.  But not to cook a full meal would have felt somehow like giving in to living so sadly--what would next slip down that greased slope?  Personal hygiene?  A roof over my head?  By the time I went through graduate school, I had relaxed a lot about the need to cook complete meals every single night, but when I became a parent, I again had to reconsider to what extent the way I was raised was ideal and/or feasible.

For a while, I had mixed feelings about working with a new baby.  I felt tremendously lucky to have a job in my field, much less at the same school where my husband taught and in a wonderfully supportive department.  Too many of my friends and colleagues had endured underemployment, long separations, or commuter marriages for me to take this situation for granted.  There was no question that I was going to continue working; I did not want to give up a career that I had worked very hard to attain and that I loved.  But subconsciously at least, I did still bear the idea that it was not as good for Allison Clare that I worked away from her--even though I was home with her for six months and Sam and I did a lot of juggling for the next six months to maximize our time with her. I felt that on balance and in the long term, it was probably better for all of us for me to continue working, especially since the flexibility of my job meant that I could minimize extremely long periods away from her by working after she went to sleep. (Yes, this meant not sleeping.)

Still, for a long while, I assumed that my work meant a trade-off for my children, and one that they would unfortunately endure in the tenderness of their early childhood.  Not that I was choosing a personal indulgence for myself over something for them, but that I was choosing something that was in better for their lives as a whole over something that offered more immediate benefits for them.

But after a few years, something dawned on me.  We've had this group of women in our lives--April, Maggie, Becky, Sarah, Kim, Cency, Cassie, Kelsey, Cammie, Sammi, Brittany, Mary, Lexie--and when I think of each of them now, I can think of distinct values and lessons and gifts tangible and intangible that we've all received from their presence in our lives as they've talked about how they grew up and what they learned from their own parents.  It's as if we've had a dozen examples of the end result of excellent parenting to observe closely over months and years.  And sometimes I think that half our kids' books have come from our babysitters, who often so lovingly share their favorite childhood titles with our family: Caps for Sale, Bedtime for Bear, Cranberry Valentine.  Books I'd never heard of but have now read over and over again with each child.  None of these lovely women would have been part of our lives, especially not a real, integral part, if I hadn't worked.

I know that not everyone has the luxury of being able to secure high-quality care for their kids, or of being able to work at a job that feels like a vocation.  But for me, realizing this somehow quieted a little buzz of worry and made me see my working as a different means to the general end of raising children who are loving and who are loved.

It may have taken me a little longer to come around to this fairly obvious assessment in part because of some unspoken assumptions in Christian circles that raising children in faith is so important that there is no other way to do it than to have an at-home parent.  When I was younger, an acquaintance once told me that he believed that the fact that his wife stayed at home demonstrated that he loved his family more than other men with working wives did--time and attention, he reasoned, are the first expressions of love.  I didn't exactly agree, but my reasons for disagreeing have taken a long time to coalesce.

While motherhood is not universal, obviously a lot of people have to have children for the species to continue.  So, does believing in the missiological significance of our relationships with other people mean that (all of those) women are called to be at home throughout their childrearing years?  This may sound like a dumb question, but it should be a live one since many people in the church generally assume it's better for the mother to be at home.  But for the Christian, this conclusion requires the assumption that the work occurring outside the home has no comparable missiological purpose.  And that's kind of where I've come around on the question.

There's this famous sermon from early American (no, not that one--the other one).  It was preached by this pastor, John Winthrop, to the Puritans who would eventually go on to found Boston, just as their ship approached North America.  I picture this wind-tossed vessel and these seasick men and women, exhausted but struggling to believe, wondering how to survive.  Could they trust one another?  How would they organize themselves?  What rules would they observe?  Finders, keepers?  Every man for himself?  Everything in common?  To every man as he has need?  Interestingly (to me), the subject of the sermon, which is titled "A Model of Christian Charity," is property.  Money.  It's about how surviving and being a Christian and living in a community have everything to do with how you decide what to keep for yourself and what to give away.  The sermon starts with the observation that God has in his infinite wisdom created a diversity of gifts for the simple reason that that diversity reflects the diversity of his own character. From there, Winthrop reasons that some people are called to be rich and other people are called to be poor--a line of thinking that it's pretty easy to criticize, with our ideological interest in social mobility (even if that mobility isn't practically exercised as often as we'd like today).  But what's amazing about it is that he goes on from there to say that the rich are called not to "eat up" the poor, and the poor are called not to envy the rich--because the graciousness of the rich and the gentleness of the poor are both qualities of God.  So the sermon seems to me to be radical in a couple of ways--both by telling the rich that that yes, they must give money to those who have none, even when it means they can't save up for their own families beyond what they need for the next year or so, and by telling the poor that even they, in their station, reflect the qualities of God as beautifully as the rich do.

With respect to mothering, I think I've come around to thinking that Winthrop was right about the diversity of callings that God has given us and the significance of that diversity--it's not important just because we're all different and unique and special and isn't that pretty and can't we help in lots of different ways, but it's important because it gives us the opportunity to reflect unique qualities of God's nature in our created beings.  This sacred diversity is in tension with the universality of parenting.  There's a kind of camaraderie in parenting--sometimes you see it when your kid is melting down and another parent gives you an "I've been there" smile, or when you tell your friend that you've just realized your daughter's shoes are not one but two sizes too small (just for example) and she tells you about her own mommy fail.  All the world over, people are hoping that their children will grow up to be kind and unselfish, decent human beings, while nursing or swaddling or lugging toddlers from place to place.  I feel that these things, these universal basics--giving our children the love and provision they need to grow up seeking and reflecting the face of God--with their essential sameness, must also be able to exist in tandem with the diversity Winthrop talks about--the fact that every one of us reflects particular aspects of God, the diversity of his character and the many ways in which he can be glorified.  I just can't believe that God would envision mothering in such a way that no other calling can be fulfilled while doing it; otherwise, it seems mystifying as to why he would endow women with lots of gifts for service of various kinds.

I've always believed wholeheartedly that plenty of women are not called to be mothers, or are called to work outside the home.  But I think I somehow assumed that that calling to be a working mother was a particularized one, or that it was an exception granted because of family exigency or the significance of one's career that required some kind of tradeoff.  I'm beginning to think that it's less of an exception and more the rule.  That you don't have to be called to be the COO of Facebook (just for example) to justify working outside the home.  But that maybe you're called to be a really nice, supportive, and helpful coworker on an insurance hotline offering your gifts of personal serenity and attention to detail and conscientiousness to comfort the afflicted.  Or maybe you're a shipping clerk whose wry sense of humor isn't appreciated by your toddlers but is an expression of God's amusement with us all.  And maybe mothering (even good mothering) is one of those things that is bimodal--you are or you are not; it's not incrementally measured.  Maybe you're a good mother just because you are their mother, however you've defined that for your family, whether it means you're the one who cooks their meals with loving and skilled hands, or the one who researches after school activities they'd like, or the one who tells jokes before bedtime, or the one who puts the right amount of bubbles in the bath.  And maybe any one of those versions is fine because God has made kids so that they just need someone to plug into that spot, which adapts to the size and shape of the mother they've got (this seems so likely to me because even kids who are abused want their own parents, and often do better with their own parents than in more stable but less familiar environments).  Maybe being a good mother isn't being good at all of mothering in all its many forms, given the universality of the fact that kids need mothers and the diversity of the gifts of the women that God has made mothers.  And maybe that leaves the rest of yourself available to be all the other things you're called to be.