Welcome, First Things Readers

Thanks to Clare Coffey for linking to us in her post commenting on the stay-at-home motherhood fracas.

With that said, it seems to me that we do women no favors when we conflate childcare and motherhood. Motherhood isn’t a job–it’s a vocation and an identity. Stay at homes are not “full-time moms” any more than women who work outside the home–as if breadwinning fathers were “part-time dads.” Fulltime childcare, especially as it’s usually combined with housekeeping, however, is a job–is hard, demanding, work. And the sooner we stop fetishizing it as the core of what it means to be a mother and a woman, as some sort of sacred, higher, path for the female sex, the sooner we will see it for what it really is: difficult, necessary, and honorable work whose workers deserve dignified and decent working conditions.

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness. –G.K. Chesterton

I appreciate Chesterton’s thought, but rhetoric like this seems to imply that childcare is one long, exhausting, ecstasy of creative energy and emotional fulfillment. A woman needs no other identity or outlet: motherhood, or at least the Victorian ideal of motherhood predicated on rapt and constant communion between mother and child, is all in all.

Our cult of motherhood demands human sacrifice—hence the constant need for, and glorification of, victimhood (interestingly, in my experience especially by women privileged enough to pay me for childcare while they work neither for pay nor passion). I see women at the playground who look like zombies–completely exhausted, frazzled by the demands of their children, clad in dirty and ill-fitting clothing, constantly interrupted in what may be their only adult interactions till the Mr. gets home by the requests and complaints of their children. “Men just don’t understand,” they say. “It’s all part of being a mom.”

My experience of my life, and of my own personhood, is one of continuity. Motherhood has intensified certain of my tendencies, exacerbated some traits, and ameliorated others. But it has not fundamentally altered who I am or thrown some bright line across the continuum of my life. Being married and having children has been a rich and demanding phase of my existence and has defined much of my experience for the past ten years, but those aspects of my life are not the totality of it.

In fact, I feel most broadened when I branch out into new ventures not connected specifically to being a mother, because those are the experiences that round me out as a person. Can I tell you how exhilarating it was to run a 5K last year? Or to complete National Novel Writing Month in November despite having a death in the family and no heat in the house? My family wasn't absent from these ventures -- indeed, I relied on their encouragement and support, as always -- but they were ventures in which we interacted as people who loved each other as family.

My children, at their current ages, tend to view me as "Mom". That's my primary function to them, and that's okay. But I hope as they grow older, our relationship will deepen (as have my family relationships) to the point where they relate to me as a person who loves them as a mother. "Motherhood" may be an archetype, but every mother is a person. Just as trinitarian nature of God reveals that he is too full to be contained just in the roles of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, so motherhood is only one aspect of femininity, not its end.

Further reflections on home and work

Everyone's heard by now about Hilary Rosen's comment that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life". Romney, who stayed at home and raised five boys, quickly answered this lazy charge, but this surely won't be the last time that a woman who stays at home will hear this accusation.

What grows personally wearisome is that this line of thought -- that staying home to raise children and keep house is not "work" -- suggests that these things are not because *I* am doing them. The maintenance of children would be work if I were paying someone else to do it; the education of children would be work if I were paying someone else to do it; the business of cleaning and cooking and generally managing a household would attain the status of "work" if I employed a butler, laundress, maid, and cook, but loses this distinction because I perform these activities in my own home for my own benefit and that of my family.

This raises the question of what, exactly, is work. Activity that receives financial compensation? Activity that takes one away from family? Activity done outside the home? Activity requiring management, external accountability, or special training?

Perhaps one of the reasons for the perception of stay-at-home mothers as non-working members of society is that they do things that have to be done even by people who work. Everyone's laundry has to be done; everyone needs groceries. All children need care and education. It's hardly surprising that a woman who, after a long day at work, drags herself to the store and feeds the kids and puts them to bed, might think, "Boy, women who stay at home really have it easy. Why should they complain when I do everything they do, and still put in a full day of work?"

This is a question that deserves to be answered, even if it's not an accurate description of the life of stay-at-home mothers (especially if they teach their children at home as well). The value of what women who stay at home do is not primarily monetary, though there is a large financial advantage in having an adult in a family whose time is dedicated to making the family and household run smoothly. But the stay-at-home mother is able to tailor her work to fit the family's specific needs and style. I know exactly where the stains in all the laundry are, because I'm here when the baby spills something on herself or the boy goes rolling down the grassy hill. I have the time to make meals that cost-efficient, nutritious, and personalized to my family's taste. All these are benefits that it would be very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to replace were I not at home most of the day.

But these are all things that could be done competently by a live-in housekeeper, and even lovingly by a relative. The true value of being at home with my children is that I am the one who is raising them. At every point, whether we're doing schoolwork or cleaning or reading or just hanging around, they're absorbing my values and culture, not that of the daycare staff or the nanny or the neighbor down the street. They're also absorbing my flaws -- any child who takes after me will be a mediocre housekeeper and an inveterate procrastinator -- but it's fine with me that my children have a safe and loving environment in which to encounter the idea that adults aren't perfect. If children are a gift from God, then I see it as my job to be a gift back to them, in the most personalized and effective way possible.

Not every mother is able to stay at home with her children, and not every woman wants that lifestyle, but it's absurd for anyone to denigrate the work of a stay-at-home mother, as if the inherent desire of a woman to raise and care for her own children was the height of decadence and luxury.

UPDATE: Apropos of the discussion of what stay-at-home mothers add to the economy,Rebecca Ryskind Teti reiterates the point she made in her chapter of Style, Sex, and Substance.

The economy exists to be sure each household has what it needs. What that requires may look different for each household (does it make more sense for us to outsource childcare or provide it ourselves?), but it’s the flourishing of the human person that is the point. Is someone sneering at you for not working outside the home? Smile. They work for you!



...The human person is of course not reducible to a mere “worker.” Still, in strictly economic terms, people are our most valuable economic resource and the family is not a nostalgic religious notion, but also the most essential engine of the economy. Stay-at-home moms are not outside the economy, they’re at the heart of it.