Daughter of Eve, the Follow-Up

I want to start this post by thanking all of you for your incredible comments on my Daughter of Eve post. It wasn’t exactly an easy post to write; I like to think that my life is a little more together, that I’m thrilled to be a stay-at-home mom, that I find fulfillment in laundry and cooking. (Actually I do find fulfillment in cooking, but you know what I mean.) But there has always been that undercurrent, even in the best of times; that nagging emptiness, that slight dissatisfaction that made my words sharper than they ought to be, that clipped my patience, that made my silences dour instead of cheerful. It was only natural, then, that when the time came at last to face it head-on, I should turn to you. It may seem silly to some of you, although to others it may make perfect sense, but I have found, through this blog, the type of friendship and community that I have been longing for for years. Those of you who read and comment on my blog are so wonderful. The fact that many of us share interests, live in similar circumstances, and share a belief in Christ allows me to come to you in the knowledge that you’ll understand my struggles. Your kindness and compassion has helped me feel at ease, and I’ve been able to put a voice to struggles that until now I ignored. And you’ve been there. You’ve been reassuring, helpful, constructive and honest. Here in the desert, I often feel like we’ve been exiled…away from family, friends, all that is familiar. In a strange city with a too-bright sun, I’ve found solace in you, my online friends. So thank you. You have helped me more than you know.

Reading over my post just now and the comments that followed was an interesting experience. In the days that followed that post, I came to realize something that I didn’t realize when I was writing it. It seems that the feminist mentality has invaded my subconscious more than I realized, because it became clear to me, particularly as I read Melanie’s comments, that what I felt the lack of wasn’t the freedom to pursue the intellectual life. This paragraph really struck me:

And no I don’t think our sole intellectual activity should be supporting our husband’s intellectual activity. Though I do think it important we engage with him to the extent that we can to understand and appreciate and share in what he’s doing, I also don’t think it beyond reason for him to share in our interests as well. And on that point, it seems to me from what you’ve written elsewhere your husband does. You’ve mentioned in several places how he’s interested in what you are interested in. He’s interested in your developing your abilities and talents. He’s willing to recommend books and to read what you write and to give you space to do those things. So I’m wondering how much conflict is there really in your marriage over your having space and time to do what you want to do? Is it really a matter of your not having the time and space or of your not using your time effectively? Because I know for me it’s often the latter.

Of course, she was absolutely right. In fact, the Ogre often pushes me to read things that he knows I would learn from because he knows that I aspire to be somewhat intellectual. Often, however, I balk at these suggestions and instead re-read Harry Potter. Again. The Ogre has offered, time and again, to give me a break so that I can go to Starbucks and read. Most of the time I decline, ostensibly because my children would shrivel up and die without their mother for two whole hours, but really because I’m lazy and pajamas are more comfortable than jeans. The Ogre encouraged me to start a blog. He proofreads every post. He’s delighted that I’m writing, and writing often. He’ll drop anything to give me time to blog. So what, exactly, am I bitter about?

I realized that it isn’t that I want to learn, it’s that I want to accomplish. I want to finish my Master’s. I want to get an MFA. I want to be published, to write a book, to have a career. And yet…and yet right now, in this time of small children, I actually have lots of time. I have hours that I fritter away on facebook, hours that I spend watching House and Doctor Who, hours that I spend clicking through blogs. Hours that could be spend reading Yeats or Eliot. Hours that could be spend working on tropes and schemes and learning the ins and outs of different poetic forms. When my husband has pointed this out to me before, my response has always been the same. You know I don’t work well alone. I have to be in a classroom setting to learn these things. I have to be able to discuss it with people, to bounce ideas off a professor, to work with a deadline over my head. Otherwise I just can’t get anything done. 

That’s true. But it’s not true because I’ve got some sort of learning disability that allows me to only learn in the classroom. It’s true because I’m lacking in self-discipline.

Junior Poet is a particularly rigorous course that English majors take at the college I attended. It’s an intense semester of poetry, wherein the students are not only thrown into the depths of the great poets of the Western Tradition, but are also expected to complete an in-depth study of a particular poet. The students read the complete works of that poet…at least three times. They read a biography of the poet, hundreds of pages of criticism, and write tons of annotated bibliographies. It’s a huge class, and I came out knowing that I had learned more in that semester than I had at any other point in my life.

Since then, I’ve often flirted with the idea of undertaking a project like that on my own. I’d like to know other poets as well as I know my junior poet. But I’ve never done it, because I lack the discipline and the will.

I’m probably being a little hard on myself, I realize. Motherhood does take quite a toll on us. It is often exhausting, and most days all I have the energy to do after the kids are finally asleep is collapse in front of the TV and fold laundry. But motherhood also throws our faults into sharp relief, and chief among those faults, for me and for others, is selfishness.

Laziness may be a factor in the fact that I’m not pursuing the intellectual life the way I’d like to, but it doesn’t explain the great deal of angst I have about it. It doesn’t explain the bitterness I have toward the Ogre or that I often feel that the universe has done me a great disservice by making it impossible to be a stay-at-home mother and a successful full-time writer at once. It doesn’t explain why I snap at Sienna for showing me the sixteenth Lego car she’s built for me when what I really want to do is read this complete stranger’s blog post about showing love to her children. And it doesn’t explain the fact that, while I like the idea of accomplishment, perhaps what I’m even more jealous of in the Ogre’s life is the freedom to just walk out the door.

I’d like to sit in a classroom without wondering if my baby is starving. I’d like to pee without a two-year-old trying to climb into my lap. I’d like to go to Starbucks and order a venti caramel macchiato with five thousand shots in it and not have to worry about what that might do to the breastfeeding infant. I’d like to stay up until two, sipping wine and reading poetry the way I used to, without having to worry about the fact that as soon as the sun rises I’ll be covered in children the way seafaring ships are covered in barnacles.

I’m not alone in these wishes. After my post, I received a number of personal emails and one touching phone call. It seems that many of you feel the same way. It’s really hard for all of us to adjust to life as a mother, whether you’ve always wanted children or you’ve never wanted them. I talked to one woman in particular who I deeply admire, a homeschooling mother of eight who reads her children Green Eggs and Ham in Latin, who is funny and cheerful and has raised some terrific kids, and she admitted to me that although she’d always wanted to be a mother, her first few years of motherhood were horrible. She had two little girls very close together and was so overwhelmed by how difficult it was that for a while she consoled herself with the thought that she just had to babysit the children until they were old enough to be sent to school, and then her life would be her own again. When the time came to send them to school, however, there weren’t any suitable schools in the area and the choice was made to homeschool. It was only then, when she actively put herself away and began to make her children her priority that motherhood became something enjoyable.

I think this is the particular cross of motherhood, and also the particular grace afforded to mothers. More than most people, mothers are forced to truly put their own needs behind the needs of someone else. We don’t get to sleep when or how we’d like, we can’t use the bathroom alone, we don’t remember what silence sounds like or what life was like when books stayed where we put them. The people we serve aren’t even reasonable! They’re little tyrants who scream for no reason, pull and scratch and pinch, demand to be fed at ridiculous hours and have an uncanny ability to tell whether you’re sitting or standing, regardless of what position you hold them in.

And yet, none of us would truly give it up. I know I wouldn’t. As much as I struggle against the strictures of motherhood, all the caramel macchiatos in the world don’t measure up to having a baby fall asleep on my chest. I could publish poems in the most prestigious of magazines, I could write thousands of books, I could even be named Poet Laureate, and still the greatest moments of pride and fulfillment in my life would be the moments three blue-and-red, slimy babies were placed on my chest.

In the eternal view, motherhood also affords us mothers a grace that others often don’t have. We are forced to confront our own selfishness. My godfather likes to say that “babies are selfishness magnets. They just suck it all out of you.” How true. Babies are pure appetite, and learning to deny our own appetites in order to satiate theirs is at once the most difficult and the most wonderful of lessons to learn. By the very facts of their existence, children teach us how to love properly. We have to put their needs above our own because that’s what’s necessary to keep them alive. We have to think of what is best for them in the long-term, not what will make them happy in the short term. We have to be willing to endure tears and tantrums, we have to learn to make the hard decisions and stick by them. And perhaps even worst of all, we have to confront the fact that our children will learn primarily not through what we say, but through what we do. All our sins rise up before us with a different kind of clarity when we see them in our children. And if we don’t want our children to fight these same battles, we have to confront those sins in ourselves first.

There was a lot of that selfishness in me when I wrote this paragraph:

And yet, there is still that part of me that recoils at the idea of being a helpmeet. What about me? my inner feminist wails. What about my life, my talents, my interests? Am I supposed to just put it all away and let myself be swallowed up in someone else?

The answer, right now, is yes.

In fact, that’s not true. I’m not supposed to let myself be swallowed up in someone else, as Eve so keenly pointed out. She said:

The feminist mentality inserts a division between the two: as in, you have to be Calah but being a wife and mother is a hindrance/ in opposition to that. The truly Christian attitude is figuring out how God made you, Calah, to function as a wife and mother in the particular set of circumstances that are *your’s* and no one else’s (your husband, your children, your personality, etc.)

I’m actually not going to lay blame for this idea of a “division” at the feet of the feminist movement, but rather at the feet of self-interest. It’s hard to become a servant to others. It’s easier if you allow yourself to feel like a martyr for the cause. It’s easier to say, “Oh, I shall fall on the sword of self-sacrifice for my husband and children, letting all my talents and interests shrivel up and die in the face of domesticity, because I am that noble. Let the process of canonization begin.” What is truly difficult is carving out a unique space for oneself.

I am, indeed, called the vocation of wife-dom and motherhood. I don’t think that I have a vocation to the intellectual life in the same way that my husband does, but I certainly have a love for writing and reading. It would actually be more selfish and childish of me to choose one or the other; the proper thing to do is to order my life so as to make a place for both. This requires no small amount of discipline and an even greater determination to overcome selfishness. Instead of saying, “I’d really like to sit down and watch this TV show. I’ll mop the kitchen later,” I’ll have to mop the kitchen now so I can write later. It certainly won’t be easy, but choosing anything else would just be perpetuating the cycle of discontent.

Life is hard enough as it is. Little children require a great deal of energy, energy that I won’t have if I continue to allow a lack of self-discipline and a martyr complex to keep me in the endless throes of ennui. Now that things are clearer, now that my path is truly laid before my feet, perhaps for the first time ever, the only thing left to do is to begin the journey.

As far as the requests for reading, I’m really grateful for your suggestions. I’m planning on reading The Story of a Soul because it’s the only one we have at the moment, but the Kimberly Hahn books are going on my birthday wish-list. I’m also going to ask for Women, Sex and the Church since I have heard so many good things about it, and I’d like to find Josemaria Escriva’s The Way because it seems like such a good book to have for little snatches of uplifting reading.

I hope this has been as helpful for all of you as it has been for me. I think it’s crucial for us, as mothers, to realize that “dying to self” does not mean letting all the things we love literally die. It means letting our selfishness, our vanity, our indolence and our pride die so that we have time and space for everything…our husbands, our children, and ourselves.