MAILBAG: Working mothers, and exceptional people. Y’all are in bold, I’m in plain text. For once, both readers get the last word! (Mostly.)

From Lisa Powell: Just wanted to add my four cents to the many emails I’m sure you’ll get on this subject. The subject of working vs. stay-at-home mothering is a bag of snakes you may wish to close as quickly as possible, but your comments that some mothers enjoy their work and therefore they are doing no wrong by continuing it was striking, and could use some clarification.

It is not in itself morally wrong to work if you are a mother. But it is a sin to abandon your child to the care of others for the purposes of personal gain, tangible or otherwise.

A child receives the best care from a direct and continuous relationship with a person who loves him. If he does not receive this, it is a loss.

Sometimes the loss in unavoidable. My grandmother was widowed, left with four children, when my mother was a baby. She had to work to support her family. The loss of the care of the mother was in this case very much like the loss of the care of the father who had died — a misery, a suffering, but part of the necessity of life. Those children knew that she worked, in addition to taking care of them when she was not working, because she loved them and because of their needs.

When parents decide to give a child over to daycare, nannying — any system that entails this loss of loving, direct care — in order to increase their standard of living or to fulfill career aspirations, they are asking the child to suffer a loss so that the parent may gain. Children understand this. No amount of quality time can make up for the hurt that comes to a child the day he realizes that mom would rather have her partnership, dad would rather have his SUV, than sacrifice so he can have a parent raising him hour by hour, day by day, with love and attention. The child is taught that he is less important than status, than achievement, or than things. The child is taught that he should value status, achievement, or things more than people. This is where the sin lies, not in the suffering of a child — all children suffer, and we cannot always prevent it, we even should not always prevent it. But that the child is told by the people he most loves and depends on that he is of little value, that people are of little value.

Staying at home with your child does not, of course, prevent you from sinning by putting your own desires above the needs of your child. There are a million ways in which this selfishness manifests itself. For example, my sins tend to anger and pride, I am mean-spirited to my husband in front of my child. This is a wretched thing to do — perhaps it is a worse sin than leaving her in daycare to earn money for a trip to Hawaii. But if you slap a person, and I beat someone with a fist, you can hardly say that the slap is not wrong because my offense is worse. Abandoning your child to the care of another for the purposes of personal gain is wrong, even if there are greater wrongs.

Of course, for any one individual, I can never judge whether this has happened. I don’t know if the child has been abandoned. Many mothers work and yet arrange with their husbands for the full-time parental care of their children — a very difficult and sacrificing thing to do. I can’t know the reason why any mother puts a child into the care of others — even when the reasons appear entirely self-centered, I cannot know the circumstances of a decision, I cannot know the heart of another person. While I can define the sin and say with conviction that it is wrong, I cannot ever decide for someone else whether they are committing that sin. This is the problem of stigma — it is moral judgment of a group, and even if the moral judgment is accurate for 80%, 90%, 99% of the members of that group, it is always wrong to punish the innocent, and humiliating one innocent person does so.

Let me, though, try to help you understand why so many people would like to stigmatize working mothers. Stigma may be wrong, but it is universal. Societies choose the traits they wish to promote, and stigmatize those who do not conform. Many nonworking mothers, like myself, would tell you that the stigma lies with us. Our society values people not in themselves, but by their resumes. We value ourselves in this manner. The majority, if not all, nonworking mothers struggle not just with the unintentionally degrading comments of friends and relatives but with the personal, nagging anxiety that they are being irresponsible and lazy when they step off the career path. Most of us figure out eventually that it’s something we just have to get over, that we are charged to do the right thing, not the thing that gets us praised and admired. But it chafes, and so our gut sometimes says that as it seems someone must be stigmatized, let it be them. It is also painful to know that the society that you are a part of communicates through its stigmatization that it values wealth and power over love; we do not want our charity towards working mothers to seem to condone that. What we must remind ourselves is that if we live our lives in rebellion against that value system, we do not need to use an immoral tool like stigmatization to attack those who don’t.

I realize working mothers was not the topic of your blog, so maybe I received the impression you hadn’t considered these things from the brevity of your comments. If so, please excuse the time I’ve taken.

My reply (slightly edited for clarity): Thanks for your email. I’m afraid I gave the wrong impression–I don’t think it’s right for parents to place personal enjoyment over their children’s needs. (And I do think that mothers have a stronger connection to their children than fathers do, which is why this discussion is cached in terms of mothers who work outside the home.) I tried to point out that I knew women who were working not out of economic necessity, but who were also able to be fantastic mothers. I do think day care (esp. for very young children–putting infants in day care??) is a bad idea and to be avoided if possible, but there are lots of other options–babysitters, family members, etc.

[A little bit about my background here–varying ways my parents made sure I was cared for. My mother has worked full-time for as long as I can remember.] Because of other aspects of my parents’ life, workplaces (e.g. both were able to leave work in emergencies, both were able to bring me to their workplaces), and personalities, this worked out terrifically. I can honestly say that I never thought, or even wondered, whether my mom was choosing her needs over against mine–I never wondered whether I “came first” for her. I knew I did. So that experience definitely colors my beliefs about what’s possible for a mother who works outside the home. I tend to be very “different strokes for different folks–but here are guiding principles you should keep in mind”-y. The guiding principles rule out sacrificing your kid’s needs to your desires, but I don’t think employment-by-choice (as vs. need) always entails that sacrifice.

I absolutely agree with you about the problems w/the stigma attached to SAHMs.

Her response: I suspected the fact that your comments were a quick aside might have led to my misunderstanding your position — your reply to me was unexpected and very much appreciated.

In case I caused offense, let me clarify. It seems self-evident to me that most kids of working parents at some point, perhaps not consciously, must face the question — why does X take care of me instead of Mom/Dad — just as my child is probably now asking why Mom keeps writing emails when she’s crawling into my lap saying, “I want cookies, Mom!”. Is it not probable that you did face this question, maybe early in life, and simply found the answer satisfactory? If not, please excuse my presumption — sometimes I make generalizations forgetting that I’m talking to individuals with specific experiences.

(Eve interjects briefly: No offense taken, certainly. But to answer your question, it was always kind of obvious to me why my mother worked. Her work is interesting and important, it’s something she’s really good at, and as I said above, it didn’t take away from her relationship to her children. Taken together, those three factors made working outside the home the more obvious choice. Frederica Mathewes-Green, in Real Choices, makes the excellent point that rhetoric pitting babies against careers for women forgets that most women, like most men, don’t have “careers”; they have jobs. Jobs that typically provide a lot fewer outlets for creativity and a lot less excitement than caring for a child. But many women do have “careers,” and if you do have one, it’s definitely worthwhile to try to keep career and kid rather than choosing. Sometimes the choice is forced, just because kids do need a lot; but it’s worth figuring out if you have to choose, rather than assuming that you have to choose.)

Powell again: I do believe there are many scenarios which are perfectly loving and acceptable — I’m a big fan of stay-at-home fathers (talk about stigma!). Just thought you might want to clarify the basic point for readers like myself who might want to know where you stand.

From Robert Dakin: Responding to my post on how art “…advocates for the ‘exceptional’ over against the majority”: So, what’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t that pretty well describe the activities of a saint, even of Christ, assuming that it refers to the cumulative life choices of the individual. There was nothing ordinary or “socially conscious” about the activities of St. Francis. Isn’t to be consciously different ipso facto to be “against”? Didn’t Christ set a son against his father, etc.? To me, an exceptional person in this sense is any person whose actions consciously and constantly strive to enact his beliefs, whether it be through prayer and transcendence, or through art. To such a person all is permitted that he permits himself to do; society becomes irrelevant as an aggregate of people: individuals as receptacles of the

Message become all-important.

My reply: There’s nothing wrong with advocating for the exceptional–in fact, the second point I was making was that most people are in some important way, or have the capacity to be, exceptional. I was trying to point out the need for the exceptional (note that I didn’t deny that this is what art is about) while also adding that focus on the “exceptional” can be deceptive unless people keep a sense of humility and openness to the unexpected. My quarrel isn’t with the “exceptional”–it’s with people, whether they think of themselves as “exceptional” or as “majority/bourgeouis” (sp?), who hold others in contempt. I was trying to tease out ways in which thinking in terms of “exceptions” can become perverted–though I don’t think that those perversions are inherent in the concept of focusing on exceptions. I should probably make that more clear. Hope that helps–

Dakin responds: Yes. Thanks. I fully agree that a self image can be focused on the “self” (the part called the “ego”) and morph into its own fetish. I find that to be “exceptional” (in the sense I was trying to express) only as yet another form of self-delusion, however. Jesus seems to have had what can only be called “contempt” (on the worldly level) for lawyers and scribes and hypocrites, for instance–the kind of people that become involved in behaviors that are often attacked by artists as well as saints. These things are difficult to talk about without sounding self-righteous on the one hand, or being judgmental in the wrong way, on the other. It is difficult to deal with “the ways of the world” at all without coming to sudden and unwelcome realizations that you’re fighting fire with fire. I guess that’s why they have monasteries?