Identity Politics and Mothering

I happened upon this article many weeks ago and have been chewing it over, in the usual way, along with all the rest of the news.

Ms. Dilley writes, most trenchantly, “We can debate gender and parenting all day long. But the Western world, I believe, is making the war almost unwinnable by conceiving of the home as a modern gulag where the lesser breadwinner is sent to perish.” It goes on being pretty well from there. She wishes the church would do more to obviously value care giving and that the choice to mother would be upheld as a dignified and honorable vocation. Amen and Amen.

But I want to go a few steps back, because the reason that I’m finally writing about this today, as opposed to several weeks ago, is because of The Planned Butcher-hood continuing scandal–well, it should be a scandal and that the fact that it’s not says more than anything.

In school, with the children, I’m “quickly” reviewing all the history we’ve ever done, because we humans are so forgetful, and just before Christmas we read again about the Gracchi Brothers. Their lives are the usual tale of blood shed and honor and politics that make all of Roman history so compelling and relevant, but the real reason they are always fixed in my mind, of course, is because of their mother and the anecdote of the jewels. Here is a little fanciful retelling, with embellishments, for children. Essentially, this elegant bare armed Roman Lady is asked where all her jewels are and she pulls her two young sons to herself and says, ‘These are my jewels.’ And this claim is remarkable in two ways. First, her dignity is inextricably tied to theirs, for without her, they wouldn’t have amounted to much. And two, they, imbued with this dignity, are given to the Roman Republic to cover themselves with glory, and there they courageously sacrifice themselves for what we might call the downtrodden.

This little historical moment always sticks in my throat as I look at my own children and examine my own feelings about them. I don’t think about them as my jewels, even when singing that gorgeous song about God having the little children as jewels, precious jeeewwwweeeells, in his bright shining crown. Like most women today, I am often counting over the minutes when their education shall no longer be on my shoulders and I can carry on doing all the things I wanted to do. My identity and sense of dignity are not so bound up in them that I can’t imagine myself without them. Although, as they and I age, I think the familial bonds of identity cinch ever closer together.

And I am more comfortable in my mothering skin than many, I think, for reasons I cannot fathom. I don’t have a terrible lot of angst about it. We wanted to have babies, we had a bunch of babies. There you are. I didn’t feel that I was leaving anything behind to be wandering around in the kitchen trying to get children to eat. I didn’t have any other vision of myself and so there was no sorrow over anything lost when they came along at the rapid pace they did. In fact, now that it seems that God isn’t giving any more, I am looking into the darkness of each baby-less day with some real sorrow, trying to understand myself more than anything.

The fact is, the choice, for the west, is more and more against Mothering. Mothering is the decadent, self fulfilling way. Mothers who make the choice to mother have to gather what dignity they can, very often in isolation from one another, trying to carve out meaning and relationships on Facebook, or in book groups, or by homeschooling. The mother who just mothers and doesn’t also go to work will probably need to eventually homeschool to salve her conscience and beat back the judging inquiries of what she does all day. That is probably too dark a picture, but I am tripping over elements of that world view everywhere, even in the church.

An educated woman, if she has children and stays home with them, will be wasting her life if she doesn’t do something more. But what more? Work in an office somewhere? Go back to school? Expend her energies on people and activities that might be interesting for a while but don’t bring any richness, other than money, into her home? What are the jewels of the modern woman? There is no everlasting, enduring dignity in the workforce, except for the precious few who are so brilliant as to be remembered for maybe a generation, maybe two. Gosh, Margaret Sanger is sure remembered, being remembered isn’t always a good thing. Work is work is work. It’s needed to make the world go round and the food appear on the table. I’m not here to knock the working world.

It’s just a source of complete fascination to me that identity, yay even for women, has to be forged in the workplace for it to be valuable, even if that workplace is a total drudgery. You toil along in whatever industry, and certainly you can make a difference in people’s lives, but what of the richness, for a whole culture, of the properly reared and educated child, the baby who, over time, is taught to stand up, know who they are, and sacrifice themselves for the good of others.

Often when we talk about someone making a choice it’s because they’re facing two less than good options. It’s so telling that the choice to kill the child is the better choice, for everyone seemingly. The woman who goes ahead and has the baby is indulging herself and she must work to overcome that selfishness. Except then she is overwhelmed and doesn’t feel adequately equipped for the job, because there isn’t any cultural support, and so she just has to figure it out by herself.

I think we are long past a crisis of caregiving. We are at the tip of the iceberg of cultural suicide. I think the church should definitely say something about it, but what the church says has to be the gospel–that human identity is forged by God, that the human person is valuable, that the woman who chooses to spend herself on the least child is fashioning for herself a crown that never fades, never tarnishes, is never lost or broken or ruined, that she is participating in the life giving of the cross itself.