What Do You Do All Day?

I was about to launch into another portion of RHE’s introduction this morning, but became distracted by this basically good, and I think pertinent, article in Huffpo this morning. It all ties in, in my own mind anyway, so I don’t feel as if I am wandering away to another subject.

The article asks a series of pretty good questions about why it’s such a hard thing for women to leave the work place, especially when they are upwardly mobile, and stay home with their children, even when they want to and they know it’s the best thing both for them and their families. What does it say about us as a culture that this should be a hard choice?

She zeros in on the dreaded and uncomfortable question that women who stay home are asked by people who haven’t lived that life–and nobody has ever asked this of me so I’m taking her word for it–“what do you do?” You could probably add “all day” to the end of it and you would have that lovely moment that mothers everywhere experience across this great land, the Random Person Calling Your Very Existence into Question. If you have more than two kids, you’ll be told your hands are sure full. If you have a child with a disability, you’ll be asked why you can’t get them to behave. If you have a third baby of the same gender as the first two you’ll be asked if you’re trying for the other gender. If you quit work to have a baby you’ll hear a gentle ‘oh no!’ If you leave the baby with a care giver to go to work because you, you know, need money, you’ll hear ‘tsk tsk’. In this modern age of Facebook and just having occasionally go to the grocery store you can’t do anything without inviting comment, often of a questioning nature.

The author of this piece knows fancy exceptional women who had to give up something real to stay home. Most of the women I know were not making a difficult choice. The work was awful, oppressive, boring. As soon as they didn’t need the money they ran away to go home, to have some volition and independence over their own lives and the lives of their children.

So I basically agree with Ms. Slaughter’s answers to the question of why a cloud of judgment follows a woman when she leaves work to go care for other people. First, she says, it’s because we as a culture over value money and undervalue caregiving. And second, she says it’s due to our cultural value of personal independence. Leaving your own career path to enmesh yourself in a web of relationships goes against the prevailing winds of our time, where each person should attain his or her own highest good. Yes and yes to all her answers.

But also, not entirely. As I said before, the few women I know who have been able, financially, to leave the work force and go home have gained an incredible amount of independence from the drudgery and sameness of the office, retail store, factory. I don’t know anybody so rich they had to make an existential choice, it is always a financial one.

Not that there isn’t an identity problem for the ordinary woman. I’ve been reading about it for years. I’ve been feeling it myself. But it’s not that the cultural push of achievement in a career destroying the possibilities of women who want to stay home, it’s the fact that you have to be somebody at all. I think the cultural lie of feminism, entwining itself irrevocably around consumerism, did the good and perfect work of wrecking the confidence and psychological security of ordinary women everywhere, at every level.

At the end she asks,
“Why can’t we learn to evaluate the success of a life, or indeed even of a career, as a blend of money and meaning, of both climbing a ladder of accomplishment and building a web of relationships? Why can’t we embrace the reams of research that shows how creativity, in particular, springs from the ability to make unlikely connections across a wide range of diverse experience?”
And then she says,
“We can, of course. Just as we have learned that smoking is not cool, but a sign of weakness and selfishness toward others. Just as we have learned that homosexuality is not deviance, but part of nature’s endowment of many different species. Just as we have learned that difference is not dangerous or frightening, but valuable and productive. What we value is up to us.”

And I nodded my head in the usual way and said, “mmmhhmmm” as I always do because we are back where we started. We have chosen what we value, and that is the self. She is entirely right. And because we have chosen the self, a self made remedy cannot be had. When you have yourself at the center, you can have all the outward appearances of being a person who makes sacrifices, and who works for the good of society as a whole, but it can never become an internal way of being.

And this is why there is such a proliferation of insecurity in motherhood itself. Giving life to another person, out of your own body and soul, is essentially and fundamentally a selfless act. A new mother is suddenly swept away by the life of another, her child. And it’s practically euphoric, and necessarily very very hard, because her choices are of life and death importance. She must wake up to feed the child lest it die. She must bathe and clothe it before she bathes and clothes herself. She must watch over it to keep it safe. Her own personhood is catastrophically put on hold. And this is the best thing. Psychologically, existentially, having to be so bound up in the life of another that you experience a kind of death of yourself is the healthiest thing. It is a small tiny way of experiencing the ground of Christian truth, that Jesus died to give life to you.

But while she is having this revolutionary death of her being, her whole self is in revolt because from a child she has been told that she Is Somebody, that she matters, that it’s all about her. She must chose her own way, chart her own course, achieve her own destiny. Her education was about her, her marriage was about her, and so her child must be about her. And so, by degrees, she takes over and appropriates the ego of the child to herself, bringing everything back into alignment. Add in a cultural over valuation of money and she must also keep up to provide what is required so that she appears to be the right kind of mother. What the child eats and wears is of preeminent importance. The child itself becomes an identity marker just as the career was. If she isn’t in the work force, her identity must be formed somehow.

The problem is so much deeper than over valuing money and undervaluing a web of relationships. The problem is the wrong headed idolatry of the self. Certainly every culture has this to one degree or another, but in our time it is flourishing like a luxuriant vine. The very fact that a mother, a woman who has someone else’s life living and surviving on her own flesh, can make a “choice” about that life, is horrifically indicative of where we are. Backing away from that reality, the landscape is wondrously molded and shaped by insecurity, by depression, by not knowing what to do with one’s own life and the lives in one’s care. Mothers don’t just settle in with their babies, feeding them, caring for them, carrying on keeping body and soul together. They have to do that and then also they must Be Someone in their motherhood. It’s why even having a child is a decision that must be justified.

The only remedy is to put yourself into the hands of Jesus, whose identity and purpose can become your own, whose death and resurrection means that you don’t have to invent something novel for yourself, nor hold it all together, nor justify yourself, nor be brave and wonderful. His life for yours so that yours can be for another. It’s an old, well tried solution and if works every time it’s tried.