and Wife<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\nI was horrified on her behalf at the waste her life had been to be remembered only in light of her relationship to her husband and nothing else. She was worth infinitely more than this, whomever she had been.<\/p>\n
My visceral reaction was rooted deeply within my own superiority. The girls of my generation were raised for better. <\/i>We were taught to aspire to greatness as captains of industry, agents of change, breakers of stereotypes and taboos. Our mothers saw in us the promise of an imagined future, and raised us to be unfulfilled by the normal of centuries past.<\/p>\n
And so we are.<\/p>\n
The girls with whom I grew up saw marriage as a stepping stone to adulthood. It was one of the things we checked off as we left childhood behind \u2013 high school graduation, college, a Bachelor\u2019s Degree at least, a job, and then a career. We\u2019d buy cars and houses, and at some point along the way, we\u2019d get married and maybe even divorced. Our view of marriage was a blend of Little Mermaid naivete mixed with modernist cynicism. More than one of my schoolmates was told at her wedding that if she had made the wrong choice of spouse, divorce was always an option. There was no reason to spend the rest of our lives with a mistake when we could learn from it and move on. As one of my mother\u2019s friends quipped \u201cYou grow up, fall in love, get married, get divorced, and live happily ever after.\u201d<\/p>\n
The message was loud and clear to us, marriage was a necessary evil that women took on. A husband was the burden of our adulthood, the infant child who never grew up, and the sacrifice we made for motherhood.<\/p>\n
All of this baggage sat squarely on my shoulders as I stared in disgust at that stained glass window and wondered how Mrs. Eilers had ever lowered herself to accept such a place as nothing more than some man\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until later that I thought about my beloved grandmother who was nothing more than a wife for nearly a decade before they adopted children. She had stayed home and kept house for him in a time when such a thing was acceptable. I realized that I\u2019ve never met anyone my age who lived that life. I could hear the ugliness of what my own reaction would be to a stay at home wife in today\u2019s world. The very idea of staying at home if one didn\u2019t even have children<\/em> brought me up short with the realization of my own arrogance.<\/p>\nHow different would my life be, I mused, if I saw dignity in being just a wife<\/em>? What if instead of just being vocally in favor of marriage, I behaved as if I really saw it as a vocation? How would my own marriage, and my children\u2019s view of the Sacrament, be helped if I saw it as the life fulfilling choice that it was meant to be instead of a rest stop on the way to somewhere else? What if I saw the word Wife as a title to aspire to? How would my attitude towards my own husband change? If I died today, could they make\u00a0 \u201cand Wife\u201d\u00a0 my epitaph? I don\u2019t know, you\u2019d have to ask my husband about that. As for me, I\u2019m not sure that I\u2019ve earned that right.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren\u2019t the screaming angry abortion-on-demand kind of feminists that we all know and love. They were housewives who wanted more from life than traditional roles they had been raised to expect to lead. My own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren't the screaming angry abortion-on-demand\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren't the screaming angry abortion-on-demand\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Shoved to Them\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-09-04T01:40:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/-xY8OWNha8g8\/U-EETV2_wgI\/AAAAAAAACpg\/9H4yZgTVCVY\/s640\/blogger-image-603213346.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Rebecca Frech\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Rebecca Frech\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html\",\"name\":\"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-09-04T01:40:53+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-09-04T01:40:53+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#\/schema\/person\/a480038559bb99863ca3ba86f368775d\"},\"description\":\"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren't the screaming angry abortion-on-demand\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/\",\"name\":\"Shoved to Them\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#\/schema\/person\/a480038559bb99863ca3ba86f368775d\",\"name\":\"Rebecca Frech\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53a07a84a2f9a9ba08b14e744e53ae70?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53a07a84a2f9a9ba08b14e744e53ae70?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Rebecca Frech\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/author\/rfrech\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me","description":"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren't the screaming angry abortion-on-demand","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me","og_description":"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren't the screaming angry abortion-on-demand","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html","og_site_name":"Shoved to Them","article_published_time":"2014-09-04T01:40:53+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/-xY8OWNha8g8\/U-EETV2_wgI\/AAAAAAAACpg\/9H4yZgTVCVY\/s640\/blogger-image-603213346.jpg"}],"author":"Rebecca Frech","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Rebecca Frech","Est. reading time":"4 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html","name":"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#website"},"datePublished":"2014-09-04T01:40:53+00:00","dateModified":"2014-09-04T01:40:53+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#\/schema\/person\/a480038559bb99863ca3ba86f368775d"},"description":"I blame my issues with the institution of marriage on being raised by a feminist. My mother and her friends weren't the screaming angry abortion-on-demand","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/09\/my-feminist-mom-marriage-and-me.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"My Feminist Mom, Marriage, and Me"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/","name":"Shoved to Them","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#\/schema\/person\/a480038559bb99863ca3ba86f368775d","name":"Rebecca Frech","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53a07a84a2f9a9ba08b14e744e53ae70?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53a07a84a2f9a9ba08b14e744e53ae70?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Rebecca Frech"},"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/author\/rfrech"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1979"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/-xY8OWNha8g8\/U-EETV2_wgI\/AAAAAAAACpg\/9H4yZgTVCVY\/s640\/blogger-image-603213346.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n