Jenn Monroe is another "Wheatie" (i.e. person who attended Wheaton College) who graduated before I did. We didn't know each other at Wheaton, but when we both attended the Regent College Family Group 2 years ago, we recognized each other. We were both spouses of Regent Students, and stay at home moms. I guess once a Wheatie, always a Wheatie because we realized we had a lot in common and became fast friends. Jenn now lives in New Mexico with her husband Kurt and three kids Ian, Anna, and Calum. You can enjoy her motherhood musings (and laugh out loud on a regular basis) on her blog: Jennifer's Super-Fantastic Old-Time Blog-O-Rama
How to be a Stay-At-Home-Mom Without Loosing Your Mind: Tell the Truth
Have you ever heard of the concept of
“flow”? It's a term invented by
psychologists to describe what happens to us when we're fully and completely
immersed in a task, so much so that the world around us almost disappears and
we are caught up in the sheer joy of doing a task for the the task's sake. Here's a bit more of what wikipedia has to
say about the concept: “In flow, the emotions are not just contained and
channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be
caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred
from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture,
while performing a task, although flow is also described as a deep focus on
nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.” I would venture to say that most of us have
felt this at some point or other, perhaps in the midst of an art project or
figuring out a tricky algorithm, while playing a musical instrument or out for
a long run. Suddenly you realize, or
perhaps you only realize in retrospect, that you have been experiencing flow,
an incredible, intimate sense that I was made for this. I have experienced flow many times in my
life: while teaching English, while writing, while leading worship, while
kneading bread, while working on a sewing project, even in the midst of an
intensely intellectually-challenging conversation, and in prayer.
I have almost never experienced flow while
doing my job as a mom.
More often, my job as a mom is
characterized by fits and starts, frustration, aggravation, and
disappointment. I flounder more than I
fly. Heck, it feels like I flounder
pretty much all of the time. And if
we're honest about it, that's the way most jobs go, right? Most people don't wake up every morning
thinking, “Gee I'm SO glad I get to go to work today. It's going to be so awesome!” Most people, if they're fortunate, have jobs
that they often can tolerate, occasionally enjoy, and in rare moments, they can
feel that ineffable sense of flow, of profound joy, of
alls-right-with-the-world-ness.
In my job as a high school English teacher,
I think it would be fair to say that a lot of the time I felt like I struggled,
some of the time I really liked it, and a few times it was just pure
glory. Even with those kinds of
percentages, though, I feel like I enjoy my job as a mom way less and the
moments of glory have been way fewer and father between.
I get really frustrated when I talk to moms
who have chosen to work outside of the home who say things to me like, “I don't
know how you do it. I just don't think I
have it in me to spend my whole day with young children;” or “I don't feel fulfilled
at home. My job is really such a part of who I am;” or “I'm just not the
stay-at-home type.” When I'm feeling
very charitable, I imagine that people say these things because they think that
I do love spending all day with young children or that I am fulfilled by “just
being a mom,” or that I am that “type.”
What I want to tell them is “Frankly, I don't think this is 'me'
either.” When I gave up my job as a
teacher and then as director of worship at a church, I did not do it with a
sense of relief, like I was finally going to get to focus on the thing I had
always wanted to do. For me, giving up
my jobs was a wrench, a real moment of self-emptying sacrifice. I loved those jobs. I loved knowing when I
was doing them well. I loved working with adults on projects that really felt
like they mattered. I loved getting
positive feedback and having someone occasionally say, “hey, you're doing a
good job.” I loved using my brain to
solve problems that felt like they had real weight. I loved it.
Now, please don't jump in here to reassure
me that, of course, the job I'm doing here at home has weight and significance,
that raising children is the only work that eternally matters and that being a
mom at home is as important as being a productive member of the workplace. I know all of those things are true. Really, I do.
When I finally made the decision to quit teaching completely, the women
I worked with did a really lovely thing and had a surprise party for me, celebrating
my decision. At the party, one of the
women talked about the fact that being a mom and raising kids is a lot like
being a medieval stone mason or wood carver, working on one tiny part of a
cathedral that would never be completed in his lifetime. Mothers spend endless amounts of time and
energy on a project that they never get to see come to fruition,
completely. That woman gave me a
beautiful book of European cathedrals that I treasure as a reminder of this
beautiful image. I get it, really I do. The fact still remains, there is a
significant difference between knowing a thing to be true and feeling like it
is true most of the time. Much of the
time my job feels about as significant and rewarding as the money I make
doing it. Not every difficult moment has
an “ah ha” that follows. Not every
frustration has a silver lining. Not
every terrible day has a latent sermon illustration about grace lurking around
the corner. There are some days when I
feel like the person I was before I became a mom is lost forever, and I don't
even know who I am now.
The problem is that in evangelical
Christian culture, there is not a lot of room for a mom to admit that she can actually dislike her job. Perhaps its
a push back against the feminist movement or perhaps it was always there all along,
but it seems like what John Eldridge, James Dobson and others of their ilk have
done to Christian women is make them feel as though staying at home with their
kids is the only Christian option, and not only that, but it must be done with
joy and thankfulness, all the time. Now,
I have to say, I do believe that there are some people out there who truly do
love most parts of motherhood, who are so eager to begin that they can hardly
wait until they have children and who then feel as though they are living
impossibly blessed lives from the moment of their fist child's perfectly
natural at-home birth onward. Or at
least, that's what their facebook updates and blog posts would lead you to
believe. But I have come to terms with
the belief that this state of mind says more about these women's particular
personalities, rather than about the state of their faith or the level of their
Christian commitment.
Ironically enough, one of the greatest
pieces of encouragements I have recently gotten about being a stay-at-home mom
came from a documentary I watched on PBS about the “independent women” in
modern television shows. The show
highlighted the changing role of women on TV, from the June Cleaver days right
through Mary Tyler Moore and up to Nurse Jackie and Sex and the City. One of the shows on which it focused was Desperate
Housewives, a show which, in some ways, parodied the role of the perfect
happy homemaker, and in other ways made some pointed observations about the
conflict between our culture's embrace of the feminist movement (which freed women
to do anything that they darn well pleased with their lives) and our reluctance
to give up on the idealization of motherhood.
One of the creators of the show
described his shock when, at a high school reunion, one of his former
classmates responded to the question, “So, do you just love being a
mom?” with a flat but honest “No.” Marc
Cherry described his surprise, saying, “I didn't know women could say that out
loud.” He then describes a moment in the
show when one of the characters has a breakdown, completely overwhelmed by the
pressures of being a mother, and is comforted by some of the other women who
admit to feeling the same way. “But why
don't we talk about this?” she asks, the fear and shame of admitting it shaking
her to her core.
Why indeed.
There is a lot to be afraid of in admitting
that your life as a mom is not quite everything you would like it to be. Not only could you be incurring the scorn of
secular culture who thinks that any woman who chooses to stay home when she
could be in the workplace is either less intelligent and capable than her
professional counterparts or somehow laboring under the tyranny of an
old-fashioned, male-dominated archetype
(nothing, in my case, could be further from the truth). On the other hand, admitting our real
frustrations is to invite criticism from a Christian culture which would
question our womanliness and commitment to faith and family in the first place
(again, not the truth). We are stuck
between a rock and a hard place. Marc
Cherry acknowledged that when he started shopping his idea for Desperate
Housewives around, he met with significant resistance from female network
executives who were convinced that no women would ever want to watch the
show. He described their attitude as
latent prejudice against the idea of a woman choosing to stay at home and raise
her children, in spite of all of the reasons not to. He then made the following statement, which I
found somewhat astonishing: “I find any
woman who wants to be a wife and mother and devote her life to creating a home,
I find there's something quietly and beautifully heroic about that.”
That line, “quietly and beautifully heroic”
has stuck with me, and I've been seeing more and more of you quietly and
beautifully heroic women popping up all over the place. You refuse to write what one writer has
described as “evergreen mommy blogs” but rather on your blogs and in your
real-life conversations you wrestle and reveal and repent in very public ways. You are woman enough to acknowledge that you
are not a victim, that your husband or society or any other male-dominated
hegemony did not force you into this, but that you chose this life, in spite
of the fact that there are many other ways of going about it. You don't regret your decisions, not one
iota, but you also are frank about the fact that not regretting it doesn't mean
that it hasn't come at a very high cost.
You are not masochists and you
are not crazy (though at times you might have your doubts), but you know that
to preserve what sanity you have you must simply be honest about your
experience doing the job that, for this moment, you have been called to
do. You celebrate the good things (and
of course, there are so, so many good things) without allowing yourselves to
fall into the trap of pretending that there are only good things. You are not self-absorbed whiners, not really
anyway, but you refuse to try to live up to someone else's idea of how you
should feel. You are triumphant, heroic
truth-tellers, risking criticism and pigeon-holing and contempt.
And now I'm proud to be one of you.
