This is impossible.
friday dispatch: on working and mothering
Good morning! I will be live today with Katie Marquette for a discussion of last year’s film about the Shakers, The Testament of Ann Lee, at 11:00 a.m. CT/12:00 p.m. ET. Here’s the link to join!
As I write this, I am currently in the throes of a week of working from home with all my children in the house. This is not the usual arrangement, as anyone entering my home today would immediately discern. It’s a mess of cushion forts, “washable” marker scrawled on what seems like every available surface, variously displaced furniture, and my personal favorite: a hundred thousand shoes. Trigger warning: I’m about to show you a picture of my laundry room, which is currently giving me waking nightmares.
This is not to mention that our air conditioner is currently out of commission during the worst heatwave of the summer so far. Throw in my youngsters’ constant fighting and door-slamming and the result is that my week of “work” basically consisted of me apologizing profusely over Zoom while rushing out of the frame to stop my toddler from smearing salami on the kitchen window.
Weeks like this often send me spiraling into a full-blown crisis over my life choices. Not my children, of course. But attempting, even for a few days, to work and parent full-time simultaneously, is impossible. Actually, no—working your typical 9-5 office job and parenting simultaneously, that’s what’s impossible. I think of something Louise Perry said on Ross Douthat’s podcast this week, that historically women’s work was designed to be combined with childcare, and herein lies the rub for the modern woman. The kinds of jobs we gained access to when we entered the workforce are often decidedly not compatible with full-time childcare.
I feel tremendously blessed to have a job that allows me to schlep my kids along in a pinch—truly, I do not take that for granted, ever—but having permission to bring kids around from time to time (as long as they aren’t too disruptive or needy!) is not the same thing as meaningful integration between work and motherhood. So when I’m forced to try to mash these two parts of my life together as I have this week, and confront head-on the mis-match between my “work life” and my “family life,” I can start to wonder if I’ve made a mistake by choosing to be a full-time working mom, and that my attempt to have a job at all is to blame for the growing mountain of dishes in my sink, my increasing irritability, and that relentless, nagging feeling that I’m just getting it all wrong.
I often have to resist the idea that being a working mom is somehow less-than. Somehow more selfish, more short-sighted, than the choice to be a stay-at-home-mom. Because I move in Christian circles where a lot of really lovely, beautiful, holy women have made the choice to stay home, I have been taken in at times by the idea that homemaking is the paradigm for this (made-up) thing called “Christian womanhood.” That if I was serious about motherhood, I would choose it, too.
It’s not easy to untangle, is it? I have three children. At the moment, we happen to need two incomes, but I also enjoy working. Even if my husband was a brain surgeon, I imagine I would still work—it just feels fitted to me and the way I’m put together. At the same time, the consequences of living in a dual-income household are no joke: early mornings, harried schedules, extra long commutes (and the absolutely devastating effects of that commute on my Spotify Wrapped, which is now 80% Disney songs and the Charlotte’s Web soundtrack), fewer hours to cook, clean, grocery shop, and otherwise maintain a functioning household, and so on. Then there’s daycare, which on its own eats up about 80% of my take-home pay every week. Some days, it feels so pointlessly difficult.
So as much as I sometimes look at my SAHM sisters and think, oh my Lord, that looks impossible, the truth is, I’m also just living my own version of the impossible task that simply is modern motherhood. We’re all doing what we think is best given our capacities and constraints.
Speaking of constraints, I need to wrap this up sooner than I hoped—there’s a toddler pulling on my leg and a 5-year-old asking for me to listen to an audiobook with him. I have more to say about this—lots more—and I think those of us Catholic moms who also work deserve a lot of credit, and the recognition that the dual-income lifestyle is neither a moral failure nor a tragedy of circumstance but is in fact a legitimate path for faithful Catholic life.
Pope St. John Paul II agrees with me, by the way:
Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life-social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of “mystery”, to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.
Reading this reminds me of going through the same, in a pre-zoom era when I brought kids to the office or to meetings, and they'd smear salami on windows that aren't ours. Ah, my beloved twerps. It was an exhausting time. And you're right about the shoes! I've got no words of wisdom, just empathy and encouragement. You've got this.
Thank you so much for writing this and putting words to some of what I have been feeling/experiencing for so long, especially in Christian mom circles, much of which hasn't been echoed by much of anyone else. It means so much to feel like I'm not alone.