When I made the decision to turn down a promotion and leave my job to stay at home with my first-born, no one was more surprised than me. I’d spent most of my adult life judging women who set their professional ambitions aside to care for their children. How regressive, I would think. So when I made the decision myself, entirely in response to a powerful feeling in my gut, I was terrified. I feared the loss of my financial independence, my place on the institutional ladder, and my professional identity, all of which served as welcome sources of external validation.
We often hear about what mothers lose when they prioritize caregiving over career building. But these narratives only tell us half of the story. They don’t tell us what we stand to gain.
The individualism of the modern era has led to a flight from traditional forms of sacrifice, what we might call “relational sacrifice,” which is implicit in monogamy, marriage, and parenthood. In these contexts, the boundaries of the constructed self are routinely undermined by the reality of others and their needs. As these forms of sacrifice have fallen out of favor, however, another form has replaced it: sacrifice for the sake of one’s career. Unlike relational sacrifice, this form of sacrifice tends to shore up the particularly modern, individualist identity we’ve constructed for ourselves. Consider how we describe people who “succeed” by sacrificing time with family and friends, their physical and mental health, and other aspects of their humanity on the altar of their careers. They’re “ambitious,” “hard-working,” and “determined.”
The conflation of selfhood with professional identity and self-worth with productivity and ambition is, of course, why stay-at-home motherhood is regarded as such a lowly vocation. At home, there’s no remuneration for services rendered or ladder to climb, nor is there much external validation. There’s just your children and your home’s ongoing needs, which are never complete. A mother’s labor can appear to amount to nothing, at least when seen through the abstract, quantitative lens of the eight-hour workday. Thus, it can be difficult for it to register as a kind of productivity.
To be a stay-at-home mother is, therefore, to step outside of the productivity paradigm entirely, “to [fall] off the edge of the working world,” in the words of Mary Harrington. It’s to step into the margins, to render oneself invisible, and thus to confront a vacuum where your former sense of self and self-worth used to be.
And that’s exactly why it’s such a profound opportunity.
A Sense of Self
When I left my job, I quickly realized how deeply my sense of self was tied to my professional identity, and how much my sense of self-worth and daily well-being were dependent on the rather abstract notion of “productivity.” I realized that I’d been conditioned to view myself as valuable only insofar as I served an institution, whether literal or figurative, and through it, my ambitions. I realized that the form of “happiness” I was most familiar with was entirely contingent upon how much I’d “accomplished” in a given day.
This same conditioning had taken hold of most of my contemporaries, many of whom were holding off on having children so as to prioritize their careers. Having a solid professional identity was reflexively understood as synonymous with self-actualization, and the few friends who never “found themselves” in a particular career were often tormented by the pernicious belief that they had “failed to amount to anything.”
This is a profoundly narrow and spiritually denuded understanding of selfhood, which is predicated on a fundamental insecurity: namely, the belief that “the self” only exists insofar as it’s consciously constructed. The psychoanalysts D.W. Winnicott and Alice Miller provide a helpful framework here: the dichotomy between “the true self” and “the false self.” For Winnicott and Miller, the “false self” emerges in early childhood in an attempt to win the love and approval of our caregivers. It’s the self that pleases, that toes the line. It emerges out of the fear that the “true self,” the self composed of our inner, authentic feelings and desires, isn’t lovable. Over time, we become so practiced at being the false self that we begin to identify with it. As a result, the true self becomes increasingly distant.
This need to be loved and approved of is not something we simply outgrow. In adulthood, it simply seeks a different outlet: what historian and social critic Morris Berman calls “the ideology of achievement.” In his classic 1989 text, Coming to Our Senses, Berman writes: “In capitalist nations, the search for love often takes the form of the drive for success, which we think will get others to love us.” Only this never works. For while the drive for success can provide us with fleeting forms of validation and create profit for our employers, it often does so at our own expense, for the love and sense of meaning we seek is never where we are. It’s always out ahead of us, luring us toward the next professional achievement, the next big break. As a consequence, we tend to neglect or look past the actual sources of meaning in our lives, which are exactly where we are.
As a new mother, I spent my days tending to my beautiful baby, whom I loved more than anything. Yet I felt unable to experience this tending as meaningful, even as I grasped its meaning intellectually. In the face of this dissonance, I became determined to heal from the manipulations of this false self. I wanted to learn how to find meaning in being, instead of doing. My mission, therefore, became to incarnate myself: to begin living more deeply in my life and my being as they were, instead of channeling all of my energy into my desire for ascension.
As it turns out, stay-at-home motherhood—in its utter simplicity, seeming mundanity, and lack of socially conferred dignity—was the ideal opportunity to practice this new, receptive approach to meaning-making, in which meaning is received rather than aspired to. Of course, I didn’t master this practice overnight. Like an addict, I had to slowly wean myself off my dependencies, to reorient my entire inner ontology. I struggled, particularly when confronted with the reality of what others were achieving while I was at home.
Still, over time, I was able to build a life so rich with the beauty of the ordinary that I found that I didn’t need anything else. I also found that I had much more to give.
Cultivating Attention
Central to this process was learning to deepen the quality of my attention, which Simone Weil described as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It was through the offering of my attention—whether to my child, the grease-laden saucepan, the chickadee at the bird feeder, or the mess on the floor—that the meaning (and even beauty) of such things was inevitably revealed to me. With each passing day, the more abundant with meaning my little world began to feel, and the more gratitude I felt in response. I was grateful for life, yes, but also for myself: not as one who achieves, acquires, and asserts her will, but as one blessed with the opportunity to be.
I also discovered that the quality of my attention had the power to transform what I would have previously described as “drudgery” into genuinely meaningful work. To labor with one’s hands, instead of only one’s head, to touch and tend and attend, is, in the words of Wendell Berry, “the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living: it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or props but is one of the forms and acts of love.” This is not to romanticize homemaking and caregiving, both of which can be grueling and monotonous. Yet the sense that they are meaningless and that the work we do in the name of our own ambitions is somehow more meaningful, is merely a reflection of the quality of our attention. It’s attention that shapes the worlds in which each of us lives, whether at home or outside of it. It’s attention that determines whether those worlds are rich in tangible meaning or devoid of it.
Attention, in other words, and not ambition, is the means through which our lives acquire meaning, structure, and purpose. As the psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher Ian McGilchrist wrote in The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and Unmaking of the World,
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up”—and brought into being.
The valorization of ambition for ambition’s sake forces us into an ascent structure that diverts the generosity of our attention away from what is, because what is can never be enough. It erodes our responsivity to the world around us, thereby depriving us of the opportunity to access and experience the immediacy of its meaning and beauty, and through this, a sense of selfhood predicated not on an insecurity (the need to construct or become) but on an inherent capacity (the freedom to attend). As McGilchrist explains,
What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it—if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
To lack such responsiveness is therefore to live in a deeply impoverished world. It’s to go hungry, even while surrounded by nourishment. And it’s this sense of impoverishment—and not our innate talent or authentic desire—that drives much of our ambition, thereby imprisoning us in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the false self.
This is also the source of greed and materialism. The need for more is merely a symptom of one’s inability to properly metabolize and experience the meaning and value of what one already has. Ultimately, this failure of attention leads to an insecure sense of self, one that must be painstakingly pursued and constructed, and can therefore be deconstructed by an experience like motherhood, which often compromises or eliminates the modes of action that shored up the boundaries of the false self.
Furthermore, to seek one’s sense of self and self-worth in the external world, to live from the outside in, is to channel one’s God-given talents and proclivities into life paths that we believe will meet our desire for security and validation, thereby reducing our ambition to an expression of desperation rather than the response it’s meant to be. By contrast, when our sense of selfhood and self-worth is rooted instead in the abundance of meaning we reap as a consequence of attentively being, we will seek to do things in the world, not out of inner need, but out of inner abundance. For when we have much to give, our ambition to act is just a natural function of the responsibility we feel to give of ourselves.
Importantly, this sort of ambition acts quite differently in and upon the world. It’s deeply value-driven and more fearless, as it’s not about advancing yourself so much as advancing a particular vision. This is an ambition that is not driven by the question, “What do I want?” but instead, “What do I have to give?” or “What do I want to see in the world?”
In order to reach this place, we must relinquish our dependency on the external world for our identity. This is the gift bestowed by stay-at-home motherhood. It was when I could no longer seek external affirmation by pursuing my need-driven ambitions that my true self was finally revealed to me.
Into the Wilderness
Since I left my job four and a half years ago, I haven’t lost my sense of self. I have recovered it. I haven’t lost my desires and ambitions either. I have clarified them. I understand that I, like all of us, am here to serve other human beings, beginning with my own children but certainly not ending there. I understand that it’s through service that I’m able to fulfill my own deepest desires, by tapping into forms of joy and meaning that are not transactional rewards for a job well done, but immediate experiences.
I’ve come to view stay-at-home motherhood as a kind of wilderness, a desert, or some other marginal place. Like the seekers and prophets of times past, mothers venture into the wilderness in order to experience what is real and true again. As Wendell Berry has observed, experiences like these have consequences far beyond the individual seeker.
The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents—they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision… He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before.
It is this cleansed vision—one that recognizes the value and necessity of privileging relationships and communal interests over individualist ambitions—that our world is so desperately hungering for. It has the power to transform not only religious structures, but social structures writ large.
The people who do not need the approval of the world are precisely the kind of people the world needs. We need people who are willing to go it alone, who, like the prophets, will venture outside the city walls and into the marginal spaces. There, what is real and true can be felt again.
For me, stay-at-home motherhood has been just such a wilderness.
