When I read Elizabeth Kulze’s recent Fairer Disputations essay, “The Motherhood Advantage: On Attention, Ambition, and the Search for the Self,” my first thought was, I agree, but I wish she didn’t stop there!
Kulze’s depiction of motherhood as a wilderness in which the woman can find herself by focusing on relationship over ascendancy and embodied living over self-focused ambition is powerful. And yet, I believe it is not just stay-at-home motherhood that makes this possible. In fact, as someone whose workload has ranged from very part-time and freelance to full-time throughout my six years as a mother, I’d argue that the unique strictures placed upon the time, energy, and attention of the mother who works outside the home can also serve to form the imagination and clarify one’s sense of self.
The Quality of Attention and the “Stream Narrowly-Hemmed-In”
My first lesson in this aspect of flourishing as a working mother came from the French Dominican priest A. G. Sertillanges. In his well-known 1921 book The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, Sertillanges says that to live an intellectually rich life is to “sow a good and fruitful seed.” Doing so requires an intense commitment, and Sertillanges urges readers to devote at least a few hours a day to careful reading and study. Thankfully, for those of us—frankly, most of us—who lack this kind of time, Sertillanges has welcome words: absolute liberty in time and mental energy is far from necessary to sow good and fruitful seed. In fact, he goes so far as to say that “liberty presents pitfalls that rigorous obligations may help to avoid” and that “[a] stream narrowly hemmed-in by its banks will flow more impetuously.”
The constraints on the working mother’s time force a sense of focus reminiscent of Sertillanges’s narrowly hemmed-in stream. Mothers who pursue economically productive work outside the home, by choice or by necessity, are not spared the relentless demands of caregiving. Caregiving is not being deprioritized in favor of a career. Rather, a well-ordered career is yet another way that women can prioritize their families through financial provision. It does, undeniably, add an additional burden to the roster of responsibilities that can overwhelm a mother. This overwhelm can certainly divide the attention, burden the consciousness, fragment the mind, and when unchecked, negatively affect the household. But, if we let it, it can also work in our favor. Adding an additional, massive obligation on top of the daily work of caregiving can force our energy and efforts into a good, healthy shape. It can push out extraneous activities or idle concerns; it can force us to question whether the activities with which we fill our days are ordered toward everyone’s flourishing, or if they must be let go in favor of more margin for mom and more free play time for kids. It can admonish us to guard our time and our energy—two unrenewable resources—to ensure we are giving our families as much as possible.
The working mother faces a perennial reckoning: am I spending my time as I should be? Am I putting my energy into the right places? For those who take the time to ask these questions consistently, answer them thoughtfully, and adjust their actions accordingly, the resulting labor, in the home and outside of it, can start to look like Sertillanges’s impetuously flowing stream: strong, steady, focused, refreshing, and life-giving.
A part of this reality for the working mother is the need for regular, and often intense, discernment. Professional ascendancy is not the working woman’s only aim, and not in every season. At various points, many mothers who have careers choose to—need to—maintain rather than grow. A young professional seeking to pay off college loans may need to grow and ascend to meet financial needs, while a mother in the thick of having babies may need to maintain the status quo, to turn down opportunities for promotion, for the sake of the family (and perhaps for her own sanity). Both paths require discernment, and in each season, spouses must ask one another: is this a time for upward growth, or a time for steady maintenance? Is this a time to add more, or to pull back? This process can be strenuous, and for many, it is deeply humbling. Choosing a period of what may appear from the outside to be mediocrity in work, for instance, can be intensely grounding and recalibrating for a woman who is capable of more and who would, eventually, like to do more.
Think, for example, of female physicians. Their early years are grueling, and significant student debt from medical school can tether women to the hospital who would prefer more hours at home. Nonetheless, in many cases, the rewards they reap for their labors can be tremendous. Some of these women had children while being forged in the fires of residency or fellowships and have now obtained flexible, part-time, well-paid work that allows them to enjoy their school-aged children. Practical matters aside, there is a great deal of personal formation that comes from the intensity of an early career, particularly when paired with childbearing. I can only imagine how a female physician who suddenly finds herself with a bit of spare time after years of exhaustion would savor slow mornings at home with her little ones.
I’ve never done anything as demanding as a medical residency. Nonetheless, from my perspective, since moving from part-time freelance to full-time work a few years ago, and then having a third child, I feel more focused, more grounded, more capable of living communally rather than transactionally, embodied over self-focused. I think this is not in spite of, but because of, the strictures my outside work imposes on my life. I have less time to stumble after insignificant and diffuse interests. My natural tendency toward self-loathing perfectionism has met a natural limit. I simply have “too much to do” all the time, and because of that, I simply cannot anguish over the types of things that once would have pained me. To corral my vices, I needed more to do; I needed more people’s needs to think of, all the time.
Integrating Identities
A point I wish Kulze had clarified is the issue of ambition and whether any mother who works must necessarily be singularly focused on personal advancement, at the cost of personal relationships and communal life.
To me, the answer is clearly no. My professional ambition is naturally curtailed by taking on the strictures of work on top of having many young children. Doing both together means that on a given day, the best I can often do is to complete the work at hand. More often than not, to be “ambitious” means to strive to do good work within the confines time and obligation give me. At work, I may want to take on a new project (which my wonderful employers always allow!) but the other necessary, daily tasks required of my position take precedence at the moment. At home, there may be plans to take a family trip, but a child has a specific need or someone gets sick, and those lofty personal desires get swept aside.
Not to mention, there is a great deal of overlap between managing tasks in a paid job and managing a home, and though dipping into the same wells can feel enervating, it can also be a boon. Enduring trials at work can translate to running a smooth home. My prior work as a litigation attorney reminded me, more often that I liked, that adults can be just as difficult as children. If I could handle a pushy client, I could potty train a recalcitrant three-year-old. (At least the three-year-old was cute.) Conversely, pouring talents and time and energy into a wild brood of children’s daily activities can teach us skills and virtues that are just as applicable to our professional work.
For me, being a working mother does mean transferring my sense of identity from one realm to another. It means my sense of self lies in doing the good and quotidian work across the board, in both realms, then calling it a night and allowing myself to rest in the knowledge that I did what I could.
In her delightful little book, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work,” essayist Kathleen Norris writes about how daily tasks all ground us in the world. She begins by writing about her sister, a single mother who supports her children alone. After describing the fullness and chaos of a typical day in her sister’s home, she praises her “grace and wit and humor” and says, “the key to her life is not to be found in her job, the money…It is instead the priestly charism of transformation.” She goes on to explain that as her sister has grown and matured, she has begun to seek “refreshment in unlikely places” and in doing so “she can offer nourishment to her children.” Norris illustrates some of the practical ways this plays out, for instance, how her sister uses the daily commute to her children’s school as a time of connection with them. But what struck me most about this example is how her sister found her way through her own wilderness to support a family, make a home, and raise flourishing children. She worked with the materials that she had at hand and accepted the unique pressures her single motherhood placed upon her.
We all know the concept that applying extreme heat to matter seems to transform it into something else entirely. A lump of carbon that starts out as graphite, under intense heat and pressure, can achieve a new crystalline structure and become a diamond. There is something unique about a woman’s ability to endure the “extreme heat” of long suffering. Mothers, in particular, learn to bear the pressure of many different needs—other people’s needs, no matter whose they are. If they do so with a mind toward helping every person under their roof flourish, this can be truly beautiful.
Like lightning striking sand and making glass, or the earth’s interior burning carbon into diamond, by laboring in the service of others, we become more brilliantly, radiantly ourselves.
