Listen to Your Motherhood

Maternity as revelation - and revolution

If you’re active on the Substack platform, you might have already noticed that I’ve been working on a little rebrand over the past week or two. If you’re an email-only sort of reader, then let this serve as an announcement of sorts. Welcome to “Listen to Your Motherhood.” And if you’re new here, I hope this post will convince you to hit that subscribe button.

Let me give you a bit of backstory—the reason behind this reconconception. About a year ago now, I connected with an amazing editor at a major publishing house, who encouraged me to put together a book proposal. He introduced me to my wonderful agent, Keely Boeving (seriously—I so highly recommend her, fellow writers!), who has been helping me hone and refine my concept. We’re working on putting a few final details in place, and then will start formally submitting the proposal to publishers and hoping for a bite.

The central concept is one that I’ve been circling around for a long time: the idea that becoming a mother is a “thin place”: a place where the transcendent nature of reality shines through our immanent frame, revealing things our secular mindset simply cannot compute. In brief, I think that motherhood teaches us what it means to be human. Among other realities, it forces us to confront our radical interdependence, our nature as embodied creatures, and the significance of sexual difference.

Alongside this highly personal, inward-facing focus on maternal revelation, I want to explore a set of political and social questions—questions about how we live out the truths we discover, and how we can build communities based upon them. If human beings have a certain nature, as I believe they do, then if we want to be truly happy, we need to figure out how to live in accordance with that nature. If we want a thriving society, we need to build it in ways that make it easier to live fully human lives.

In many ways, second-wave feminism did help women to do this: it allowed us more freedom to develop our rational nature and pursue excellence, which is important for us, just as it is for men. But, as so many other excellent writers (many of whom are featured authors at Fairer Disputations) have explained, it also made a false idol of radical autonomy, leading not only to the rejection of motherhood through the violence of abortion, but also to the more subtle rejection of the goodness of the female body and its life-giving capacity.

On a societal level, too, there have been serious unintended consequences. Although it was not the only cause of our contemporary fragmentation, the entrance of mothers into the workforce en masse has contributed to the erosion of the social bonds that once held us together. As Yuval Levin has documented in The Fractured Republic, the mid-twentieth century was a time of unprecedented social consolidation and coherence. This was not without its dark side, and clearly it was not a sustainable cultural moment. But I think an underappreciated part of the story of the post-war period is the incredibly significant political role of housewives.

Freed from many of the more physically demanding tasks of running a home by new technologies like laundry machines, yet also alienated from the creative and financially sustaining work that they had performed before the industrial revolution took work out of the home and into the factory, these women had a lot of time on their hands. Contemporary ideals about hands-on intensive mothering hadn’t achieved prominence yet, but birthrates were already dropping. Instead of channeling their intelligence and energy into over-the-top cultivation of little Johnny’s gifts and talents, as many educated stay-at-home-moms are pressured into doing today, many of them used that time to create and sustain a stunning array of civic institutions.

In the decades that followed, with the advent of non-discrimination law and changing social mores, moms shifted their focus from these formal volunteer roles and the informal work of hospitality and community building to participation in the paid labor force. At the same time, even as birth rates dropped farther and farther, moms started spending more and more time actively caring for their children, while still doing the lion’s share of home maintenance tasks. This is a newer term, but I think it’s accurate to say that moms’ “mental load” has generally gotten heavier and heavier over the last fifty years, with an ever-expanding set of physical and psychological needs to monitor and attend to.

Not only does Mom have to feed everyone, she also has to create a color-coded spreadsheet in December and calendar reminders for the dates in January when she has to remember to stay up until midnight to secure a spot in the twelve summer camps that her meticulous research has indicated will provide the most enriching experience and best before-and-after-care hours to make up for the loss of childcare provided by school and after-school activities during the academic year. Oh, and she has to remember to make Emma’s therapy appointment, too, and fold the laundry and finish that work report and—seriously??—call the pediatrician and wait on hold for an hour and take another unpaid sick day because it looks like we’ve got another ear infection on our hands. Time to figure out what the login for insurance company website is, then look up what ENTs are in network, then call twelve of them to find one that’s taking new patients, then…

When so many moms operating at this level, it’s no wonder we get books with titles like Screaming on the Inside: the Unstainability of American Motherhood.

The difficulties American moms face are certainly compounded by the lack of family-friendly policies. Yet it’s also clear that no amount of government spending is going to solve this problem. When you’re working a full-time job (and constantly on-call via your smartphone when you’re at home or at the park, too) and juggling kids with no family support (since you moved far away from your hometown in pursuit of career opportunities), you don’t have time to get to know your neighbors, who are the ones who could watch the monitor for you so you don’t have to wake up the toddler with the ear infection to go pick up Emma from soccer super quick, which is what you really need. Unless you are highly organized and highly extroverted, you probably don’t have time to get together with friends regularly or to create social networks of support with people who are in different stages of life—say, a retiree who wouldn’t mind snuggling your baby for a couple of hours so you can take a nap. And, if you don’t go to church, where are you supposed to meet anyone other than your coworkers or your equally stressed out parents, anyway?

Something has got to change.

Please don’t me wrong: I’m not advocating a return to the 1950s. Not only is that impossible, it’s undesirable for a whole host of reasons. Nor am I advocating for the defeatist Gen Z trend of “quiet quitting” and opting out of having children, for reasons ranging from the tragically self-centered (“being dinks is so much more fun!”) to the just as tragically misguided (“I can’t in good conscience add more human beings to this dying planet”).

I do think there’s a solution, and I think a lot of couples are already stumbling upon it. There are ways to structure your lives—your work obligations, your caregiving arrangements, your physical surroundings, your investment in your community—in ways that make family life more sustainable, joyful, and lifegiving. And I think when we make those choices, the positive effects ripple outward.

I’ll stop here, for now, but if these are questions you’re interested in, well… I’m glad you’re here. And if you want to help me get a book deal to explore the solution to this modern dilemma, the best thing you can do is to share this post with a friend and encourage them to subscribe.

“Family Tree” by Amy Hiley Art.

Just couple more brief notes, and then I’ll let you go.

First, the book launch event for The Mother Artist was so lovely. I brought my 8-year-old daughter, and it was so special to share the experience with her. I’m very un-insta-savvy, but you can peep my little reader checking out the book nook in this post by my friend Jess Sweeney of Wellspring. I hadn’t realized that the book includes not just well-known modern mother artists and writers (like Madeleine L’Engle!) but also contemporary ones, many of whom are local. Several of them had art displayed in the special Mother Artist exhibit at the gallery, and quite a few of them were actually at the event! Philly has such a great arts scene, which I’m juuuust start to discover, and I love that this event made it possible for kids and mothers to tap into it.

The image above is of a print that I bought at the event (thanks to my friend Holly, amazing mother artist herself, who encouraged me to splurge ;)). I’m a total sucker for art that reflects the trinitarian nature of reality through representation of a man, woman, and child.

Last thing: Fairer Disputations is making the leap to Substack! Please make sure you’re on the list, and I’d love it if you’d consider becoming a paid subscriber. We’ve got a lot of exciting plans in the works for premium content, which I can’t wait to share with you.