The humiliation of momhood has been good for me

Why I want to embrace being "just" a stay-at-home mom

Dear Readers,

On Wednesday, my friend Deisi K. and I were talking about the local culture of full-time daycare. On Friday, my friend Rachel S. and I were chatting over sandwiches and got riled up over the dissing of motherhood in American culture. Both friends asked me independently whether I considered myself “stay-at-home” or “working.” I asked what they thought, and they gave the exact opposite answers. That was confusing. But from the title of this post, you can see I’ve made up my mind! I also dove into the comments section of a post on Other Feminisms, in which women commented about the biggest influences on their views of motherhood. And, to top it all, I read Stella Tsantekidou’s Substack essay “Why I am worried about the rise of Neo-Con women.” The universe is clearly conspiring to force me to articulate my views on the destiny of women. So, here goes.

Some women do not struggle at all with the idea of being mothers. For my dear friend Anna Grace becoming a stay-at-home mom with a happy family has always been the deepest desire of her heart. It hasn’t happened yet, and so she’s using her graduate degree in the workplace for now. But many of us do struggle with motherhood, for one reason or another, and if that is you, perhaps you’ll find this essay salient.

xo, Amelia

My baggage

It doesn't seem "cool" or prestigious to bear and raise kids in a world that celebrates women for being authors and engineers.

Growing up in a university town, I was always aware of a general disdain towards childbearing among highly educated people. But my parents served as a counterbalance to that milieu. My mom regretted prioritizing achievement over family because when she decided she did want children at the age of 32, she suffered from infertility. Thankfully, God opened her womb and gave her five kids between the ages of 35 and 42. She prizes her children infinitely more than her PhD. In fact, she couldn't care less about her world-class education in piano performance. That's quite a powerful testimony.

Despite her example, I have struggled to honor motherhood. It doesn't seem "cool" or prestigious to bear and raise kids in a world that celebrates women for being authors and engineers. In a world where a woman can be anything, why would she be a mother? But I realized a few years back that when Scripture describes heavenly treasure, it's talking about human souls. That's been good reminder to me that parenthood is God's work and will teach my heart to love what he loves.

For context, I married during college at 21, was intending to get a PhD in German Lit, got sidetracked, and had my baby daughter at 24. I only took six weeks maternity leave before returning to work part-time but left the workforce completely when we moved to New York. I hope to have several more kids so we can galumph about, kicking up dustclouds wherever we go, like the joyful tribe I remember from my childhood.

Motherhood or career?

In Greek, English, and American culture, a woman is technically free to prioritize either marriage or a career. The difference is whether her choice is greeted with champagne or a sneer.

One of my favorite Substack-ers, the honest and entertaining Stella Tsantekidou, recently wrote a delightful essay “Why I am worried about the rise of Neo-Con women.” In this essay, Stella argues that a wholesale return to traditional family ideals brings its own troubles—misogyny, oppression of women, self-objectification. The women who promote trad-wife lifestyles, she says, are only in the position to advocate for those beliefs because feminism has already given them economic freedom and opportunities for self-actualization. To illustrate her point, she describes how her Greek mother constantly pesters her about her marital status. In Stella’s current home in London, she is a sexy, savvy, young professional. But despite her many accomplishments, to her Greek mother, she’s reduced to a spinster.

What strikes me about Stella’s analysis is her focus on honor. In Greek, English, and American culture, a woman is technically free to prioritize either marriage or a career. The difference is whether her choice is greeted with champagne or a sneer.

It is within this framework of honor and dishonor that I add my voice to the chorus of angsty, female Hamlets: “To be, or not to be… a mother? A girl boss? Both?”

But rather than addressing the question on a cultural level, I want to ground it in practical, individual choice. Specifically, mine. I’m sharing from a personal perspective because it’s honestly exhausting to enter this debate at a higher level. There are many individuating factors at play (What’s your heart’s desire? Have you found a man? Are you single-momming? What is your work, anyway? Are you an atheist? etc. etc.). There are reasons not all women should stay home with their babies, and reasons that some women will choose singleness over family life.

So, I won’t proscribe. I’ll just describe.

My main point is simple. If I were driven by a desire for honor, I would focus on a career. My homeland, unlike Stella’s, values women in the workplace, not the kitchen. But I don’t want to be driven by what other people find valuable. I want to be driven by what God finds valuable, and, as I will explain, stay-at-home motherhood is a good way for me to do that right now.

The cultural pressure of “mom, and…”

Are women that good at multitasking?

America celebrates some moms. If you pay attention, you’ll notice it’s mostly the “mom, and…” moms—women who, in addition to kids, boast a string of impressive job titles. In these cases, motherhood is treated like the optional (and sometimes despised) cherry on top of a whole sundae of more valuable achievements, e.g. “Jane Doe, mother of two, author, educator and entrepreneur.” This model usually goes thus: By winning the capitalist rat-race in their twenties, women prove through Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest that they’re worthy to reproduce. By that time, their bodies are tired and aging, and they are working full-time hours, but they still want kids. So, on top of their demanding careers, they take on the stress of The Hardest Job on Earth, aka forming bodies and souls, aka Motherhood.

Is it possible to pour your whole heart into both jobs simultaneously? Are women that good at multitasking? Is it just me, or is expecting women to build shiny careers and shoulder the biological burden of motherhood anything less than cruel? We are not goddesses. We cannot live five lives in one. I am not the first to point this out.

But why this impossible pressure on women to be “moms, and…?”

Though Stella points out that women are expected to embrace traditional gender roles in Greece, even there, I doubt that the roles of mother and wife bring public accolades. The reason for this is, I think, quite obvious. Motherhood is, by its very nature, a private endeavor. It takes place in secret and focuses on a select few. There’s no snappiness to the headline, “Mother Achieves Herculean Task of Teaching Four-Year-Old Henry to Stop Hitting Other Kids.” And so, looking at the bored looks on our single friends’ faces when we discuss our children, we decide that if motherhood is not enough for other people, it is not enough for us. We were made for better. We want more.

The invisibility of Christlike love

If I claim to be a follower of Christ, I must die to my desire for self-glorification and follow his path of humility.

The Ivy-league university town in which I live reflects this glory-seeking attitude. Here, most educated women put their kids in full-time daycare. The implicit message is: “Taking care of kids is pleb work. Low-class. Beneath you. Your higher level of intelligence and gifting demands that you pursue higher calling as a doctor, scholar, etc. Then, you can have a real impact.”

But as I encounter Christ in the Gospels, I see him contest the assumption that wide-reaching, public work is the most important kind. I watch him reject invitations to greatness and turn instead with joy to embrace the lowly individual. He washes feet, stops to chat with beggars and children. Above all, he dedicates the majority of his time to caring for his ragtag adopted family of twelve. Serving the people in his life is never “beneath him.” In fact, besides communion with God, it is his number one priority.

Yet, in our media-saturated culture, the most Christ-like vocations are invisible, overlooked, and undervalued. Is this any surprise? The very definition of love is to pour immense amounts of time, energy, and affection into one or two insignificant people. You can’t love “the public” or “humanity.” You can’t love 2 million Instagram followers. You can only love Allie or Steve, your mother, your brother, your husband, your wife. That’s not glamorous at all.

Embracing this secret lifestyle of love is hard medicine to swallow for a girl who grew up on a steady diet of praise. I won blue ribbons at track meets to the sound of loud applause. My school boasted about me to the paper when I won a National Merit position for my standardized test scores. Professors wrote me notes, telling me they’d never seen anything like my writing. I had a collection of neatly packaged, completed tasks labeled with A+ and “promising” and “talented.” Unlike the work of love, which is eternal, all-consuming, incomparable and ever incomplete, this work allowed me to check off a list of showy tasks designed to distinguish myself as superior to others.

It is for this precise reason that I believe my heart requires the discipline of stay-at-home motherhood. I need the humiliation of being seen as a lowly person and pouring my whole life into a likewise lowly person (my baby). Otherwise, as Jesus points out, I will not follow God. “How can you believe,” Jesus said to the religious leaders of his day, “when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:44). If I claim to be a follower of Christ, I must die to my desire for self-glorification and follow his path of humility.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy staying home with my baby. In fact, my mental health has never been better. I am joyful, stable, and content, and I have a new appreciation for my body after witnessing its ability to birth and nurture new life. All the same, I think it’s important to point out that despite the beauty, value, and happiness that motherhood showers upon families, the vocation is looked down upon as a whole. Love must be its own reward.

Some tend to idolize (even fetishize) stay-at-home momhood, which is just as unhealthy as despising it. So, I think it’s important to note that this phase of stay-at-home momming is not an identity just a phase. The rhythms of childrearing ebb and flow as new babies arrive and then babies are babies no more. When I reach the next stage in my life, and my gaze begins to turn outside of the home, I hope that this season of love will have trained me to take satisfaction in other work, not because the work is glamorous, but because the work is good.

Loving baby girls is particularly important

In conclusion, I will throw a small biscuit to the culture wars. Speaking of honor and dishonor—sex-selective abortions have robbed 23 million infant girls of their lives since the 1970’s because, in some parts of the world, daughters bring less honor than sons. By staying home with my daughter, my husband and I are both affirming the larger truth that women, as a sex, are not a deadweight on society when the call of our biology pulls us out of the workforce and into the home. We are affirming that not to The Culture, really, beyond you readers and our circle of friends. Mostly, we are affirming that to ourselves. Affirming that girls are inherently valuable. Our girl is valuable. Every unborn baby who has been killed for her sex is valuable. And so am I.

That’s what Christ affirms in his actions and his words. And it’s enough for me.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

—Emily Dickinson, #260