The Work of a Lifetime
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Yesterday, I expressed my dismay at the story of a 61-year-old widow who’d left her home and her family and live the rest of her life in a monastery. She died recently—at 92—and both the secular culture and the Catholic internet applauded her midlife decision. I was perplexed and dismayed and actually a little insulted by the celebration of her abandonment. And I expressed that online.
Maybe it’s me-the-midlife-mother feeling a little marginalized by people who think it’s no big deal to a family if a mother walks out of their lives forever. Or maybe it’s the child and young adult I was who knows exactly what it’s like to be abandoned. Likely, it is both, because the child has grown up to always endeavor to provide what she did not have.
Yesterday afternoon and last night, I spent a great deal of time in my Instagram message box. I read heartbreaking stories of abandonment—women who are still very wounded into their own middle age because they were left by their mothers (or their fathers, or both). I heard from several women who are the only practicing Catholics in large families where everyone turned away in the wake of a mother’s fanaticism. Their zeal for religion made them cold towards their families—and unforgiving. This isn’t the love we’re called to, friends. I read message after message from young women who wished they had practical support and encouragement from their mothers or mothers-in-law or really anyone a generation older who could shed some light and share some tasks. They wish someone would come alongside and help bear the burdens that they try to bear with joy every day. I cried and prayed with these women.
I heard from women who can’t imagine doing life without their moms very much in it. They told me how much the wisdom and the practical help and camaraderie of their mothers make their own lives richer and more joyful. Those were the happiest notes.
I heard from women who are at midlife and shared that these are the hardest and most exhausting parenting years. Much more than when they had lots of babies, now they wish they could pack up and be alone and sleep well and not be entangled. They’d never do it, but the strain is intense. They are grateful for the vocation to which they’ve been called. But they understand how hard it is and how theirs is a mostly unspoken season of hard.
I also heard from some women who surprised me. These are people who spend lots of time online championing traditional homemaking and motherhood. They write compellingly about how family and keeping a home are a woman’s path to holiness. They are frank about the struggles, and they offer one another genuine encouragement to keep on keeping on—because it’s worth it, because this work has eternal value. But these women applauded a meme about a middle-aged mother of many who left her family and her home. It’s as if they think that there is little value in the home of an older mother, no worth in the mothering she can do after her children are legally adults, no reason to work out her salvation in the place where she was first called. By their reasoning, if there is value, it is easily expendable if a woman is called away by a more noble cause.
It’s as if they haven’t thought about the work young homemakers and mothers are doing now and how in the blink of an eye no one will value it—not the popular secular culture or the culture of Catholic women they are cultivating. It will be the same work; they will actually be more skilled and accomplished at it. The people in whom she invested will still need her, though in very different ways. It astonished me to learn that both the secular culture and the traditional social media Catholic family culture think there is a higher calling for a mother at midlife. It’s as if some women can see that motherhood and homemaking are God’s call, but only if the home is filled with young children. After that, mothers who have invested in their homes are entirely dispensable, and not very valuable at all to the next generation. This sentiment surprised me, and it concerns me. These young women themselves are investing everything into home and family. Midlife is likely to be quite difficult for them if they don’t think that investment has true, irreplaceable, essential value after children are grown, if they don’t think there is still work to be done, countless conversations to have, and prayers to be prayed. They will look back upon these growing years—all the hard work they’re doing now—and wonder if it’s all wasted time, if nothing of worth remains. And of course, the secular culture will be on hand to say “I told you so.”
In the story behind the meme, the culture celebrated the woman’s choice to leave and to cloister away. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine investing your life in raising children for a couple of decades or more only to have everyone applaud when you walked away from it at midlife. Do you feel valued in that moment?
If you have been called to marriage and motherhood and homemaking—if you have devoted yourself wholeheartedly to these things and recognize them as your path to holiness—please be assured that there is immeasurable value there. You would be missed and mourned and irreplaceable if you walked away.
We were designed to live inter-generationally. We were intended to accompany one another along the path of holiness for a lifetime, each generation learning from and supporting the other. It’s much harder on everyone to go it alone. If you are a young mom, don’t hold back. Invest everything you have in your home and family. Lots of people will tell you it’s shortsighted. It’s not. It’s the holy work to which you’ve been called.
