#52. Two Ways to Ruin Motherhood
The great terror of motherhood is that we’d ruin it. This dread causes some mothers to do less: the less we do, the less we can fail. The same dread causes others to grip tighter and work harder: the harder we try the more sure the outcome will be. The painful truth is that both—minimal doing and overdoing—are ruinous to the thing we are trying to preserve.
There are several ways to not enjoy freshly baked sourdough. The first is to choose not to make it in the first place. If you don’t get your leaven and flour and water and salt together, you have no chance of baking your own loaf. The second way is to attempt it, but to labour so hard, that your effort works against the natural processes that raise a loaf. Some frustrations come from the absence of effort. Other frustrations come from too much of something in the wrong way or the wrong time.
God has given natural gifts to supply what is needed for the nurture of children (eg. marriage, mother, father, home, time, affection, Things To Do together, authority, obedience, worship, the natural appetites of children). Twenty-first century social and economic forces actively subvert or circumvent these provisions. The good provisions God has made for children are seen to be bad for women or bad for the economy. Our adult ambitions often win against children’s needs. When God-given provisions are willingly given up—given up when they could have been held onto (which is different from when they are taken from us apart from our own choosing)—then we are choosing to withhold a good that is in our power to give, a good that is due and that is needed. When we choose to give up God’s design in relationships; when we misuse time; when we don’t worship God on his own terms; when our authority and responsibility are handed over to someone else; when we dull our children’s appetites to move and make and know; we end up with something else on the kitchen bench. When we leave out God-given ingredients which we could choose to put in, that changes the nature of what is being made. This is wilfully choosing to go against the natural law God has embedded in creation. We cannot deliberately (or passively) ignore his reality and expect things to go well. The book of Proverbs calls that Folly.
The basic ingredients of a fruitful, enjoyable experience of motherhood aren’t passively assembled, delivered with the baby. The elements don’t come together accidentally. In our time where these good provisions have become foreign and distasteful, it takes deliberate, determined effort to learn and preserve the components that God has designed for raising young people. If we don’t know what those elements are, if we’re bored by the idea of home and children, if we feel bound to living in a particular place where the mortgages require two incomes, if we have believed the narrative that children need to be away from home in order to optimise their development, if we feel the need to live on a grander scale than domestic life gives, if we want to do something that is esteemed in society (because if we choose not to, people might assume we can’t); if we set aside maternal duties that we could choose to grow into, the outcome of our mothering will be different from what it would have been if we had spent more time doing it. Our children will grow up to be different people from whom they would otherwise be. We will be different. Our communities will be different. Our churches will be different.
Less frustration happens when we acknowledge that there are some demands reality will make which cannot be bypassed. The sooner we make peace with the fact that time, money and energy are finite, and that joyfully raising children takes an awful lot of all those things, the better we’ll be at budgeting their use. Frankly, we need to clear the bench of most things that typically compete for our attention. Our clear surface then allows space to arrange our commitments to serve the primary work Jesus has given us if we’re married with kids: the work of being a godly wife and mother. Activities that are done at the expense of these first duties are due for pruning. We will need to make vastly different choices from most people around us. We will leave the 99 for the one; the public, esteemed and large scale for the tucked away care of the little few. It is costly to do the work of motherhood and it is costly, in other ways, to leave it undone.
Over-doing the work is costly too. Overdoing motherhood can be effort that ruins. If you’re reading these words, you are probably inclined to care deeply about mothering. You are more at risk of over-doing than not doing. Let’s go back to sourdough. There is no formula that works in every kitchen at every latitude and every altitude every time. There are principles to be understood and applied with observation and a light touch. It is possible to over-knead the dough, undoing the rise and spring that the fermentation would otherwise give. Trusting all the ingredients are in at the right time (and that requires some learning and practice), then we need to be there, keeping watch and responding to the conditions. While zero effort goes into a non-attempt, an awful lot of effort can go into a sour, flat, stodgy loaf. No effort is a sure path to missing out, but a lot of effort can also end in something distasteful. So, what is the difference between doing the work of motherhood and over-doing it?
Sometimes when we’re intentional about our mothering, we aim at only the significant interactions: the “spiritual” conversations, quality time, the moments that merit a photo, the direct instruction. But if our mothering is built only of those concentrated ingredients, it’s a bit like serving our kids mouthfuls of sourdough starter. The living ingredient needs to work itself through the plain. The dough needs time to rise without our hand being in the bowl constantly. We need to know what we’re doing, and keep a watchful eye on things, but a lot of the time it might look like we’re not doing much at all. There is no substitute or speeding-up the rising times. Charlotte Mason calls this wise letting-alone, “masterly inactivity”.
There is no substitute for being there a lot of the time and making sure the vital ingredients are present. But being there doesn’t mean fiddling constantly. We need to have the intentional, direct instruction diluted in a life of ordinary interactions. Our role is to build spaces and atmosphere, to order time well, to provide nourishment of every kind, and to protect the atmosphere from the sin that constantly springs up to contaminate it. We have a lot of work to do that takes time and effort, but much of it is subtle, indirect effort.
Sometimes in our zeal, we can become a bit crass, losing our subtlety. Anxiously, we might worry that our mothering is Christian only when we string up a banner over every task and pin a verse to every object. We get a bit clumsy when we try to turn every story into a gospel exposition. We fabricate gospel gimmicks because we’ve forgotten that Christ’s banner is over everything already. It’s not our tricks and manoeuvres—our forcing—that make our mothering mean something. We don’t make Jesus Lord of it all, he already is. God has given our work meaning already. We’re just uncovering hints of that meaning as we work out how to do it well for him. If we avoid the doing, we’ll have something less than motherhood can be. But the doing is not forcing. It’s the quiet pervasiveness of leaven in dough. Small, gentle, living things working according to their ancient nature.
“He looked back on that time as on a nightmare, on his own mood at that time as a sort of sickness. Then all had been whimpering, unanalysed, self-nourishing, self-consuming dismay. Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and the world, and even an element of pleasure,” C.S Lewis Out of the Silent Planet p. 92
