Published October 8, 2024
This essay appeared as part of First Things’ Letters from the Synod series and is adapted from a chapter in Lived Experience and the Search for Truth, edited by Deborah Savage and Robert Fastiggi (En Route Books and Media, 2024).
It happened a few weeks after my third child was born, my first son. It had been a difficult pregnancy, with fear of a placental abruption. I recall the doctor’s stern warning over the phone as I watched my daughters’ swimming lessons. “You have twenty minutes to get to a hospital if you start bleeding heavily, otherwise you could both die.” I gulped, unnerved to know that there was very little time standing between our lives and death.
I was also working to finish my doctoral dissertation, every spare moment given over to completing it. During my twice-weekly appointment monitoring my unborn son, I scoured books. I even worked on the dissertation while in labor and delivery.
A few weeks after my son was born, something hit me. I was living between too little sleep and too much pressure to finish my doctorate. I was raw and healing and overwhelmed at being entrusted with another tiny new life. But something new had broken in. It was joy.
At first, I thought it must just be a byproduct of exhaustion or too much coffee, but it didn’t wane and wax with fatigue levels. It was just a new constant sense. Yes, I was all these things that most people wouldn’t associate with joy and happiness, but there it was. Joy. It was the fruit of giving myself in the most vital sorts of ways. And not just a little. I was giving everything I had. Pouring out every ounce for my children, my husband, and in the intellectual work that God had placed before me. I felt a deep sense of purpose—and the goodness of that purpose—in who I was and what I was doing, even in the very mundane tasks that filled my day. They became less bothersome as I focused on the bigger picture of what was happening in our home. My joy, however, wasn’t in spite of suffering. It emerged because of it.
I was not prepared at first to understand this new sense in my life. Motherhood manuals don’t mention it. It was finally in spiritual reading that I came to understand it. How, I wondered, had I not heard of this experience before, particularly given that it is such an essential aspect of the Christian life? It also made me wonder what has happened to motherhood that has led to a nearly complete ignorance of the joy that comes from self-gift.
The message offered to women today is that childbearing is drudgery, a drag, an end of career, or even of one’s life—both metaphorically and biologically. But this claim—that the end of what is familiar and comfortable in a life lived for oneself leads to an erasure of one’s identity—is a myth. There is a dynamism that emerges in one’s vulnerability and the true gift of self. It has a name: kenosis, the Greek word for the pouring of self that all Christians are called to by Our Lord through the Cross: “[he] emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. For which cause God also hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names . . .” (Phil. 2:7–9). The word is also used in Luke’s Gospel where Christ says: “This is my body, given for you” (Luke 22:19). We know that life will always involve suffering; almost every religion and philosophical system has tried to solve this problem. Only Christ offers us a way for suffering to have meaning, for it to be fruitful, but also for suffering to give us joy as we follow him more closely in emptying ourselves out in the vocations to which he has called us.
Embracing the vulnerability of motherhood is not just about minimizing that which threatens all of humanity in its weakness at the beginning and end of life. It is about maturing and growing in strength and virtue. Motherhood is the common means through which women are freed from the sterile trap of a self-centered life and enter into the luminous life of self-gift; through it they learn to love and care for others. This turn that motherhood demands, of surrendering our will to the will of others and to growing into a fully mature adult, is what motherhood is about. This is joy’s source. Monks and nuns have bells to call them to different tasks, moms have the cries and needs of children to make their will as supple as those behind monastic walls. All are called to joy through these concrete means. But the mother’s advantage is that her child’s sonorous demands come with a smile, tiny hands, a sneeze, and that newborn scent. Such tender things assist in melting away her own selfishness.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our current situation is that so many women will miss out on this realization: that motherhood holds out the promise of spiritual maturity and joy.
How did it come to this? When did the culture, particularly Catholic culture, lose sight of this most basic teaching of Christianity?
Vulnerability and Power
Choice. It is an idea that has reverberated through the twentieth century like few words ever have in history. It seems benign enough, offering the simple selection of A or B. And yet this innocuously packaged word has dramatically changed how women think and live while at the same time determining if a child will continue to live. It is hard to think of any other word that has played a more powerful role in life and death in recorded history.
The choices newly given to women through reproductive technology have dramatically modified the way women have come to view motherhood over the last several generations. “Choice” ushered into our culture an adversarial attitude toward bearing children. What has long been considered the most natural and tenderest of human bonds, that between mother and child, is now viewed with ambivalence, its worth dependent upon the attitude of the mother.
Feminism as it has evolved has strained the fundamental relationship of mother and child to the point where many women have decided to skip it altogether, often just to avoid the demands, the drudgery, the pain associated with mothering a child. The new emphasis is on power and control and the erasure of any aspect of life that leaves us vulnerable.
In Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre recognized that three basic elements form the parental relationship. The first is a parent’s unique responsibility to their child. “If parents, especially mothers, are to provide children with the security and recognition that they need,” writes MacIntyre, “they have to make the object of their continuing care and their commitment this child, just because it is their child for whom and to whom they are uniquely responsible.”
MacIntyre identifies the second vital element of parenting as unconditional commitment. “The parental, especially the maternal attitude, has to give expression to a pledge in the form of an unfailing commitment: ‘However things turn out, I will be there for you.’” This is the answer to the question every scared child is asking, “Will you take care of me? From monsters? From strangers? From being alone?”
The third essential necessary for parenting is that it is “the needs of the child, and not their own needs in relationship to the child that have to be paramount.” Childhood, by its very nature, reflects a kind of vulnerability that parents are charged with guarding. Certainly, basic needs are to be met, but vital elements of innocence and safety are just as important precisely because a child cannot do these things for herself.
MacIntyre offers a rich and textured explanation of what he means by the kind of trust a child must be able to have in a parent, or even just what can be expected from our loved ones when we are in a vulnerable state—a state in which we often find ourselves throughout our lives.
I must be able to trust you and to rely on you, not only in the routine transactions of everyday life, important as these are, but also and especially when I am something of a burden and a nuisance, by reason of my disabilities. So I must know that you will be there, at times when you have promised to be there. I must know that you will not make promises that it would be unreasonable for you to make. I must know that in emergencies you will do what is needed and that you will not blanch when some task for which you have taken responsibility turns out to be much more unpleasant—coping with vomiting or persistent bleeding or screaming, for example—or much more burdensome than expected.
In MacIntyre’s description, the priority of the child’s needs is essential, as is the unconditional and continued love and responsibility of the parents. Efforts to sidestep these requirements entirely have inverted the order of parent to child; now the needs of the parent trump the needs of the child. And as a result, as psychoanalyst Erica Komisar has explained in Being There, mothers often lose touch with the instinct to feel empathy for their children. Rather, children are felt to be just another demand upon a woman’s time. Often, however, this failure to recognize the vulnerability of the child is also the reluctance of the woman to recognize her own vulnerability, as she buttresses herself against the weaknesses entailed by motherhood by pursuing a career and garnering the income it provides.
One could object that poor mothering is precisely what contraception is trying to avoid—bringing into the world a child whose needs would not be met by a lax parent. Lived experience, however, has shown different results. What has become a “contraceptive mentality” has created a sense in the minds of parents that children are some kind of contingent option, subject to parental wishes. This cultural shift away from parenting as a lifelong act of self-gift, an offering of “my life for yours,” shifted quickly into “your life for mine.” The commodification of children is seen most explicitly in the fertility industry where children created in a petri dish can be frozen until desired by the parents, donated to “science,” or systematically destroyed when no longer wanted.
This prioritizing of parent over child and the elimination of the vulnerability associated with fertility has had the effect of diminishing the power, strength, and focus that develops in caring for the needs of others. Responding to the needs of others is the general avenue through which human maturation takes place, while rubbing out narcissism. In the case of motherhood, a striking attribute that emerges is the intense love children elicit in a woman. A mother’s love for her child can and should elicit deep fierceness, ingenuity, and perseverance: emotions that motivate her so profoundly that even she may not have known she was capable of such empathy for or protection of her child. A mother grows in her constancy in loving, protecting, guiding, nourishing, and sheltering her child in appropriate ways throughout her life. What started from her willingness to become vulnerable leads to strengths she perhaps could not have achieved otherwise. Vulnerability elicits trust, faith, perseverance, courage, compassion, care; it invites the protection of others. These are qualities that flow from the natural relationships between parent and child to provide for vulnerability and perpetuate life.
Not Alone
Contraception has seemingly reduced the physical risks in sexual relationships, specifically pregnancy. The avoidance of pregnancy has led to shorter-termed sexual relationships, characterized by fleeting pleasure, instead of long-term monogamous relationships. A single parent, which is most often the mother, is now left to care for a child without a spouse in the home to provide support, protection, and a loving partnership. (The most recent American national census shows that one in four parents is unmarried, with women representing 81 percent of those unmarried parents.) What was envisioned as a help to women has actually made women more vulnerable: They are now doing alone what was previously done within a family unit.
Motherhood wasn’t meant to happen in isolation. Family also highlights the reality that women do not become pregnant on their own; even in vitro fertilization requires a male contribution.
It is not an accident, then, that the best solution to the poverty associated with childbearing is a husband and the family. There is a reason why men and women become couples—vowing to love each other through thick and thin—so that, together, their lives are much stronger and better than if they live their lives separately. Rather than helping women to live in a family, with a husband and children, we have led them to believe that life without these essentials will somehow be better.
The lived experience of many women intent on avoiding the vulnerability of motherhood can be seen in the statistics reporting on women’s overall happiness: Women experience greater rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse, divorce, and sexually transmitted diseases today than ever before. Women have been largely deprived of the direct and rich relationships that have marked female lives since Eve; they have been replaced by the ephemeral and shallow. Bubble-wrapping women biologically and psychologically against the demands of motherhood has not made them happier. Women are made for thick relationships, but the idolization of womanhood unencumbered by family short-circuits that reality. Strained relationships with children and husbands have left the family fragmented and threadbare. Certainly, situations arise that are less than ideal: abuse, death, disease. But though such circumstances do occur, they cannot lead us to abandon the entire project. On the contrary, it reveals the need to strengthen the bonds of family. Frequently, women who do have children amid the broken circumstances of our present reality take on burdens that were never meant to be carried by just one person. Others find solace in surrogates, such as pets, the ownership of which has exploded in recent years; pets now outnumber children in American homes.
Helping Women as Women
The best way to help women is to restore the family and natural fertility. The Church can help by teaching clearly and frequently what she has always taught about contraception and abortion. But we can also help men and women become better spouses, better parents, by making the family stronger in the face of life’s vicissitudes. As members of the wealthiest culture in all human history, Americans have the capacity, the resources, and the intelligence to shift away from trying to treat women like men, and to honor their fertility, their womanhood, and the many gifts associated with these. What we lack is the will and a vision of what civilization should look like, absent role models and a general grammar for understanding what womanhood is.
But more than anything, we need to remind women that motherhood isn’t just reducible to drudgery; indeed, it isn’t about drudgery at all. As a culture, we have completely overlooked the reality that it offers our lives meaning, purpose, joy. It also is an icon of God’s love. German philosopher Max Scheler wrote of the way in which women serve others: “This great urge to love, to serve, to bend down, is God’s own essence.” It is not because we are childish, or somehow lowly and insignificant, that women care for others, particularly children. It is because it mimics a perfection of God: the greater can pour itself out for the lesser, the smaller, the more vulnerable.
Carrie Gress, Ph.D., is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she co-directs EPPC’s Theology of Home Project. She earned her doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and is the co-editor at the online women’s magazine Theology of Home.
