At the end of this school year I am staying home! No more 9 to 5 while my sweet little ones are in day care. As a school teacher, I have had the blessings of summer vacations and holiday breaks with my boys, but I've always known that I would eventually have to head back to work. The breaks would end too quickly, and we would resume life as usual. My husband announced to me a few months ago that this would be my last year working. It took several weeks to sink in, and even now, I have a hard time believing it's true. I've been thinking a lot on motherhood, and how so many of the stay-at-home moms I meet seem to get so burnt out. They struggle with isolation. They feel guilty that they aren't earning a paycheck. They resent losing their identity. I'm not sure why this has happened to so many of my friends, but their honesty has helped me to realize that I need to guard against these things.
This brings me to Chesterton. (obviously)
While an undergraduate, I was very briefly a member of the "Montgomery Chesterton Society." I specify very briefly because I attended all of 4 meetings. Fortunately, this was enough for me to be exposed to G.K. Chesterton's genius. I have always loved what he had to say about wives and mothers. This is such an encouragement to me as I consider the higher calling of motherhood:
It is not difficult to see why...the female became the emblem of the
universal ...natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who
require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be
taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly,
woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he
asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be
odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. ...But when people
begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and
dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of
imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called
drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If
drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home,
as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at
Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is
trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it
up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite
area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a
certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes. and books, to be Aristotle
within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can
understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could
narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about
the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the
universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be
everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is
gigantic, not because it is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of
her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
