On motherhood and career
It's way more complex than we have the words for. We desperately need a new narrative.
I’m not a particularly “online” person, but it’s pretty hard to miss something people are talking about as much as they’re talking about a recent commencement speech given at a Catholic university, specifically about a part where he addressed the women.
As someone passionate about issues of womanhood and motherhood, I listened closely to this part. He used the word “vocation,” a Catholic word with plenty of nuance that means “calling,” along with “homemaker,” a word I love (after all, my Instagram handle is @radical.homemaker). One of the main themes of my writing is the undervaluing of the work of the home and of caring for children. I was into it. But then, he shared that his wife does no work outside of home and children: “Isabelle’s dream of having a career might not have come true...”
I audibly sighed.
First, here’s what he said.
For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.
I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I'm on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I'm beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.
[Applause lasting 18 seconds]
She is a primary educator to our children. She is the one who ensures I never let football or my business become a distraction from that of a husband and father. She is the person that knows me best at my core, and it is through our marriage that, Lord willing, we will both attain salvation.
I say all of this to you because I have seen it firsthand how much happier someone can be when they disregard the outside noise and move closer and closer to God's will in their life. Isabelle's dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you asked her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud, without hesitation, and say, “Heck no.”
So there are his words, just so we’re on the same page. A lot of people have said a lot of things about this speech, but this is the thing I want to say: he could have uplifted the sacred work of children + home without contributing to the garbage narrative of “SAHM” / “working mom,” a construction that’s loaded with (bad) ideas about motherhood and paid work. Not helpful.
This past week was the last week of my amazing part-time teaching job teaching ELL at our neighborhood elementary school. It was a wonderful experience, as I used to be a teacher and it felt so good to be “back in the saddle,” if you will.
There are many ways this teaching job has been amazing for me and for our family.
It’s been a relief financially. I didn’t realize how much of a mental burden it was to feel like I had to be so frugal when we were (mostly) on one income. This year, when the kids have needed something, I’ve just bought it, without trying to find it at a thrift store or garage sale. I’ve purchased a few other things I’d been wanting but didn’t feel I needed.
I’ll just say it: the extra money has been really nice.
It’s also been good for empathy for my husband, to know what it feels like to work at a job and then come home to parent. While being at home full-time is most definitely work, going out to a job all day is a specific type of exhausting. I haven’t work like that since becoming a parent, and it’s been good empathy-wise to feel how it feels to do that all day and then to come home to your multiple children and all the work that’s required until bedtime. Ryan has felt a little vindicated, and I’m humble enough to say that I probably didn’t give enough grace in the years past for the space and time he needed to decompress after work before jumping into the work of thoughtful parenting.
And then the job itself was wonderful. My colleagues were kind and competent. My students and their families are absolutely amazing and I feel privileged to have been able to support them. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to practice my Spanish a bit, and I absolutely love being able to work with students in smaller numbers. (As a teacher I always loved differentiation—meeting students where they were instead of doing a one-size-fits-all approach—and this job is completely that!) I’ve also just found the school to be a wonderful place overall. There’s a lot of negative talk about public schools these days, and while I do think there are plenty of problems in public education, I’ll say that I’ve been happy to see the inner workings of our neighborhood public school. Lots of great people doing great work with kids.
And still, I quit.
I’m not returning next year. I discerned that it was a one-year opportunity placed in my life at a specific time for specific reasons. It wasn’t the start of a new career as an ESL teacher, as much as I think that would have been amazing. Instead, I’ll be teaching my own kids next year—as of yesterday, we’re officially a homeschooling family!
Since having my first child in 2016, I’m completely oriented toward my family first, toward my role as a mother and keeper of our home. This isn’t something I say with arrogance or ego of any kind; it just is. I resonate with the words from the speech—like Butker’s wife, I’m “leaning into my vocation.” I see it as holy and sacred and the most important thing. I’m a mother and a homemaker first.
But leaning into my vocation as a mother doesn’t mean I don’t do anything else other than tend to my family and home. This is where his speech went south for me.
Since I became a mother, I haven’t worked a full-time job outside of the home, it’s true. But I have done paid work (part-time). In addition to the teaching job, I’ve done paid work in the form of freelance writing (where I made my own hours and worked around the kids and mostly didn’t leave my house). I’ve also been writing the whole time I’ve been a mother about things that matter to me.
I don’t buy into the all-or-nothing narrative of become a mom and choose a path: stay-at-home mom or working mom. But this is the overly simplistic story sold to us—by both the secular and the Christian world.
And I really don’t like it.
Butker’s audience is essentially the same as mine; I write to women like me: educated, ambitious, thoughtful. And I basically share the same message with them—that the work of children and home matters immensely. It isn’t oppressive and demeaning, as loud cultural voices tell us.
I think the message is an important one. Smart women are encouraged to pursue education and career. Marriage, motherhood… sure, if you want, fit those in too, but they’re not to be the priority. Because you’re strong! You can do anything a man can do! You can do more than cook and clean and change poopy diapers.
That’s the vibe. That’s the messaging talented young women are swimming in.
Becoming a mother is a massive life event, yet this messaging continues when women become mothers. Don’t let motherhood overtake you! You don’t want motherhood to become your identity!
Furthermore, many Americans—men and women alike—get wrapped up in their careers to an unhealthy extent. I think it’s wise to consider this possibility, to consider how your self-concept can be very attached to your paid work, and how shifting your self-concept when you become a mother to be focused on motherhood is not a cringe, unhealthy thing. It’s a biological thing. It’s a spiritual thing. It’s a VERY OKAY AND NORMAL THING.
All this to say, I get the pushback he’s going for here, and I’m on board.
Educated, ambitious women shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit they’re excited to become mothers. They shouldn’t be afraid to surrender to motherhood or to prioritize it as the most important thing.
But where he goes wrong—where I think Christian messaging in general goes wrong—is implying that seeing motherhood as something to prioritize and aspire to means that you can’t or shouldn’t do any paid work. That “homemaker” means something very specific: total dedication of time and energy to husband and children.1
We can and should take motherhood seriously. It’s a great gift and one that our culture diminishes. But leaning into motherhood doesn’t have to mean a “giving up” of work outside the work of home and children.
The issue is the cultural narrative of “working mom” and “stay-at-home mom.” This is one of the most insidious and harmful frameworks that exists in our collective minds, and it’s especially harmful to young women.
Here in the U.S. at least, these two phrases are emblazoned into our consciousness as identities and descriptors of the type of women we are: whether we’re smart, ambitious, whole women who take care of ourselves (and don’t let motherhood change us!), or whether we’re overly involved and identified with motherhood and don’t want to do or be anything apart from wives and mothers.
When we have a child, we’d led to believe that these are the two camps in which we can land. These terms need to go.
When I’ve talked about this on Instagram, sometimes I get pushback like what do you mean that we should get rid of these phrases? I like having moms whose schedule, etc. I can relate to. To that I say, sure, there’s such a thing as a mother working outside the home full-time as well as a mother doing no paid work at all and instead caring for her children and home full-time. Of course those realities exist (and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with either one), and yes, it’s good to be in contact with other mothers living the same reality as you.
It’s the dichotomy and the accompanying stereotypes that are harmful.
The dichotomy sets up an either/or, proposing two options as the only choices (and implying that by nature they are very, very different). The realities and possibilities of part-time work, freelance work, entrepreneurial efforts are available only to the freest-thinking among us, those of us willing to trailblaze our own way somewhere in the middle.
The stereotypes encompass related ideas about what kind of woman/mother you are. Being home with your kids means you’re a “good” mom, appropriately selfless, but it also means you’re unambitious and probably not that smart. Having a full-time job outside the home means you’re kind of selfish, but it also means you’re talented and smart and therefore fit for more important and difficult work than cleaning and tending to children.
These are the garbage ideas women are swimming in as they navigate motherhood and paid work.
This framework also implies permanence—that once you pick one of these paths you’re on it forever. Because it’s who you are. A friend told me once, “I remember when I was back at work after my first was born and thinking, this is a big choice I’m making for the rest of my life. Now I get it that no, this is a choice I’m making right now, and it can change.”
(She’s at full-time at home and homeschooling at the moment.)
All of this—the dichotomy, the accompanying stereotypes, and the permanence—is narrative, a story we carry in our collective consciousness.2
Many women on the ground know the truth is more complex. I have numerous friends who are primary caretakers for their children and do flexible paid work alongside it (and are creative and educated and ambitious). I know several women who work full-time outside the home but who will tell you without hesitation that their priority is their role as mother (they’re working for financial reasons and are not the selfish caricature of the “working mom”). I have a friend who left her big career and now prioritizes the work of the home—but has her kids in part-time childcare so she can write and do other paid work. I listened to a woman in her seventies give a talk last year about her life with her husband, and how she shifted from working full-time alongside her husband as they started their business to being mostly home as they had multiple children and then back to full-time involvement in the business as her kids entered school. (See the fluidity?)
I could go on. The rigid story we have in our minds about mothers and paid work is outdated and harmful. Many of us who have been mothers for a while know this. But I worry about women who aren’t mothers yet, like the college graduates listening to that speech. I worry they’ll make choices based on their perceived options.
We desperately need a reframing around the realities of work and motherhood. Our choices as mothers aren’t 1) be home and do no paid work or 2) go to a full-time job away from home. There’s a vast in-between to explore. And, you can always change it up. Motherhood and paid work can be fluid: it can shift as children grow or our circumstances shift or we evolve as women.
Harrison Butker could have said something like this:
“Homemaking and mothering are sacred, valuable work—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You are all off to start your careers, but I want you to know that when you become a mother, your relationship to paid work may shift. You may want to take a break for a while, go part-time, or use the time to explore a different path, like freelancing or entrepreneurship. You’ll figure it out. But don’t let anyone convince you it has to be this or that or that any choice is a forever one. Be open to a path that is uniquely yours.
But he didn’t. And of course he didn’t. In an age where we love to be in our tribe and call out our enemies for all their wrong ideas, nuance isn’t what we’re going for.3
So yeah, as much as I loved it for a year, I’m not returning to my teaching job in the fall. I’ll be homeschooling my kids, writing here and freelance, and becoming certified to teach an amazing workshop about the female body.
When think about the way things have come together for me regarding work outside of mothering and homemaking, I’m stunned. It’s amazing.4 I followed my intuition to be with my babies, and paid and creative work has still been there for me alongside that.
While Harrison Butker might have been trying to lift up the beautiful work of caregiving and homemaking, what he also did was reinforce a harmful duality and its accompanying stereotypes.
And he did it to young women who are about go to out into the working world and most of whom will have to make choices about motherhood and career in the years to come.
Motherhood and paid work is so much more complex than “SAHM” or “working mom,” and the caricatures-framed-as-identities that come along with those terms are harmful. Only when this framework dissipates from our consciousness—when we can talk about motherhood and work without these rigid ideas about what it looks like—will women be truly free to figure out what’s right for them and their families.
His message also subtly implies that if you remain unmarried or without biological children, then you’re somehow doing it wrong, which is absolutely a vibe in Christian culture that needs fixing but that, for sake of argument, I’m not focusing on here.
Honestly, it’s the language too, something I’ve written about in the past, but it’s the whole framework that is more deeply problematic than the specific words used.
The entire speech seemed like a politician’s to me, touching on all the hot-button topics in just the right way so as to rile up his constituency against his opponent. Was he trying to uplift and encourage a graduating class, or become Internet/Christian famous? Honest question.
I actually can’t think about it too long without bursting into tears. I’ve struggled a lot with feeling like I’m wasting my talent, etc.—all the rhetoric we hear about educated women who choose to care for their own kids—and I’m amazed at how things have come into my life that have allowed me to both be with my kids for much of the time but still use my gifts in the outside world.
I love your take on this. I saw someone say that the “working mom” and the “stay at home mom” are often the same person at different point in their lives! I think your piece explores this quite nicely!
There is so much nonsense out there about on this topic. I do really like the distinction of vocation vs career. For so long I mistaked a career for vocation. But it takes being in touch with your true self (not your ego or silly moralistic ideals) to find it and lot of trail and error and along the way you may have the profound experience of becoming a mother that of course changes everything. Now that I feel closer to understanding my vocation, I'm thankful for jobs that allow me to pursue my vocation as a mother and otherwise.