“Mom, how big am I?” my son bounces on his heels, eagerly awaiting my answer.
“What do you mean, honey?” I ask. I am slow to look up from my reading, so I miss his gesture towards the wall.
“I mean, how much do I weigh?” he asks.
“We’ll have to go upstairs and see,” I reply, thinking of the digital scale in my bathroom.
“NO!” he replies with uncharacteristic force for my usually mellow 5-year-old. “You know,” he says with a meaningful look, and this time I follow where he is pointing.
He wants to know how much he weighs, according to the measure on the wall, where on each of their birthdays, we make little pencil marks to show how tall our children are, so that they can see how much they’ve grown each year.
He’s asking how much he weighs, but that isn’t really what he means.
One question that people are asking all over the internet these days has to do with the value of motherhood, thanks to a certain viral speech on a college campus somewhere in the middle of our country.
The reflection I have for you today is not a hot take on the merits or faults of that speech. This isn’t going to be a relative weighing of the value of stay at home motherhood or the permissibility of mothers pursuing paid work or passions outside the home.
This is simply a reminder from one mother to another, on the Feast of the Visitation, that your motherhood matters.
Because one thing that speech got right is that motherhood, in the last several decades, is under attack. We hear in Revelations that the dragon is enraged at the woman – that is, Mary - and is waging war against her offspring. We know that women have been a central battleground over the last century. We know these wounds. We know the political talking points.
We know the voice that lurks in the darkness and whispers words that weigh on us, filling us with guilt and despair – guilt for choosing motherhood and, or guilt for not contributing enough to the world. It wants to wreck us, whichever choice we make, and we lash out and scapegoat whoever has chosen differently than ourselves. We know it all.
But do we know just how important our motherhood is?
It’s easy to forget, whether you’ve left a career full of accolades or are still accruing those accomplishments. Either way, the daily tasks of motherhood are mundane, thankless, unfulfilling.
We do dishes. We prepare meals. We fold laundry. We sweep up crumbs. And whether we bake sourdough from scratch or slap some Wonderbread on the table, there really isn’t a lot of glamor in this job description.
Sure, we can coordinate calendars with the skill of an executive assistant and plan perfectly proportioned meals to nourish our children. We become experts in removing blood stains, toy rotations, and cutting off crusts. Some of us can even fold a fitted sheet. Motherhood is challenging, and forces us to develop skills we feel are beyond us. I’m still working on those fitted sheets.
Like I said, the tasks that make up our everyday are not glamorous. When I left work to stay home with our kids, my husband would come home every day and ask me one dreaded question: “What did you do today?”
I hated answering that question. When I was working, that question might have any number of interesting answers. I might have had a meaningful conversation with a student or gotten some nice comment from my boss. I might have gone toe to toe with a parent or come up with a brilliant idea of how to teach a difficult concept.
As a stay at home mom to two littles, my answers weren’t worth repeating. I got that jam out of the couch. I changed out of clothes covered in spit up. We played with Barbies while the baby inched his way across the carpet.
My frustration with that question and our inability to appreciate the value of motherhood have the same problem as my son wanting to weigh himself by the marks on the wall: they use the wrong measure.
My son won’t learn his weight from the wall, and we will never understand the meaning of motherhood when we try to account for it by any of the world’s measures. Not productivity. Not economics. Not statistics on good outcomes for mothers who adhered to any particular type of work related performance or abstinence.
The immeasurable and intangible meaning of motherhood cannot be captured by a checklist.
Mothering children is a divinely-appointed vocation, one in which the souls of our children have been entrusted to us to raise. The effects of motherhood are not inconsequential, but have eternal significance that few employment opportunities can hope to provide.
Cardinal Josef Mindzety phrases it like this:
“The most important person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral – a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body. . . The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation… What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother?”
And if you don’t believe the good cardinal, ask yourself who has been the most important woman in all of history. Who is the most powerful? The most influential? Whose work during her earthly days has not only moved our world, but ripples into eternity?
The answer, of course, is the woman God crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth, his mother.
And yet if we reflect on Mary’s daily tasks, we will find that they were not much different than our own – even if she did not yet have to contend with fitted sheets. She washed dishes. She prepared meals. She folded laundry, swept up crumbs, and made bread.
And as the mother of God, she even made the bread that comes down from Heaven. Her days were filled with snuggles and storytelling. She taught him to pray and introduced him to the community.
Mary practiced by example what her son would later advise: “If you wish to become great, you must become the servant of all,” (Matt. 20:26).
The greatest Woman on earth spent her days cooking meals for her husband and washing her son’s clothing. Why should we desire anything different?
God has given us souls to steward, and no measure on earth can tell us what that is worth.
When people say you are “just a mom,” turn the other cheek. Don't cast your pearls before swine. Those who would have us believe our time with our children is worth less than our paycheck, or who see hopping off the ladder as a death wish rather than a great leap of faith will spend their lives chasing dust and ashes.
When they accuse us of wasting our potential, let us not take offense. Thomas Merton said only the false self is ever offended. We should look on those who see motherhood as a pitstop or an impediment to what really matters with the gaze of Jesus who looked upon the lost with hesed, sometimes translated as pity, loving kindness, or mercy. They are sheep without a shepherd.
It is our job to be salt and light. Beggars showing the other beggars where to find food.
Motherhood is littleness. Motherhood is servanthood. And motherhood is monumental – by every measure that matters.
