It’s the knee-jerk American question: “What do you do?” Even though so many people hate their jobs, we just can’t help ourselves. We talk about work. It’s an easy conversation topic—unless you answer, “I’m just a mom.” Then it’s like someone let the air out of a balloon. The conversation might spurt along for a few little gasps of air, but then it goes flat, dead. The person has run out of things to ask you. They’ve said all the bromides they know about what they think mothers do…yeah, like, what the heck does a mom do anyway? Change diapers? Drive kids to soccer practice? Even the word mom sounds frowsy, dull, slightly annoying. It’s an incredibly easy word to whine or bellow. It’s just not cool.
You can tell mothers understand that they have a lame response to the universal American conversation starter because they often insert the adverb just: “I’m just a mom.” People don’t usually say, “I’m just a student;” “I’m just a pilot;” “I’m just a nurse,” unless they perceive that their position is lower status than the person they’re talking to. Mothers feel that in their bones. Ask any woman who has made it her life’s work to care for her family what it’s like to be socially sidelined because she doesn’t have a paid job, and she’ll probably have a story or two. In the eyes of a good many people, if you make motherhood your life’s work, you cease to exist as an interesting person.
Given the low social status of motherhood, it was pretty gutsy of Dr. Nadya Williams to walk away from fifteen years as a tenured professor so she could be home with her children. As she relates in her book Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, people told her that her decision was “a loss to the profession.” But Williams didn’t throw away her academic training upon heading home. Perhaps in some ways her decision actually sharpened those skills, since she is raising concerns that most people want to sweep under the rug, especially in the academy. Williams’ book raises critical questions about present-day attitudes towards vulnerable people, in particular, mothers and children, drawing upon contemporary and historical evidence to argue that as society rejects its Christian heritage, it devalues human life.
You don’t have to look very hard to see how people are being devalued in this world. Humans are considered more and more as widgets, installed here, yanked out, and reinstalled over there. Williams calls this the assembly-line life, and it’s starting earlier than ever. For some kids, it begins even before birth. Thanks to rapidly improving genetic testing and manipulation techniques, fertility clinics are feeling more and more like drive-throughs. Instead of, “Cheeseburger or chicken sandwich?” prospective parents are asked, “Boy or girl?” As Williams notes, “this struggle to design the ideal baby ultimately reduces human beings . . . to objects to be shaped and molded to our own will and for our own happiness, rather than image bearers entrusted to our stewardship for a season.” It’s not just fertility clinics that dehumanize unborn babies. Genetic testing and endless ultrasounds during pregnancy have become so routine that it’s considered irresponsible in many corners to decline them. The growing baby is reduced to a series of grainy pictures and test results, which make it easier to end baby’s life if it doesn’t measure up satisfactorily, even though these tests are not totally reliable. “Quality control” on the assembly line, Williams observes, means “if the product . . . is faulty, it is best to destroy and start over,” and this increasingly applies to babies.
The assembly-line life also conditions women to turn their bodies over to the medical experts during labor. As Williams notes, “respect toward expecting mothers is something not to take for granted.” Late in her second pregnancy, she realized that the obstetrician-run office where she had been going was not going to work. They “told me exactly how my delivery was going to go without ever listening to my thoughts on the matter,” so she switched to a midwife-run clinic. To Williams’ delight, her “voice and preferences were respected.” But even at the midwives’ office, the first question she was asked at her six-week checkup was what type of birth control she was going to use: “it was time for me to employ the right technology to manage my (re)productivity.” This is a great observation, one that merits deeper exploration. Birth control pills and devices keep women stuck on the assembly line. If they really want to take charge of their fertility instead of being at the mercy of the medical-technological apparatus, they need to learn to read the cyclical signs that tell them when they’re fertile. The same goes for relearning the art of breastfeeding as birth control, which, despite the protestations of medical experts, really does work if you nurse frequently enough and don’t have too high a body fat percentage. Granted, that’s pretty tricky to do in a world hellbent on wrenching mothers and babies apart, but it’s a really effective way to step off the conveyor belt.
Williams next turns her attention to engineered childhood. Many parents hand off their babies to be raised by others. Williams calls this sad phenomenon the post-modern surrogate: “the mothers unable to shape or raise their children but who must give them up to ‘professionals’ who will take care of them and educate them from birth in the most scientific way possible.” Williams focuses on the educational system, but it’s worth pointing out that post-modern surrogacy starts shortly after birth. There’s nothing that screams assembly line like the hospital nursery, with bassinets lined up in neat rows as newborns stare up into bright fluorescent lights and cry pitifully for their mothers. It’s incredible that this practice persists, even as it gives off strong mid-twentieth century vibes of twilight sleep, enemas, and fathers barred from the delivery room. Enormous damage to the maternal-infant bond is wrought in the hospital, via the drugs used in labor as well as the atmosphere and attitudes of the institution, which doesn’t help mothers adjust to the enormous, exhausting job of caring for a newborn. It’s too much to do alone, but the machine world has made off with the army of helpers that new parents need. They’re all on the assembly line, maximizing their economic potential at paid jobs.
School looms large in the modern child’s life. As Williams reflects, “we use schools, to which we send our children to enhance our own efficiency in the workplace, to engineer our children as the best of the Americans.” Parents become so obsessed with optimizing their children’s education that there is little room left for nurturing the unique gifts of their individual children. While it’s true that there are parents who force their children through multiple rounds of preschool entrance exams or who call up the dean to put pressure on a professor to give their child a better grade, it’s also true that most American parents are too overwhelmed or too checked out to pay much attention to their children’s education or formation. What does it say about society that the end of summer vacation is eagerly awaited by many parents? Williams shares that one year, her city postponed the beginning of school by two weeks. The decision was greeted by “widespread parental dismay.”
Although Williams focuses on the younger years, the assembly line doesn’t end as kids leave school. The modern world lives on money, which forces most adults into wage slavery, giving their prime years to scaldie jobs and traffic jams, grinding away their health so that when they finally reach retirement (provided no economic disaster wipes out their savings), they have only a few years left before the medical specter starts knocking, sucking those hard-earned dollars out of their accounts (and the next generation’s paychecks). When their bodies or minds finally wear out enough, then it’s off to the retirement home to molder until the medical industry decides it’s no longer cost effective to keep them alive. In the modern world, old people in particular fit Williams’ category of the “useless ones,” but it doesn’t have to be this way. Old people and babies are meant for each other—who better to snuggle the little ones while passing down the wisdom of generations?
Modern society is not alone in devaluing motherhood. Williams cites the ancient playwright Aeschylus’ play The Furies, in which Orestes, son of King Agamemnon, is on trial for killing his mother, Clytemnestra. The goddess Athena organizes a trial with the Furies as prosecutors and Apollo as the defense attorney. As Williams explains, “kin bloodshed in Greek religion was a terrible offense,” so Apollo hits upon the unusual strategy of arguing clemency for Orestes on the grounds that Clytemnestra was not actually a blood relative. As Apollo puts it: “the one named mother / is not the child’s true parent but the nurturer / of the newly sown seed. Man mounts to create life / whereas woman is a stranger fostering a stranger.” Apollo can even point to Athena as living proof that you don’t need a mother, since she was born from Zeus’ head. If you can believe it, Apollo’s argument wins the day. Even as Williams uses this play to illustrate the devaluing of motherhood, she adds that Apollo’s argument doesn’t represent the most common Greek viewpoint on pregnancy. A side-by-side comparison with other strands of Greek thought would be helpful to get a sense of the variety of views the Greeks held on pregnancy, as even today, people have a diversity of opinions, running the gamut from an unborn baby being a perfect parasite to pregnancy as woman’s opportunity to become co-creator with God.
That said, it has become increasingly common to view pregnancy as a health hazard. As Williams points out, it’s strange to label abortion as health care, as it implies that a “healthy woman, by this definition, is one who is not with child.” In fact, the logic here leads to the idea that mothers are “those who have willfully chosen to engage in something that will make them terribly, horribly and irreversibly sick (and poor!) for a long time.” This is a very excellent point. Pathologizing of pregnancy leads right into the hands of abortion advocates. Yet later in the book, Williams writes of how “many mothers spend the first trimester feeling nauseated or even violently sick . . . the third trimester is a time when virtually no woman is comfortable.” It’s true that for many women, the process of creating, carrying, birthing, and nurturing new life has become increasingly difficult in a world run by machines, but this is not how motherhood is meant to be. Woman’s birthright, which the machine world destroys, is beautifully illuminated by many pre-modern cultures, which understood that careful preparation for birth—beginning even before conception—is critical for avoiding so many of the problems that afflict women nowadays.
Williams makes a creepily good connection between the rationale for Canada’s awful medical suicide program and the reality of caring for a baby in the modern world. When surveyed why they were choosing death, people gave the following reasons: “loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities;” “loss of ability to perform activities of daily living;” “inadequate control of pain or concern;” “perceived burden on family, friends, or caregivers;” and “isolation or loneliness.” As Williams astutely notes, all those same reasons can describe mothers of young children. That should set alarm bells ringing! The loving circle of women caring for each other has gone missing in the modern world, and mothering has become such an isolating, exhausting experience that it drives some women temporarily crazy. What a shame that the only solution society thinks to offer these overwhelmed mothers is drugs and therapy.
As Williams notes, ours is a culture of death, one that has drifted from and even consciously rejects its Christian foundation, which, with its bold doctrine that we humans are created in the image of God, redeems people that many elite ancient Greeks and Romans considered worthless: mothers, children, old people, widows, childless women, orphans, the disabled and sick. The power of this doctrine shows up in a comparison of the writings of ancient pagans and Christians. Williams explains that while ancient Romans apparently loved to write instructional manuals of all kinds—from interpreting dreams to cooking to how to choose a good warhorse or survive a siege—“there is one topic on which no pagan writer ever wrote a how-to treatise: caring for others.” In contrast, ancient Christian writing abounds with such subjects, and many ancient Christians took such words to heart and diligently cared for others, such as Macrina the Younger, who rescued abandoned infants. It would be great to include a few more examples that illustrate Williams’ argument that it is Christianity that teaches us to care for the “useless ones.” Two that come to mind are St. Dionysius’ description of a plague outbreak in Alexandria, where Christians survived much better because they cared for each other instead of shoving the afflicted out into the streets to die at the first hint of illness. Another comes from Emperor Julian’s letters, who, in attempting to restore the old gods in the fourth century, wrote to Arsacius, high priest of Galatia, urging him and his priests to not be outcompeted by Christian piety and generosity to the poor.
I don’t think I’m the only one who learned pitifully little about the classical world in school, and I quite enjoyed the peek into ancient history provided in the book. The story of the martyrs Perpetua and Felicity, two young mothers thrown to the beasts in the arena because they wouldn’t deny their faith, is still inspiring almost two thousand years later. This ancient heritage is critical for understanding where so many of our cherished ideals spring from, especially as people think they can toss Christianity away. That said, it’s important that these old stories be told with all their nuance. Father Abraham comes in for an unfair drubbing in the book, as does his wife, Sarah. The story of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah as told in the Bible is complicated. Clearly, there were some difficult family dynamics, the details of which have been lost in the sands of time, but by trying to place these ancient ones in their environment and understand why they made the choices they did, we can practice the same charity and compassion that gave the early Christians strength and motivation to care for the “useless” ones of their times. This is especially critical in a time when interest in the classical world is reawakening, particularly among young men who are unimpressed with the current state of society (and the academy). They’re daydreaming of Odysseus. They want there to be heroes again. Giving the old stories a fair shake demonstrates the glorious news of Christianity—we are all redeemable.
I very much appreciate Williams’ efforts to revalue motherhood. I’ve felt the devaluing of motherhood myself. In fact, not too long ago, I was talking with someone I’ve known for a couple of years. She mentioned that her daughter was studying to go to law school. Now, in the far-distant past, I went to law school too, and I wanted to warn her daughter about it. But I didn’t get a chance. Scarcely had I gotten the words, “I went to law school,” out of my mouth when this woman’s eyes got big, and she said, “You went to law school?” I nodded. “You went to all that work, and you’re not doing anything with it?” she continued. I laughed. I knew she wasn’t trying to be mean. I tried to explain how I had every intention of taking the bar right after I graduated—several people had warned me not to put off taking it even if I didn’t practice law anytime soon. But that advice didn’t factor in that our first child was born a few months after my graduation, just as my husband was beginning a very intense doctoral program located thousands of miles away from where we had grown up. Nobody mentioned that you can’t really study for or take a test that lasts several days when you have a nursing baby and don’t pump. I had to face the fact that the advice everyone had given me didn’t measure up to reality.
Well, that’s what I wanted to say, but my acquaintance was too busy insisting that I start practicing law to pay much attention to any explanation I might have. “We need good lawyers,” she urged me. “You’ve got to use your degree.” I’m pretty sure the world doesn’t need any more lawyers, good or bad, but I made some polite noises that perhaps when the kids were grown I’d think about it. (Yeah, when hell freezes over. I’d rather snuggle my grandkids.) I came home and told my husband, “Guess what I learned today? I’ve thrown my life away.” He laughed too. He’s suffered through enough awkward social interactions because his wife is “just” a mom. He knows as well as I do that the work of caring for little ones has become devalued and degraded. Society is at the point now that even a Christian pro-natalist can say in all seriousness that babysitting small children is pretty easy because they’re content to “watch Moana on repeat.” (Dare I include his description of babies as “screaming little poop factories?”)
Babies deserve better. So do mothers. We need a new/old way forward, one that has more imaginative solutions than better maternity leave or universal daycare (from the government-wonk lovers) and high-end mommy hotels and post-partum doulas (from the free marketeers). Even among the wannabe Caesars on the internet dreaming of alternative world orders, there is embarrassingly little talk of how they’re going to take care of mothers and babies and all the other vulnerable people too. Guess what, guys? Heroes start out as babies. They need good mothers…and good fathers. You can’t go gallivanting about conquering everything and leave mother struggling alone at home. Whatever empire you build will crumble. There is a better model than that of the ancient heroes. Of all the names the Creator of heaven and earth could go by, He chooses the title of Father. It is His work and glory “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” So whatever value motherhood gets assigned on earth, it’s pretty clear what position it holds on high. You may feel invisible here, but you certainly aren’t in Heaven.
Image Credit: Mary Cassatt “Young Mother Sewing” (1900) via Wikimedia Commons
