Am I a Mother or A Fisher of Men?

"Mother" is a stately word that's been handed down to us throughout the generations. As a woman born in the 1970s, I hate to admit that the word "Mother" has taken a hit inside my own, imperfectly formed head. I can talk a good game about Mary, the Mother of God and the spiritual motherhood of St. Teresa of Avila. However, in my deepest core, I often feel like "Mother" also means a woman who is ignored, unimportant,  and a self-made-martyr.

The avalanche of "Hurrah My Kids Are Back in School" updates on Facebook has made me conscious of a division within my own religious community. Caring for small children is hard work. I like to think "we're all in this together!" Honestly, it doesn't matter to me whether a Mom has one kid or eleven. It only takes one kid with colic, or an earache, or a learning disability, or somekind of scary rare health complication to knock the wind out of a Mother's heart. I don't mother six children in my life. I mother six only children in my life. 

There is an undercurrent contained in the usual "Hurrah My Kids Are Back in School" Facebook updates from Mothers that tugs at my overly senstive, artist heart. I believe that so many women share in the  notion that real life can't happen for them whenever small children are in the house. I understand the truth of that belief. I've got a teething son in my house and the word count for my novel has sat unchanged for 10 days.

And yet.... I watched this amazing documentary about a chef in Japan that completely soothed my angst about living in a forgotten part of Appalachian and spending hours cleaning chocolate cake crumbs off the walls. I only clicked on "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" because I'm homeschooling an 8 year old who is insanely into cooking. My support of my daughter's interests open up new pathways of creativity inside my own brain. 

Yesterday when I prayed, I read the passage of Matthew where Jesus calls Peter to drop his fishing net and become a fisher of men. As a Mother, I've been called to drop my legal career (which wasn't a big loss because writing appellate briefs was far more dull to me than fishing on the Sea of Galilee). Now, I sometimes struggle with self-identity in a world that judges who I am by what I do. I'll admit, that cleaning the house from dog hair and cake crumbs does not make for sparkling party conversation. Yet at age 40, it matters to me less what the world thinks of me and more what "I think of me."  I hope I start to better match my own self-reference to God's reference of me.

I am a Fisher of Men. I teach. I clean. I cook. I write. I do these things not because I'm winning somekind of Catholic Motherhood prize. I do these things because service wins influence. I hope that my kids will call me when they are sick with mono when they are in college. I hope that they will call me whenever they are struggling with their faith after a loved ones death. I can't demand that my kids include me into their lives after they become independent adults and most likely, move far away from home. I'm laying a foundation of trust in intimacy that they will carry onward wherever they go. My calmness and my kindness help my children believe that the world is a good and safe place in which to explore.

I live in a modern world where there is a crisis of intimacy. I see so many good, good people who are afraid to get married, who are afraid to buy a house, and who are afraid of raising a child.  There is a kind of loneliness that we have in America, which is unknown throughout most of the Third World. 

I can't fight that loneliness by returning to work at a cool non-profit. I can fight that loneliness by letting myself be loved passionately and deeply and individually by God Himself. Then I can share that type of specific, individual love with the seven people in this world who live inside my own house. 

This Fall, I hope that everyone finds their true purpose in life. It doesn't matter if you are single or married. It doesn't matter if you adopt two kids or had a homebirth of seven kids. It doesn't matter if your choose homeschool, Catholic school, or Public School. Our true purpose as women is to become Fishers of Men for the Lord. I'm totally convinced that the best way to help others, is to become firmly caught by heart by God inside our own lives first and foremost.

May this Fall find you peace, prayer, and lots of pumpkin pie!

My Heirloom Marriage

My husband and I are the only Roman Catholics in our family. My husband got his faith as a deathbed gift of his Grandma Ida. Miss Ida defied her parent's wishes, married a forbidden immigrant at age 17, and then sneaked back into her childhood bedroom. Ida lived for an entire year inside her parents' house in New York City without anyone knowing about her marriage.

Other than a few pictures of Grandma Ida showing off her fur coats in the 1930s and her two marriage dates, one outside and one inside the Catholic Church, I know precious little about the woman who died from cancer when my husband was six.

As she was dying, Grandma Ida made her daughter promise to give her grandson all the sacraments of the Catholic Church. She already had a granddaughter who missed First Communion and Confirmation. Somehow this little grandson would be different. 

When I met my husband he was 27 and more of a "Church of One" kind of guy than a Roman Catholic. He liked his Faith. He attended church about 5 times a year, which classified him as "majorly religious" inside our liberal community of Madison, Wisconsin. Yet he wasn't afraid to disagree with major viewpoints of his Faith. This wasn't just a guy who thought that birth control was great and having children ruined your life. This was a guy who told me that if Jesus refused to come down from heaven to serve humanity then God would have simply given the job to someone else.

At the time I started dating my husband, I was living in the middle of an Inter-Faith Dorm on campus. I calmly had religious discussions over late night cups of tea with Buddhists, Shintos, Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics. My faith discussions with my husband felt totally different. In the end, I changed my religion after I married my husband. Ultimately, he changed his religion after our marriage, also.

Faith is a gift that can be passed down inside a family.  Grandma Ida had given my husband a special packet of heirloom seeds when she died, her Catholic faith. Until Jon's 30s, however, had never planted them. After I became a Catholic, I told my husband "Lets go plant those seeds." Lets plant the actual Roman Catholic faith inside our lives instead of the weird homogenized First World Version everyone else around us is using.

We now have some cool virtues growing inside our lives. We embrace poverty when it feels like everyone else in our social class hopes for more money. We exercise obedience when everyone around us counts themselves as "free thinkers." At a time when we have six young kids at home, we find ourselves making more time for art, exercise, laughter and good food.

My husband is so excited that he planted heirloom sunflowers in our backyard. These sunflowers are smaller and have multiple flower heads on each stalk. The flowers' effect on our family is striking. It's impossible for me to stay in a bad mood while unloading multiple car seats in our minivan with those unusual, striking sunflowers gently nodding in my direction.

I think of my marriage as a precious heirloom seed that got passed down along the generations. I use different recipes and more electronic gadgets than my grandmothers. Yet my love for my children is the same, or even more intense, than the love my grandmothers' had for me. Marriage offered me a place to put down roots and a place to develop trust.  Marriage taught me what unique talents I have to offer the world. Marriage made me more "me."

I have a quiet confidence in the value of tradition. I love my grandmothers. I love the grandmothers' on my husband side who I never got to meet.  I'm grateful to join my voice to the  great chorus of Married Lovers who sing "A New Song" to the Lord today.

A Cinderella Story In Reverse

I had the joy this Spring to hang out with a collection of cheerful 70 year old nuns. Retreats are really important in my life. I discovered the more that I feel like "I can't possibly leave my life" the more urgent need I have for an overnight retreat. This year, I went on a Silent Retreat with my Carmelite Community in March and I expected to find "rest." I had a baby with colic after a high-risk pregnancy. If they passed out Sangria on the beach with Jesus inside a convent, that what I mentally pictured my prayer sessions to be like while I was on Retreat with the King of the World.

Instead, I hung out with the Benedictine Sisters who are all about "Prayer & Work", or Ora et Labora. The Benedictines introduced me to the concept of "resting inside my work." It's a hard concept for me to get because as someone with a sanguine temperament I keep wanting to take frequent breaks on my hard days. What I found, however, is that if I've been good about resting in God when I'm supposed to be resting (i.e. keeping up my Carmelite prayer schedule) then keeping my nose to the grindstone no matter what happens during the working hours of my day can be "restful." 

I think about my life with Christ as a sort of "Cinderella in Reverse" story. I met Christ early in my life. I got super blessed to start receiving him in the Eucharist less than a year after I became a bride. There was this beautiful moment early in my marriage when I started to realize that this affirmation that I was frantically searching for first as a straight A student and then as a workplace star, was already given to me. I was God's "It Girl!" 

Then after falling in love with God, after becoming a princess of the kingdom, He's like "Okay, now go to work scrubbing toilets!" My life is 90% percent about boring, mundane, stupid-to-the-world looking stuff. It's easy for me to get discontent. "Hey God, you said I'm important! Shouldn't I be out doing calls to the sick or something meaningful." 99.9% of the time, The Creator of the Universe says to me, "No, actually I want you to put the allergy pills where your husband can find them easily. Also, your three year old has managed to lose three pairs of shoes inside the house, fix that problem pronto, please." 

It does my heart so good to hang out with the Sisters. The Sisters run a monastery. The run a "retreat center" for the world, where lots of lost souls can find healing in Christ and lots of tired souls can get recharged in Christ. The Sisters are really smart and talented. The Mother Superior has the rare talent of cracking jokes about herself and saying profound things about how to spiritually fight ISIS.

On my best days, I've stopped thinking about my housework as "housework."  Instead, I started thinking about my house as a retreat center. My house is inside the world, but not "of the world." My home is not a Corporate Starbuck's lounge or an impersonal Hotel Lobby. My home not a church, with the formality of the Tabernacle.  My home is a place that is open to my brothers and sisters in Christ, many of whom happen to share my same last name. With the recognition of my home's true function, I've been more brave in inviting really cool people over to my house for dinner. My Cinderella cleaning work helps me become hospitable to others. Learning how to do my hardest tasks "restfully, with God's help" is a gift that I give to myself.