The Business of Motherhood
By Gerry Wisz

The Sunday New York Times "Job Market" column by Lisa Belkin is among the most widely read in the New York metro area these days, mainly because there isn't much of a job market to speak of in New York. Lisa gets mail. Recently she was barraged, not because of an unusual insight for job seekers, but because of her review of Ann Hewlett's new book, Creating a Life, in which the oracular author writes that women's "success" can be gauged by whether or not they have children, and if they do, how many.

Belkin's generally adulatory review triggered a response that quickly filled her mailbox with emotion-laden messages from America's female corporate elite. Take Isabella Spiegel, for example, a corporate vice president. She writes to Belkin, "The day after my college graduation I began my corporate climb. I worked longer hours than anyone around me. I sit here now with two masters degrees, wishing I had stopped to pause for a child."

Or what about Robin, a marketing executive who postponed marriage until she was 35 to pursue her career, only to find now, at age 39, that, "my chances of conceiving are at best 25 percent" and that there is at least as high a percentage chance of a miscarriage were she to conceive. "It's high time.Hewlett and feminist pundits like her stop speaking for women as a whole," another frazzled, female corporate emailer wrote Belkin.

One senses the frustration in these messages. Though likely written from within sprawling ranch homes in the burbs with a Mercedes SUV parked in the driveway, they are messages conveying the anguish of diminished expectations. Somewhere along the line, these followers of the cultural mantra that one can have it all discovered that they couldn't after all. Now, they are angry because they have been lied to, and, of course, because they have believed the lie and are now living with the consequences. Their cleaning help have more fulfilling family lives and a brighter prospect for an intergenerational future than they do.

Believing the Lie

We can go to Proverbs 31 to find the fulfilled, meaningful life of a wife and mother who is "busy at home." Even common sense tells us something about childbearing and its implications for posterity, the fulfillment of mothering and child training - despite its challenges in a sinful world -- and the importance of this not only to a "functional" nuclear family, but to a social order as a whole.

Part of the lie that began circulating in the 1960's and is current today as common nonsense is that a wife and mother at home is "powerless." Kept ignorant, barefoot and pregnant, she contributes nothing of substance to the family besides keeping things clean and orderly. Her husband's every wish is her command, and she is destined to a dowdy life shorn of meaning and intellectual fruitfulness.

Take it from a husband of a wife and mother at home -- nothing could be further from the truth. My wife is my business manager, my confidante, my advisor and my friend. I alone am enough to keep her busy, yet amazingly I am only one pie piece (though I trust an important one) in my wife's overall daily scheme of responsibilities. I'd be the first to admit I could not do all that she does - and even if I could, not with the same grace.

In fact, I know of no Christian wives that are "powerless." Most women married to Christian men I consider friends are not only "busy at home," but otherwise as well: they teach or administrate part time in Christian schools, are involved in ministry to the destitute or troubled, manage the daily affairs of their households, many of them either help their husbands in their businesses or ministries and/or have small businesses of their own, many are college educated and some have graduate degrees.

Most contribute to the family's bottom line - some substantially. All contribute to the family's spiritual health in ways that are immeasurable this side of glory. They are busy women who are happy, healthy and laugh easily. They are, in other words, modern versions of the woman in Proverbs 31.

Family Economics

There are two ways of looking at family economics. One, the "earn-and-spend" model, measures success by the size of earned income to obtain things now while also having enough left over to retire without dramatically changing one's lifestyle from when one was working. The illusion that one can unequivocally control all this is an added irrational component.

Everything else -- including genuine quality of life, children and their inclusion -- must of necessity be subordinated to the above goal. The results are predictable: swings between intolerance and guilt instead of love prevail in regard to children (whether one has any or not); individual spousal goals, usually focused on work-related realities, drive couples down separate paths instead of down one together; and alienation intensifies among family members as the years turn into decades.

The other way of looking at family economics is to measure success by the achievement of commonly agreed-upon goals - whether children's education, ministry, business growth, career or career change, or anything else. Regardless of how large or small, income becomes a tool for success rather than, strictly speaking, its measurement. The rearing of children, walking together, and the constant working on relationships as conditions change (children's ages, for example) never take a back seat to one of the tools (income) of life.

It's no secret that wives and mothers - who are both the supportive and the supported -- thrive in the second scenario. They are not "creating a life," they are living to the fullest the one apportioned to them. In the first scenario, they are left to fend for themselves, perhaps not so much financially as emotionally and in every other way, and so must indeed be very "creative." Except under special calling, they were not meant to operate this way, and so it's no wonder that things eventually go bad when they continually feel forced to.

Scripture tells us that God takes a woman and makes her fruitful and happy at home (Ps. 113:9). We, of course, believe that this is God's blessing, though it may not always seem so for Mom. She is not worse for wear, however. In fact, just the opposite is true: placing herself willingly in God's economy she finds, perhaps surprisingly, that she could never have hoped for anything more meaningful. And instead of worrying about her future in the boardroom or the state of her 401(k) or whether Jamie will finally stop crying when dropped off at day care, "she can laugh at the days to come."

The "Ms." Spiegels and Robins of our time do not know this holy hilarity and lightness of being. Even sadder is their institutionally programmed selfishness, of which they also are apparently unaware (One, remember, wishes she "had stopped to pause" - as though at a traffic light on the way to work - for "a" child.) "The job" and its real or imagined bestowal define who they are even while they are confessing. There is no joy in their words, nor do they demonstrate the ability to view their situation outside themselves - something faithful mothers have learned to do almost by sanctified second sense, knowing it is better to give than to receive.

Can there be any question about to whom the future really belongs?

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The Business of Motherhood By Gerry Wisz

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The Business of Motherhood
By Gerry Wisz