It is the spring of 2009, and I am a senior in high school when my religion teacher assigns a “marriage” project. Over the next several weeks, in the name of exposure to real-world finances, I suppose, my classmates and I plan pretend weddings and balance mock household budgets.
Even more absurd than pricing reception venues as a teenager, however, are our flour babies.
Our flour babies, the fruit of our hypothetical marriages, are actual bags of flour that we must carry with us everywhere, as though they were our children. If they break, our teacher warns, we fail the project. The boys carry them under their arms like footballs. We girls dress them in newborn onesies for extra protection, or maybe to indulge our burgeoning maternal instincts.
It was my first foray into motherhood, and the last time I’d ever get a grade for it.
Now, eight years later, I have quit my job to take care of my real baby boy, and I would really love a grade on how I’m doing. Not only are my postpartum hormones causing me to feel as insecure and emotional as my adolescent self, I am realizing that my entire life until this point was oriented toward clear ends. First grades, then success at work. I ran marathons in my free time. Productivity was my North Star, and without it—and, with a needy newborn, I am very much without it—I am lost.
Meanwhile, my infant seems to neither need nor appreciate my modest collection of academic, professional and athletic achievements.
I am hardly the first mother to struggle with the transition from working professionally to caretaking at home. Paula Henry, a mom of two now-teenagers, has a Ph.D. in hearing sciences. She quit her high-paying job as a research audiologist when her children were 8 and 6, she said, and she found the transition challenging.
“I felt like my identity was tied to my career,” Ms. Henry told me. “I didn’t know how to introduce myself without having one.”
Indeed, the scope of full-time caretaking roles can be difficult to describe, although some have tried to quantify it. Every year Salary.com updates its estimate of what stay-at-home mothers’ combined tasks would earn in the current market, recently as much as $184,000 per year (you can calculate your own based on your number of children, ZIP code and typical weekly tasks).
Yet the question of working versus staying home with children does not lend itself to the neat comparison such figures might suggest.
“It’s a different kind of hard,” Shae Gaier told me over the phone, her toddler son audible in the background as we talked. Ms. Gaier scaled back her work as a physical therapy assistant to one day a week when her son was an infant.
“When I’m in patient care, I have that instant gratification where patients are, within 30 minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can move my leg. I feel so much better.’ I don’t get a lot of that at home,” she continued. “The reward is much delayed.”
Ms. Gaier, who likes to cook, mentioned that she does feel the reward of her efforts when her family sits together around the dinner table at the end of a long day. But “delayed” gratification is an understatement if the ultimate goal of parenting is to guide a child to become a thriving, faithful adult. Even many of the little moments of satisfaction along the way are often fleeting. A happy, snuggly toddler in one moment can be a screaming mess 10 minutes later, just as dirty dishes seem to reappear on the kitchen table as soon as the sink is finally empty.
My son learns to crawl and babble, and even as he is growing and changing, I continue to struggle to make sense of our daily life. The problem is not one of purpose or conviction: He needs care, and I want to care for him. It is important work, I know this, and furthermore it is a privilege to be able to stretch our finances so I can be at home.
But as a new mom, I sometimes worry that this season, for all its tender joys, is happening at the expense of my sense of self. Looking to my peers does not help. Most of them are working, attending graduate school or traveling the world, pursuits that make for interesting conversation at social gatherings. When I tell other people about my baby—what a marvel he is!—I search their faces for signs of boredom, signs that I’ve retreated so far into our little world that I’ve forgotten how to connect with the one outside.
If I’m going to thrive as a mother, I realize, I need a different way to understand my vocation, a set of values other than the ones I’ve absorbed from a society that seems to value only academic or professional accomplishments.
Today, after several years—and two more children—I am finding my footing. And the answer, which continues to unfold with prayer, reading and taking care of our growing family, comes from an unlikely place: contemplative religious life.
Tracing the history from the hermits and ascetics of the early church to the formation of orders like the Carmelites and the Benedictines, I notice how the men and women who live the contemplative life are able to eschew the worldly success to which I continue to gravitate. The very features of my day-to-day life that can demoralize me—the solitude, the repetitive and mundane tasks—are essential to theirs.
These days, my interest is drawn to the contemplative life more than the corporate world. I find myself asking: What might moms like me have to learn from the men and women who dedicate their lives to prayer?
A Different Rule of Life
In a historical context, the experience of 21st-century mothers is unusually isolated. Many of us live far away from family and friends, or simply not close enough for the types of spontaneous visits or convenient babysitting opportunities that help to keep connections strong. Public communal spaces outside of home and work, often called “third” spaces, are dwindling. This means that for many mothers, a significant portion of the day is spent solely in the company of our children.
“Being at home can be incredibly lonely, especially when you don’t have family in the area,” Ms. Henry told me. “You crave adult conversation.”
Apart from the absence of companionship, solitude also has a way of exacerbating our fears, insecurities and general restlessness, all of which can be difficult to process—and often are things we intentionally avoid dealing with—amid the busyness of our modern lives.
The quiet that we find in the early years of motherhood is not always, or even usually, literal quiet. The baby is crying; the toddler’s thumping footsteps are audible even to our next-door neighbors. But the lack of the mental stimulation of school or professional work is a silence of its own. My thoughts are free to wander, and they do.
Yet those things that cause us some discomfort—that we even habitually avoid—are precisely what the Desert Fathers sought. Beginning in the third century, these early monastics left the comforts of the world behind to pursue austere lives of prayer (most notably in the Scetes Desert in Egypt). Solitude and silence were central to their spiritual ascent.
“Solitude is not simply a means to an end. Solitude is its own end,” Henri Nouwen writes in The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. “It is the place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of this world.”
The Desert Mothers and Fathers also prioritized routine manual labor. But while I sometimes dread the cleaning, cooking and other repetitive manual tasks of my daily life, such repetition is a valued part of the rule of a contemplative religious life. Indeed, most contemplative orders practice manual labor in service of the community’s needs and prayer. “Understand that, if your task is in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans, helping you in all things spiritual and temporal,” writes St. Teresa of Ávila, a Carmelite and doctor of the church, in her Book of the Foundations (1610).
The author and poet Kathleen Norris has written at length about her attraction to the lives and spirituality of Benedictine monks. I asked her what she might say to moms like me, who worry that the repetitive and mundane nature of their lives represents a regression from who they were before children.
Repetition, Ms. Norris wrote to me, is “a fact of life.”
“It does seem to intensify in everyday domestic tasks, and especially motherhood,” she added. “But this is another area in which I’ve learned much from the Benedictines. Why repeat the Psalms, every day, all day, and when you finish all 150 of them, start again? Why say the Lord’s Prayer together every day, three times a day?”
Indeed, Ms. Norris compares our everyday tasks to liturgies in her book The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work.” “Like liturgy, the work of cleaning draws much of its meaning and value from repetition, from the fact that it is never completed, but only set aside until the next day,” she writes. “Both liturgy and what is euphemistically called ‘domestic’ work also have an intense relation with the present moment.”
The present moment is where we find God, who is always waiting for us there—or, rather, here. And I find it hard to imagine better teachers of living in the present than children, whose rootedness in the physical, the immediate, alternates between charming and frustrating. The maintenance of our adult lives, which we often complete without thinking—eating, bathing, sleeping—are, for them, insurmountable without help.
And so we rock the baby, we spoon-feed bites of oatmeal, we change diapers. These make few demands on the education and professional skills our society prizes, but they offer us something else instead: the opportunity for prayer, interior stillness, even simply the use of our imaginations, while reminding us that God gave us souls and bodies. We are meeting a human need in a particular moment, and there is real value in that.
Ms. Gaier told me that some of these daily tasks have in fact become much-needed opportunities for prayer for her, since her son is such an early riser that she can no longer pray by herself in the morning. “I’m doing laundry already, so I might as well turn it into some quiet time,” she explained.
A parent’s days are not nearly as regimented as a cloistered nun’s, but they contain some similar elements: the relative separation from the world, the inner quiet, the manual labor. Maybe what God intends for me and other mothers in this season is not merely some sacrificial pause on what we consider our “real” lives, but rather greater union with him in the prayer and humility afforded by the sacred “now.”
“I’ve often felt that the parents of young children are some of the most accomplished ascetics I know,” reflected Ms. Norris.
Certainly we are in good company among the church’s contemplative saints. More importantly, we are in divine company. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, a Carmelite canonized by Pope Francis in 2016, often reminded her friends and family that—even amid their lives in the world—they needed only to descend into the “cell” within their hearts to be with God.
As she wrote to her mother, “At every moment of the day and night the three Divine persons are living within you.”
An Ancient Temptation
Of course, our habits matter. Many of us—myself included—have become so attached to our devices that we rarely miss an opportunity to check in with the digital world, driven no doubt in part by the very isolation we are examining.
Through his first six months, my firstborn is hungrier far more often than everyone says is typical for an infant his age, and we spend hours upon hours nursing. Sometimes I watch TV while feeding him; more often, I scroll through my Instagram feed. I’ve recently followed some other Catholic moms, desperate for a sense of kinship as I go about my quiet days, but it isn’t helping.
If anything, social media causes more restlessness than before. I know that this little apartment is where God has asked me to be, but there are moments when I would rather be almost anywhere else, doing almost anything else. My phone makes it easy to imagine that this is so: Picture after picture shows me all the ways I could be spending my life, from packing our family into a camper van for a year of cross-country travel to selling beauty products online. And the minutes tick slowly by.
Here again we can look to the early monastics. They did not have smartphones, but they did have a keen understanding of human nature and the perils of their way of life. One is especially relevant today: the temptation of acedia.
Acedia, often called the “noonday demon” for its propensity to strike in the middle of the day, means “losing heart for your job,” said Robin Darling Young, a professor of church history at the Catholic University of America and an expert on monasticism.
“You get bored with what you’re doing,” as Dr. Darling Young described it. “You can’t read. You fall asleep. You go and look out the window and you see whether you can see anybody to talk to.”
Or, perhaps, you reach for your phone and see if anyone has texted you or posted anything interesting lately.
Acedia is a distaste for the spiritual good to which God is calling us, and furthermore an indifference to that distaste. And if it “arises out of repetition and loneliness,” as Dr. Darling Young explained, then we mothers—like the monks—are at particular risk of its perils.
It is important to note that acedia is a spiritual problem, distinct from depression and other mental illnesses requiring mental health care. Furthermore, while our emotional state can sometimes rightly point to where our lives need a change, acedia afflicts us when we are exactly where we ought to be.
So it is on my living room couch with my firstborn. At the time, I am not familiar with the word acedia—it has, after all, been largely forgotten to the modern Christian lexicon—and I find myself unable to explain the torpor that defines my long afternoons.
When I do read about acedia, years later, it is like turning a flashlight to some of the darker corners of my heart. By now it’s 2021, I’m pregnant with our third baby, and I’ve recently been laid off from a part-time job that I loved. The insecurities and restlessness I experienced as a new mom have come rushing back, and I realize that my sense of self has been, once again, depending on my job title and what I can produce.
Fortunately, the mere recognition of acedia ignites in me a desire to be rid of it, itself a step in the right direction. I tear through several books about it, which tell me to stay the course, to stick to my responsibilities. The Desert Fathers have their own remedies, prayer and manual work among them.
This time, I remove all my social media apps from my phone, and I do my best to resist fleeing the tedium. Over time, something miraculous happens: A quiet calm begins to take root. I begin to relish the extra time to think, to pray. More and more it feels possible to descend into my heart during the day, where—as St. Elizabeth of the Trinity writes—God resides. I am startled one day to notice that I am happy most of the time. Actually, truly happy, even when I’m wiping down the kitchen table or driving to the pediatrician’s office.
Mark Thibodeaux, S.J., is the author of Armchair Mystic: How Contemplative Prayer Can Lead You Closer to God. I asked him how we might live contemplatively—he defines contemplation as “sitting in stillness”—outside of a dedicated prayer time.
“I think the way to be contemplative here today is to just be fully present to the very ordinary task that God is asking you to do at the moment,” he reflected.
A Specific Call
It is difficult to discuss vocations without generalizing them. Vocations are, after all, individual calls, even if we sort them into broader categories. Even the early monastics, whom I admit to picturing as eccentric hermits subsisting on locusts and honey like John the Baptist, lived in a variety of ways.
“There was no one set way to be a solitary,” Dr. Darling Young clarified, noting that some lived alone, others more communally, and that their lives varied quite a bit across cultures, languages and regions. Furthermore, most had at least some contact with the outside world, engaging in work and commercial transactions as needed to support themselves. Today’s contemplative religious orders likewise differ from one another, and even from community to community within the same order.
Neither is there one set way to be a mother. So to compare motherhood to contemplative religious life is to risk idealizing, or at least simplifying, one or both vocations. The right balance of professional work and caretaking, as well as how and when we meet God during the day, is ours to discern as individuals (perhaps aided by some trial and error).
Still, to the extent that we find ourselves steeped in diapers and dishes—whether from dawn to dusk, or before and after a busy day at the office, or some combination thereof—we may find interior peace, if not literal silence, in recognizing that such tasks do not diminish us. Perhaps finding that inner stillness, in the measure that our circumstances permit, addresses the compulsion to achieve that can make the transition to motherhood so rocky.
Our circumstances will, of course, change. Ms. Henry is herself in a different season from when she first quit her job. Now that her children are in high school and college, she said, she has more time for personal prayer during the day and participates in a weekly Bible study. When we spoke, she was planning to join the Eucharistic procession to the National Eucharistic Congress as it passed through her state.
As my children get older—my firstborn, that sweet baby boy, is now 7—my daily life gets busier and louder. Maybe one day I’ll feel drawn to a different way to pray (just as some mothers may balk at the suggestion that any quiet reflection is possible with children around). But that’s for another season to figure out.
As Father Thibodeaux put it, “I really believe strongly that we all need to give each other permission to let the prayer life fit the vocation.”