Looks like I'm going to be blogging again, eventually

I think I'm going to start another blog again . . . but I want to be a lot more prepared this time around, so I probably won't start publishing for months. It might be 2010 before I get going.

I got some definite interest from one Catholic forum on the idea of creating resources for Catholic WOHMs. However, it wasn't quite overwhelming enough for me to want to make this a priority and declare it a clear vocation. This subject is important enough to me that I want to spend more time thinking about it and seeing what I can come up with, but I want to approach it very much in a "We'll see how it goes" fashion, with the recognition that this attitude means that I may never make any meaningful progress.

I'm thinking that the blog won't be geared towards just WOHMs. This is because I want to learn from SAHMs. They already have done a lot to discern about living Catholic daily lives when busy, figuring out how to support each other as women and mothers, and are able to balance different styles without demeaning each other.

Another reason to write for SAHMs as well is to make sure that I can speak to WOHMs without demeaning mothers who are home with their children full-time, many of whom have sacrificed to do this. Also, I want to send a clear message that the "Mommy Wars" aren't necessary and aren't Catholic. They are a construct of society. The goal of all Catholic mothers should be to serve their God, their families, and their community. For some women, they will need to be employed to do this to the fullest, giving to their families indirectly through their paychecks. For others, they will need to stay home and give more of themselves directly to their family.

My thought for a blog name is "Mary and Gianna" - as in, Mother Mary and St. Gianna. I think these women encapsulate the essence of the "employed vs. at-home" mother 'debate' as it should be framed by Catholics. Clearly Mary is the perfect woman, who served God in an especially feminine and fulfilling way by mothering Jesus with her entire life. Yet St. Gianna was called by God to serve in a very different way despite also being a mother, by serving her community through her employment as well until the birth of her fourth child (and her subsequent death). It is difficult to find much information about St. Gianna's work-life balance, sadly (I'm hoping her love letters will give me some clues), but the Vatican posts on their website that, "With simplicity and equilibrium she harmonized the demands of mother, wife, doctor and her passion for life."

I think this expresses a healthy philosophy - that mothers who dedicate their lives to their children, especially during the early years, fulfill a special vision of feminine and maternal virtue that is shown most clearly and beautifully in the Mother of Our Lord. However, this does not mean that this is the only path to feminine, maternal virtue! Employed mothers need to find ways to serve God, family, and community that may not be the same as mothers who are able to be in the home and community more, rather than in a workplace. In discerning these ways we can serve, we can draw from church teachings on women, motherhood, and labor, and also from fathers and other men who have been combining holiness and employment as the normal way of life for so long.

I won't be able to put much energy into this until at least autumn. I really want to get a few more big projects done in the yard, mostly filling up or covering the old ponds so they aren't a safety hazard (kids playing outside unaccompanied - yay!).

First step on "being the change" has been taken.

I just threw a post up on a Catholic forum asking other employed mothers if they wanted something like the support for SAHMs from a Catholic perspective. If I get good responses, I'll probably post around in a few other places to see if the good response is consistent. I threw it up about ten minutes ago, and already have about three replies, so that's a good sign :)

If there is enough interest, I'll probably kick off a blog on the topic as a low-commitment way to gauge further the interest in such a project, to gauge my own ability to commit to such a project on top of everything else (very important to know!), to practice writing on the topic, to build community, and to start storing up a collection of links, articles, and research that maybe could later go into a book on the subject.

What does the Catholic church say about WOHMs?

I love the way the Catholic church and its members support SAHMs, especially in the face of secular attitudes towards feminism and motherhood. I love the way it validates, uplifts, and upholds their work as the fulfillment of feminine virtue.

What I don't love is the resounding near-silence from most of the church and its members when it comes to employed moms. It's not that employed moms should be treated as an "alternate ideal", because there are good, sound reasons for mothers to generally be more involved with home life and less involved with employed life, while fathers take the opposite path in general. Yet so many mothers are employed, and many for good reasons, while the amount of support for these mothers from the church is very small. I ache every time I read one of the many wonderful articles or reviews of books written to support SAHMs, or hear about a great program like "Mary and Martha" that helps women discover their path to follow Christ in their homes, not because I resent them, but because I feel the same need for guidance that those mothers must feel - but don't get these wonderful, considerate answers that they do.

There is a saying: Be the change you want to see in the world. I'm trying to figure out if I can do this, somehow. Could I do something to give mothers like mea sense of community and holiness in their lives? Do other mothers even feel this want the way I do, or am I just different somehow? If it's not just me, can I do this in a way that does not diminish the virtues and work of SAHMs, but rather ties together motherly virtue and the workplace in such a way that WOHMs feel united with our sisters in Christ who serve their families in the homes? Can the rich advice and abundant guides to holiness for SAHMs, combined with church teachings on daily labor, give employed mothers a guide to living the virtues they've been given with the life that they've been given, so we don't feel excluded from the blessings of church community by the circumstances that lead to our employment outside the home?

I think that such a philosophy would flow quite naturally from church teachings, when those teachings are closely examined by anyone with personal experience in this area. And I want to know what this philosophy would look like. Surely there is information available. There have been saints who have pursued daily work while living holy lives, most pertinently St. Gianna. Nor can I believe that the church does not speak to the many men who labor for their families - surely many principles that apply to these men will apply to many women as well.

At the same time, such a task would be daunting at a time when there is so much else happening in my life. It would take research, interviews, networking, lots of thought, analysis of other women's needs, consideration of my own biases, community building, and so much more. Some of these tasks suit my introverted, analytical nature - but many would require me to step well outside of my comfort zone, asking for help and support from people I may admire or consider better than myself to complete this project, and interacting with many strangers over a potentially very personal topic.

I also expect that this would be less a situation of philosophy formation than of discovery. I think the answers are already out there, just buried under controversy and confusion arising from "Mommy Wars", radical feminism, and secular voices that praise employed mothers for all the wrong reasons. These are real controversies, but I firmly believe that they result from confusion, rather than from any real opposition - and "the truth will set you free." I want to uncover the hidden message of what God's revelation means for the employed mother's daily life, so we can enjoy the same rich meaning that I see in the lives of SAHMs.

The cultural weirdness of being a breadwinning mom

I've started realizing that the label "WOHM" does not work well to describe what I do. Recently, I've run across the phrase "breadwinning mom" - and it's the phrase I was looking for in this post on searching for labels that fit me well.

So, why is it weird to be a "breadwinning mom"? Well, first of all, there's my friends. My husband and I have relatively traditional family values, and believe that having a parent care for the children is important and that family comes first. Because of this, the families we get along with are traditional families - including lots of SAHMs. In other words, my closest female friends have a schedule that is very different from mine. During the times that the working spouse traditionally gets the kids out of the SAHP's hair, I am caring for the kids and they may be getting a much needed break from their children. Is this impossible to work around? Well, no! Of course not. But still, it's just one more thing that takes a little more work.

Then there is that reoccuring theme of "expectations". Our society has some really weird expectations of breadwinning moms, a strange mesh of working-mom and breadwinner responsibilities that has a lot of wrinkles to iron out still. A lot of this is based in our strange expectations of SAHD's, which is a blend of working-dad expectations and SAHP expectations. Basically, what I see is that breadwinning dads expect a SAHD to do everything a SAHM does (and call him 'lazy' if he does anything less, although he may do it in a "manly" fashion, or with less precision and tidyness) - but women (two-income, breadwinner, or SAHM) are more likely to expect a SAHD to care for the children and do a little housework. In other words, they expect him to treat child care as a day job, and not try to integrate in the many other responsibilities of a homemaker. The problem is that this means that the breadwinning mom carries the responsibility for managing the home, according to these expectations. It's taken me some time, but I'm starting to realize that men - naturally - have a better grasp of the breadwinning role and how to make it work. I need to look to their lifestyle first, and then modify it to fit me as a woman and mother. Unfortunately, there really aren't mixed gender support groups for breadwinners the way there are for stay-at-home parents; support groups are more a "female" thing.

Finally, there is the new appreciation I have for the life of a breadwinning dad, for the role that men have filled for generations. There has been a renaissance of appreciation for the SAHM in recent years - a long-overdue celebration of a role that has lately been viewed as mindless, unchallenging, and unimportant. However, there are challenges for breadwinner dads that I think many moms don't understand. I'm going to put a line divider here, because the rest of this post is about breadwinners, in general.

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CHALLENGES OF BEING A BREADWINNER

Firstly, a breadwinning parent is placing his or her home and children largely into someone else's care. It helps that this person is a loving spouse and a partner in life's journey, but there is still that lack of control over so many small aspects of life that is very stressful: Everything from your daily nutrition to the values demonstrated to your children is put into another person's care. Having a spouse who doesn't value something you do - from having clean clothes for work, to healthy meals, or to letting you know about the family's day - is much more difficult when that person is in charge of caring for your clothing, shopping for and cooking your meals, and providing for your children's healthy growth and development. I'm beginning to understand why traditionally men need to be the head of the household: Otherwise, it is easy to have your needs neglected or feel like you don't matter as much because you aren't home as much. This plays out differently when the gender roles are reversed - women stay more involved in family life and parenting as breadwinners, including even having the children turn to them first when they want comfort, even though children are around Dad more. However, it's still a factor for women, I think.

Then there is the stress of having THE job for the family. Even a small reprimand from my boss gives me the jitters now (especially since I was so close to being fired so recently). Even when my husband didn't earn enough to cover our expenses if I was fired, I knew we could stretch our savings or use the credit card to cover the gaps until we fixed the hole in our income. This is true no more, and it changes my responses to household issues. When my clothes are not washed frequently enough, my first thought is "How am I going to keep this from impacting my job? No one wants an employee in stinky clothes". I worry more about my health, and want to excercise and good nutrition so that I can do my best at work. I care more about getting sleep, and am less patient with dealing with the kids in the middle of the night or bedtimes that run late and cut into my sleep. Because I am more stressed about my job, I am also more stressed about those aspects of homemaking that impact my ability to hold my job.

And finally, there is the challenge of context-switching, from the busy office where I *need* to know what's going on and be "in tune", to the home environment where I really am out of touch with the details and my frustrated spouse is having trouble understanding why I don't know where the pepper is (made more confusing by the fact that I once knew where everything was). I understand, now, why breadwinning men are so "useless" around the home: It's not incompetance, it's simply that locating daily objects requires tons of tiny little facts and bits of knowledge that someone who is outside the home ten hours most days and who doesn't manage the home just doesn't pick up.

Some of these breadwinning-men difficulties are more difficult to deal with as a mother, since there is an absurd expectation that I will, through my womanly magic, not have these same problems and continue to be a homemaking maven, the working Super-Mom extrodinaire! At the same time, I have a key advantage over most men: I've been on both sides (all three, if you include two-income homes seperately), so I can see how these attitudes develop. I could head off my husband's frustration by showing how our different sippy-cup locating skills were caused by his skill, not by my incompetance. I'm understanding now how women are actually more likely to sell traditional female work short than men, resulting in the strange expectation that anyone should be able to jump into homemaking work at the drop of a hat and do it as well as an experienced full-time homemaker. I'm understanding that homemaking work isn't as easy as homemakers think, but it is, in fact, years of practice and thoughtfulness that give them their unrecognized expertise.

So curious, that appreciation for breadwinning starts with appreciation for homemaking - but it does. Once you grok fully that "Homemaking is hard, important, and has a huge impact on the family" you suddenly understand why breadwinners can feel unwanted and out of place at home if they don't get some say over the family - why, basically, giving men respect is so important in traditional families. In reverse-traditional families, this seems to play out more as having strong communication between the man and the woman, so the woman doesn't feel out of touch and gets listened to. You get why breadwinners may complain about homemakers who don't take charge of the household fully - we complain because it MATTERS, and impacts us and our ability to care for the family as breadwinners (understanding how complaining shows respect for the work a person should do and communicates valueing that work - when phrased appropriately - was important, in our family). You can especially understand why us breadwinners seem to be less "with it" at home than second-income parents (most working moms) or SAHPs - that it's not incompetance, but rather unfamiliarity with a job that relies heavily on prior experience homemaking in that specific family and house to truly excel.

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I know I keep covering similar ground to this post in my blog, but I'm trying to refine what it is about a reverse-traditional family that is so difficult for so many people trying this family style - and why we have so much trouble discussing these problems openly. SAHDs who don't do their housework duties (and, if you look deeper, home management in general) without a huge push is a reoccurring theme among many families I've talked with (interestingly, mainly in relatively new SAHD families), but a woman who says HER family is experiencing this gets a significant backlash in many circles where she should be able to get support. For a breadwinning mom to say she needs support, even, is to invite criticism. Needing support implies that she is doing something challenging and worthwhile, and somehow that seems to take away from the challenges her husband is facing as a male homemaker and from the worthiness of his work. I believe the truth, of course, is that open support for breadwinning mom challenges would add to the support available for men - but that's another post, and this post is already long enough to be three posts.

I need to write more on WOHPs - what does a good WOHP look like?

This blog is starting to become the diary I've always wanted to keep, but never felt motivated enough to maintain. I love the perspective I get from the comments - not just support, but also subtle questioning about my thinking. Hence three entries today - I'm going through a shift in thought, and documenting it in my diary.

This post is my thoughts about how giving up on responsibility at home has a flip side - I need to start living up to and thinking about my responsibilities at work. Until this point, I've been stressed about home and family. It's more important to me, and what I really care about, so it's what I've been writing about. Home is still important to me, but I've made a decision to conciously spend less time on caring about it. A SAHP is someone you can trust with the things that are most important to you in the whole world, and that is what I am trying to do. I've given myself permission to be disappointed with my husband, and that seems to be important. But while I was focusing too much on things that aren't my job, my actual job has slipped badly. I need to spend some time being disappointed with myself :-) And think about how I can be supportive and encouraging for myself, too.

If this blog is going to be my diary, it's a great place to get myself back on track. A diary doesn't have to just reflect my state of mind - I can use my diary as a tool to actually change my state of mind. Right now, I want to be thinking more about work. When I think about home, I want to be thinking about how I can appreciate and support my spouse and love my children, not about how to fix problems. Why is fixing the operation of our home my responsibility? It's not.

When I think about work, I should be investing the same kind of passion and active involvement that I was putting into my home life. True, I care less about work than about home. Nonetheless, it's my job and it is important. The fact that my work is less important than caring for children and preparing them for the world is no excuse not to do my best. My job is a critical part of my husband's work, giving him the resources he needs to feed, clothe, and care for my children so he can focus on teaching them how to live and on making a home out of our house. So expect more posts on my efforts to be a better employee as a WOHM who can (hopefully) rely on a SAHD, and fewer posts about how to get a reverse-traditional home to function.

While writing this, I had an interesting twist in my thought direction. Because of my desire to encourage and motivate DH, I've been thinking a lot about how important SAHPs are, and how difficult their jobs really are. I need to look at the other side for a bit, now. I want to keep talking about how cool the things DH does are, but I also want to start looking at the WOHP role in our home and in general, and I want to get a better understanding of it. I hear so much about WOHPs who treat their spouses like slaves and never do anything to help out, who are condescending and unfair. But what does a good WOHP look like? What do they do - and what do they not need to worry about, because they are entrusting it to the SAHP?

While writing this, it just hit me that I have very few models for this. I've never really lived in a home with a WOHP (Work Outside the Home Parent) who relied on a SAHP. No wonder I've been getting overinvolved. I really wonder what SAHPs expect from WOHPs. I don't want to be a female version of that wretched, crude, unappreciative WOHD figure at one extreme, but I also don't want to be living like a single mom - trying to "do it all" - either. Yes, I've asked DH for his take on what I should be doing and shouldn't be doing - but he doesn't have a good answer, and I suspect he doesn't really know either. He has said that he doesn't think I should be responsible for any of the work around the house, but I really don't think he should be expecting to do it all without help.

Hrm . . . maybe I should ask for a little help from those who read this blog? In your family, what are the responsibilities of the WOHP? What do you think WOHPs, in general, need to do better? What does a great WOHP look like? Feel free to use WOHD or SAHM (the normal gendered Dad / Mom versions of WOHP, SAHP) or whatever terms work for you - I'm not hung up on being PC.