Working as a Mother

Wife and mother is a vocation.

The duties and responsibilities of a wife and mother are not part-time activities; they are a full-time endeavor requiring dedication and commitment to build the skills necessary to be successful. Similar to how one might go to school and/or focus time and efforts toward a career discipline, even more so a wife and mother must dedicate her life to experience the fullest measure of success in her home.

I am confused at the wider range of skills, higher degree of competence, and more demanding and strenuous labor required and demonstrated in my wife compared to my female co-workers, yet my co-workers bear the term “working” while my wife gets branded as “stay-at-home.” Then, to add insult to injury, in spite of the incredible disparity in dedication and endeavor on behalf of the family, the term “mother” seems equally and somewhat arbitrarily applied.

I also think it’s interesting, that we would never encourage would be accountants, doctors, or lawyers to actively pursue other endeavors that would undoubtedly require them to sacrifice time away from their primary studies. You would never hear anyone counseling young budding professionals or tradesmen that they could divert their attentions toward competing pursuits and still effectively master their disciplines and achieve at their highest potential.

In the above instances, dedication and commitment mean 100% of your focus and attention; sacrifice other things, but not that which you are dedicated and committed to. It stands to reason that the increasingly automatic practice of pushing family and children to the back burner indicates that our culture values career above family and/or children.

It’s debatable whether we’re looking at the chicken or the egg, and obviously some very devoted mothers have no choice but to do additional work outside the home, but it is clear that straying from God’s path has clearly inhibited (sometimes prohibited) the recognition of wife and mother not only as a vocation, but as a worthwhile vocation. Some would argue that women have benefited, but it is unarguable that the family and children have not.

Lord, protect our children.

(I can’t possibly credibly address every aspect of this issue, partly because I have neither the time nor the wisdom, but mainly because I am not a woman. Here’s a blog post my wife showed me that goes much further to challenge today’s mis-understanding of women.)