Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
‘Motherhood Is Not a Job. It is a Joy’
‘Motherhood Is Not a Job. It is a Joy’
Mar 18, 2025 7:43 PM

In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Elsa Walsh offers some healthy reflections on motherhood and career, hitting at some of the key themes I pointed to in my recent post on family and vocation.

She begins by discussing her own college-aged feminism, saying, “I wanted to be independent and self-supporting. I wanted love, but I wanted to be free.” With marriage and children, however, her views on freedom, family, and success would eventually e to question many of the truths I once held dear,” she writes. “The woman I wanted to be at 22 is not the woman I wanted to be at 38 — not even close — and she is certainly not who I am now at 55.”

Tying things to the current discussion about women and career — driven largely by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s popular book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead— Walsh notes that, much like the revolutionary feminism of the 1970s, there’s something narrow and unsatisfying in the way that womanhood and career are currently being discussed:

Every few years, America rightly plunges into a public and heated discussion about women and feminism, work and family. The latest round has been stoked by Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Marissa Mayer, who have e symbols and participants in the argument over what women want. Yet, I find it to be a narrow conversation, centered largely on work, as though feminism is about nothing more than ing a smart and productive employee and rising to the top.

Parenthood and family are much more central to our lives than this conversation lets on. The debate has e twisted and simplistic, as if we’re merely trying to figure out how women can e more like men. Instead, let’s ask: How can women have full lives, not just one squeezed around a career?

It helps to take a longer view of a woman’s life.

Focusing specifically on Sandberg’s own views on motherhood and career, Walsh argues that motherhood and family mustn’t be so separated and isolated from our thinking and doing when es to career and vocation:

Success, particularly the kind Sandberg calls for, requires ever more time at the office, ever more travel. It requires always being available, always a click away. Sandberg is almost giddy when she describes getting up at 5 a.m. to answer e-mails before her children wake up and getting back on puter once they are asleep.

“Facebook is available 24/7 and for the most part, so am I,” she writes. “The days when I even think of unplugging for a weekend or a vacation are long gone.”

Imagine what that life looks like to a child. Imagine what it looks like to yourself when you are 80.

That is not how I want my daughter to live, and it is not how I want to live.

This, of course, applies just as well to men on so many levels.

I myself have called for a way forward that involves “integration” or “fusion,” rather than “balance” — a push toward properly ordered, God-centered whole-life discipleship, rather than knee-jerk, earthbound individualism and pleasure-seeking. Over at Fare Forward, Cole Carnesecca recently described such a place as“the meeting point of opportunity and obligation.”

In any case, much like our own “workplace” endeavors, we mustn’t view parenthood as some box to check — some “job” — on a taller ladder of so-called “success.” Like all work, there is transcendent meaning and purpose in parenthood itself.

Or, as Walsh concludes: “Motherhood is not a job. It is a joy.”

To join the On Call in munity, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The miracle apple: Co-creative lessons from the fall of the Red Delicious
In the Age of Information, much of our work now takes place in the realm of the “intangible”—creating and trading products and services that can feel somewhat obscure or abstract. Even still, in our technological, data-driven world, we should remember that we are cooperating withnatureandco-creating with our Creator. From the social-media giants to the sawmills, from the blockchain banks to the barbershops, we are using our God-given intellect and creativity to transform a mix of matter and information into something...
What can economics teach us about moral ecology?
In exploring the various connections between morality, theology, and economics, we routinely long for philosophers and theologians who understand economics, just as we crave economists who understand the bigger picture of self-interest and human destiny. That sort cross-disciplinary dialogue and mutual understanding can be beneficial, but for economist Peter Boettke, it can also serve as a distraction. In an article for Faith and Economics, Boettke argues that economics as a scienceoffers plenty of tools for “moral assessment,” and that economists...
Church and politics: Necessary definitions and distinctions
A few weeks ago The Gospel Coalition ran a review of Jonathan Leeman’s book, Why Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age. A snip: Leeman’s analysis is guided by a few central convictions. One is represented in Psalm 2 and the title itself. He explains, “History’s greatest political rivalry, it would seem, is between the nations of the earth and the Messiah.” Another guiding insight is that all of life is religious, including politics. This is true...
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Socialism is dead.
I recently gave a presentation to students about foreign aid in the developing world. I tried to explain that many ing to the conclusion that what is really necessary is to establish conditions suitable for a market-based society. In other words, there must be a transparent administration of justice, the predictable rule of law, private property rights, ease in doing business, a real lack of arbitrariness, etc. Both as I prepared and as I spoke, however, I realized that some...
Liberalism needs natural law
The great British political thinker Edmund Burke regarded what some call “liberalism” today as prehensible, unworkable and unjust in the absence of mitment to natural law.A similar argument can be made in our own time, says Acton research director Samuel Gregg: Without natural law foundations, for instance, how can we determine what is and isn’t a right other than appeals to raw power or utility, neither of which can provide a principled case for rights? Or, on what other basis...
Justice Scalia explains why the ‘living Constitution’ is a threat to America
A majority of Americans—55 percent—now say the U.S. Supreme Court should base its rulings on what the Constitution “means in current times,” while only 41 percent say rulings should be based on what it “meant as originally written,” according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Not surprisingly, the divide is mostly along partisan lines. According to Pew, nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78 percent) now say rulings should be based on the Constitution’s meaning in current...
Socialism is dead (Part 2): What’s wrong with the market-based evolution of socialism?
I spent my previous postexplaining that orthodox socialism is effectively dead and what remains is really different variations on societies that effectively accept the market as the standard frame. Here, I would like to explain, in part, why the Bernie Sanders approach to market-based socialism (after the death of socialism) is not the right way forward. As I stated in the previous post, this Americanized “socialism” is definitely of the half-hearted variety. Strong socialism would mean government ownership of the...
The (just) price of salt (and cancer drugs)
A recent episode of the very fine podcast EconTalk reminded me of one of the more remarkable episodes during my time here at the Acton Institute involving our internship program. The EconTalk episode is about the price of cancer drugs, and the various factors that go into the often astronomical prices of the latest cancer-fighting drugs. These can run up to an in excess of $300,000 per year. A question implicit in the discussion is whether such high costs are...
How geography affects economic growth
Note: This is post #78 in a weekly video series on basic economics. You could fit most of the U.S., China, India, and a lot of Europe, into Africa. But if pare Africa to Europe, Europe has two to three times the length of coastline that Africa. Why does this matter? As this video by Marginal Revolution University explains, geography can have profound effects on a nation’s economic growth. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d...
Dalio’s animated adventure in common grace-infused wisdom
Ray Dalio is a fascinating character. Founder of the“world’s richest and strangest hedge fund,”he’s been dubbed the “Steve Jobs of investing” and “Wall Street’s oddest duck.” He’s currently #26 on Forbes list ofrichest people in Americaand Time magazine once included him on their list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2011, Dalio outlined his personal philosophy on life and business in a self-published 123-page PDF called “Principles.” (It was re-released as a book in 2017 and e the#1Amazon...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved