The Endangered Species of Housewives

This is not about feminism, so please don't go there. It is a few thoughts about the value of having one dedicated stay-at-home spouse, and one dedicated work-outside-of-the-home spouse. Which spouse does which is not the topic I'd like to address here, because even though I believe in the guidelines in the Family Proclamation, I also believe in individual and familial adaptation and agency. (With my trust issues and other things, I do see value in having one gender primarily doing one or the other, but that is beside the point.)

I don't know many of my neighbors. No one in my family participates in community activities. I barely know anything about national political issues, let alone local ones. If I needed to borrow a tiller, I wouldn't know who to ask. If my neighbor needed to borrow my chainsaw, they probably don't have a clue that I have one. I don't really know if anyone on my street has kids my age, or what their names are. Very rarely does my family eat a meal that takes longer than 30 minutes to prepare. If I do take 30 minutes, I'm proud of fixing a "real meal". I have a few piles of things that need to be organized in my house, that I've just not found energy or time to organize. I don't decorate for Christmas beyond quick basics. My house is relatively clean and relatively comfortable, but not as much as I would like.

Of course, you might say that is because I'm a single mom. But if you examine my pre- and post-divorce schedules, that was just as much the case when I was married as it is as a single mother, probably more.

It is becoming increasingly necessary for two parents in a household to work. Strangely, it is a bit of a self-fulfilling problem. You don't have time to prepare meals from scratch, so you purchase quick-fix meals. You don't have time to decorate or clean, so you pay for others to do it. Rather than borrowing a tiller, you rent one from a home improvement store. All these things require money, so it becomes necessary to work in order to live the way you know how to live.

And meantime, we lose our sense of community. Interest and hobby groups take the place of geographical community. We are less exposed to things outside of our comfort zone. We live in our own isolated independent bubbles, spinning together briefly to touch on common interests. All those unseen, unsung contributions that the masses of stay-at-home housewives used to knit the community together have all but disappeared.

And almost none of those things have anything to do with having children.

The Value of a Woman

I am a mother who has worked outside of the home by necessity. Part of me has resented the fact that I've not had a choice. As I look at the current climate of women's issues, an intriguing thought occurred to me.

Historically, there has been an undeniable lacuna between the value of a man and the value of the woman. Men have been valued by how robust they are, by how much money and how many decisions they can make. Women have been valued by their domestic skills, taking care of others. By their very natures, both have ideally been about putting others needs above their own, but for men that means being assertive, even aggressive to protect the interests of his family, for women it means being passive, yielding and gentle. For ease of reference, I'll call the stereotypical male values as "hard" and the stereotypical female values as "soft".

Over the course of time, intelligent women have looked around and noticed that soft values allowed those more "assertive" to take advantage of them, leading to abuse. Whenever someone is of a giving nature, there is always someone else waiting to push the boundaries of that giving, to strip as much advantage out of it as possible. So, those intelligent women saw a need to become more assertive, to adopt the harder qualities and prove that they, too, could be hard.

As a result, they have elevated the worth of those values even further. By looking at the difference in perceived value, and deciding that in order to become more valued, they must adopt hard qualities, they have essentially bought into the myth that the hard qualities are of more value than the soft ones. In a way of speaking stereotypically, women have sought value by becoming more like men.

I think this is addresses the symptoms of the problem, and ignores the real problem, which is that historically speaking, women do not feel valued.

Interestingly, the gospel teaches us the exact opposite: that the softer qualities are more valuable.

We see in scripture, however, that there are times which softer qualities are in danger of being completely wiped out by those willing to take advantage of them. In such cases, it is appropriate to take a stand. In other words, when abuse threatens, those harder qualities of assertiveness and even aggression have value.

So my thoughts are summed up like this: I think that women (and men) will be more benefited by lifting the value of softer qualities, rather than continuing to support the value of the harder ones. Let submission be seen as praiseworthy, let avoidance of the limelight be valued. Let those who sacrifice their own interests to clean house, take care of kids, serve in the community behind the scenes, be honored equally with those who gain educational achievements or business success.

The trick is knowing how to do it without being condescending. They have to be honored with more than lip service.

And, of course, by honoring those values loudly and publicly, perhaps their worth would be compromised.

You Have No Idea What You are Doing

Those of you who preach contrary to the word of God, I have only this to say: you have no idea what you are doing. You sew your seeds of unrighteousness, thinking you are right. You tell people that parenthood is a trap, that life is about the individual and the needs of the one. You teach that whatever a person does is right for them, as long as they feel it is right. They can choose whether or not to have an abortion, they can determine how many children to have purely of their own will, they can leave family and home to pursue a self-fulfilling career, and that is right. You hide from them the consequences of their actions. You lead them into believing that life is a silver platter from which they can pluck only the foods they want and avoid any consequence for their choices. Your work brings disillusionment, pain, shattered lives and pure evil. What you teach is no better than rape, because it leaves minds and lives broken almost beyond all repair. You teach what you do because you think you have a right to do so. You think your tiny mind, with all its human faults, is somehow smarter and greater than the mind of God. You are wrong. You are so very wrong.

And the consequences for your actions are not limited to those deceived by your lies. No, innocent children, husbands and wives are damaged by your teachings. How many broken hearts have been broken not to humility before God, but to the darkest depths of self-hate because of the lies you have spun? How many men and women and children, real living people, have spent how many hours wishing they or their loved ones had never listened to you?

You have shown me that you don't have to say there is no Christ to be an antithesis to all that He is. Someday, oh ye Anti-Christ, someday you will have to face the fruits of your teachings. Someday you will have to answer to the pain you have caused in the lives of innocents, all in the name of your own intellect. Some day you will plead to avoid the consequences of what you have done, you will say, "I always knew that there was a God. But I was deceived. I said what I did because it made people happy. I taught what I did and many believed me, until even I believed that what I taught brought happiness," but it will be too late for you to have the curse removed because the curse is of your own doing. I feel so sorry for you, Anti-Christ, even as I rage at what you have done, helpless to stop your effects in my life even though I, personally, shut you out. I feel sorry for you because you will never understand real joy. You will never discover how to have pure happiness lifting you up even in the midst of your darkest time. You will never understand how to forgive.

I forgive you for what you have done to me and my family. I'm still hurt by it, but even that will pass in time.

Please stop. Please stop teaching all the things you have worked out in your own head and turn back to the scriptures and the prophets. What they teach may seem so restrictive, but once you accept those restrictions, entire worlds of joy and opportunity open to you that you will never find so long as you live in the congratulatory world of your own intellect. Please, please stop pushing your agendas on the weak and innocent. Please, please, please stop hurting yourself and your brothers and sisters. Humble yourself. Repent. For now, there is still time.

Unashamedly Politically Incorrect

I'm sorry if this is a little rambling. I've been rather sick for about a week now. I just have a few thoughts on the overdone career/mother debate.

Strangely enough, once upon a time I was the sort of girl who wanted a career. I wouldn't have minded in the least to have a stay-at-home husband while I earned the money. Time has a funny way of changing a person, though. I gradually became a person who wants nothing more than to stay home with my children, to teach them and play with them and love them. Now that I have made that change, however, I find myself trapped in a life of career and work. Is that not ironic?

As a result of being trapped by the feminist push, I have less sympathy than I ought for those women who want to work but pressure themselves into feeling like they have to stay home. I have achieved a level of compassion, but at the same time it fills me with frustration to see them tying themselves with strands of rope and then blaming everyone else for their predicament. (It's the men, the Church, society, culture, employers, etc.) "If only I could work and still stay home with my children, or, even better, be paid to just stay home." "If only other people would hand me praise for something that does not benefit them." "If only other people would validate my choices." "If only I could have my cake and eat it, too." Rather than growing up and realizing that adults often have to make decisions that require some level of sacrifice, people exhibiting these sorts of attitudes expect everyone else to make things work for them. They want the happily-ever-after without having to go through the dragon-slaying.

What many of these women forget is that companies are not paying for more family-friendly benefits because they do not see the value of them. If we mothers took responsibility to show companies the value such policies could add to a company's bottom line, more companies would implement these policies. Unfortunately, we sell ourselves into running the rat race like everyone else, thinking more time at work equates to good work. Those few of us who do get the opportunities to be more flexible often fail to provide equal returns, only proving the companies right in their nine-hour-per-day-work-week outlook.

I see mothers as faced with a choice of three options.

1. Either choose one or the other and accept the price for either choice: a) work full time and realize your children will be raised by someone else or b) stay at home and realize you will lose career mileage, or
2. choose to work with your company to achieve more flexibility, realizing you're going to have to work your tail off to prove the value of such an adaptation on their part.

Such are the realities of life. We mothers can either raise our chins, show some maturity and face those realities or we can continue to look like a bunch of whiners expecting everything to be handed to us on a silver platter.

One funny observation is that if all people in America were to follow the Proclamation on the Family, this problem would be a non-issue. But then, so many problems would be resolved were everyone trying to live the gospel of Christ.