Intellectuelle Entry
I’ve been repeatedly listening to an Iron & Wine album lately and it conjures up a sort of ersatz nostalgia, a nostalgia for something I’ve never experienced except through a genetic transmission of weeping willow trees, blackstrap molasses, lightening bugs, wrap-around porches, generational quilts and rocking chairs. The music transports me to another life, another possible self — one where I perhaps have a university education, am clad in a yellow sundress, my feet bare as I dig in my garden, a small towheaded girl next to me, digging up worms with sticky berry residue on her lips. It’s a life of ripe tomatoes, shaded sunshine, smiles, old houses and hours of family congregating to snap peas, discuss life and read together on a huge creaky porch or, in the winter, in front of a roaring fireplace. It’s me and motherhood — slowly, naturally, selflessly, graciously — without suburban ladder-crawling, utilitarianism and endlessly juggling career and family.
But, I am not this mother with happy dirt under her nails. My ‘academic’ skin bristles when girlfriends ask me if not having children is a sin, implying somehow our identity as Christian women is encapsulated in a hierarchy of roles: mother, wife, individual. And yet there are many things – yellow sundress, homeschooling, and organic garden and all – that are immensely appealing to this alternative mother-self; things which make me want to give up my ‘academic’ self in favour of home-grown food, patchwork quilts and go to a place where daily laundry becomes a type of sacramental ritual of self-emptying. But I am and cannot be that yellow-clad bean-snapping self just as I cannot be the academically regaled, multiple-degree success story either. There will always be people exceedingly more brilliant than me, while I constantly doubt if I can even make it through my Ph.D., let alone become an inspirational professor.
I am neither fully one nor the other of these women, and yet both of them.
Whichever of these selves I live out more transparently in the world, I will always fail, but for the grace of God. I cannot be fully either self, for each places and romanticizes a role on centre stage while duties to others and to the Church are mere chorus dancers, materialising briefly and flitting off to the stage wings, in comparison. Encapsulating my role as either only a mother or only a career-woman misses the point: instead, my identity is hid in Christ; for God has exchanged the filthiness of motherhood mud and fatigue as well as the career-climbing lust for advancement and renown for the righteousness of Christ. Whether it’s garden-inches and diaper-inches or office-inches and book-inches, Christ claims every square inch of a woman’s life. The gospel needs to be lived out in both selves. Now it’s just figuring out how to get these selves in me to work together! But that, too, is a work of Christ and for that, I am utterly grateful.