Motherhood is no job for saints. Just look at St. Jane de Chantal.
St. Jane lived in 17th century France. She married and bore ten children, at which point she discovered her calling as a nun, and—this was my mom’s favorite part—stepped over the wailing bodies of her children on her way out the door to the convent.
For this the Catholic Church elevated her to sainthood.
I used to think that living in a convent was a fate worse than death. Now that I have children of my own—and have read up about those medieval convents—I kind of get it. There were libraries and herb gardens in convents, servants who cooked and cleaned. Often the nuns were women who, like St. Jane, had left their marriages behind. The convents tended to be conveniently situated near monasteries and this being France there was a fair amount of, shall we say, social intercourse.
Nowadays Jane would be thrown in jail. Just look at the mother who let her children out of the car and drove off without them. She went home and was arrested. She probably just should have headed for a convent.
It’s ironic that in the 21st century, when we have a full range of options and lifestyles open to us, we have reverted back to biblical times in terms of how we view motherhood. Mothers are Mary again. That would be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ, and the Whore Mary, Mary Magdalene. But this idolization of motherhood has nothing to do with sex (does it ever, except maybe in Europe?), and everything to do with the pursuit of perfectionism.
Good Marys feed their children organic strawberries, worry about their child’s carbon footprint, go to online confessionals and mea culpa for having served their five-year-old juice in his toddler brother’s sippy cup. Seriously—someone wrote about this. Even better, it was published in a book. I will not be buying this book because I don’t want my sons to know that children can develop self-esteem issues around cups and glasses. It would interfere with my quest to get them to wash the dishes.
Anyway, not only do Virgin Marys beat their breasts, they beat up the Mary Magdalenes of the world—that would be anyone whom they think is not a good mother. Troll any parenting or women’s site and I guarantee you will find some variation of this headline: “Mothers We Hate.” These mothers usually include the Octo-Mom, Angelina Jolie, and Sarah Palin. Virgin Marys do not discriminate on the basis of party affiliation or job status—their only target is mothers whom they perceive to be not perfect.
Now these women know that they themselves are not perfect. They blog about the fact endlessly. But they are like reformed sinners—the confession of their imperfection makes them somewhat perfect. All I can say is, it feels a bit like the Spanish Inquisition to me. And not the one with the soft, fluffy pillows, either.
I’m not sure how we got here. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s and I know my mother and her friends weren’t that interested in pursuing perfectionism. One of my favorite childhood photos is of the first four (of six) of my siblings eating dinner in the backyard, in the middle of summer. It is a black-and-white photo, but you can see the dirt on us. We look as if we just spent hours crawling around in the yard—especially my sister, who is blissfully eating food off the high-chair tray with her dirty fingers.
My sister ended up writing her doctoral dissertation on nuns.
Another image in my mental scrapbook is of my mother and a group of about five of her friends on the beach. They are sitting in a wide circle in their faded bathing suits, talking, knitting and laughing. There must have been thirty kids among them, but they seemed unconcerned about where we were or what we were doing. If we needed a snack, they pointed to the picnic baskets. If someone was crying further down the sand, they sent an older child to investigate. I remember standing outside that circle and watching them, thinking, it must be pretty fun to be a mom. And for me, it has been and it still is.
