The Dying and Rising Art of Motherhood

Motherhood and any kind of public service or career are seen as a binary choice for many women. Many women have now agreed that “you can’t have it all” and have decided that the thing to sacrifice is the motherhood. But is the choice true?

Kathryn Rombs, Motherhood: An Extraordinary Vocation (176 pages, Our Sunday Visitor, 2021)

Of the American trinity of baseball, mom, and apple pie, only the last seems to be doing well. Baseball’s popularity among both viewers and players has been dragging for decades. And motherhood represents a dying vocation if the demographers are correct. Much of this is due to the failure of women to find men willing to marry them or even make love to them. But much too has to do with an attitude observed in an interview with the prize-winning author Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and, recently, a book of essays. “Don’t ever have children,” she recounts her stepfather telling her, noting that he described this as the “biggest mistake I ever made in my life.” According to the interviewer, an essay in the book explains that she did not make the same “mistake.” “She did not need the advice,” the interviewer relays, for “[s]he knew at a young age that she did not have the energy for both children and writing, so she picked the latter.”

This is standard contemporary fare. Motherhood and any kind of public service or career are seen as a binary choice for many women. Many women have now agreed that “you can’t have it all” and have decided that the thing to sacrifice is the motherhood. But is the choice true? And insofar as there are choices to be made, should motherhood be the thing to throw out?

As Dr. Kathryn Rombs recounts in her new book, Motherhood: An Extraordinary Vocation, this was and is the dilemma that has been presented to young women since the age of the second-wave feminist movement, something she knows intimately. Growing up in a wealthy family, she lived downstairs from Robert Redford and in the building next to Paul Newman. Materially well-appointed and academically successful, she nevertheless had little direction. Her mother was a well-known feminist philanthropist and liberal Christian who was pals with Gloria Steinem and would have the famed feminist give pep talks to young women in her apartment. The message? That women needed to make a difference in the world. Young Kathryn, however, had little sense from those talks of the importance of intangibles such as friendship, love, and especially motherhood—something that seemed an extra at best to most Manhattanites.

Her life took on more direction when she experienced a Christian conversion in her late teens that was encouraged by her mother, though the conversion went in directions unexpected to either.  When she went to college two years later, she was “a Christian with no clear creed and a feminist who was no longer at home with most feminists.” Ironically enough, her interest in things Catholic was supercharged when she went on retreat with a Baptist group to Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery made famous by the monk Thomas Merton.

By the time she got married in the Lady Chapel at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Kathryn was a Catholic who had lived in a convent for a year and was currently writing a doctoral thesis on Thomas Aquinas at Fordham University. That’s where I met her. Her bridegroom was a friend of mine from the theology department. I later married her roommate, another philosophy student. Now, twenty-three years later, Dr. Rombs has six children ranging in age from college to grade school, most of whom she has homeschooled for periods of time. When she’s not teaching and taking care of her children, her external work has consisted of a bit of philosophy teaching and writing on the side and a lot of popular writing and speaking on the beauty of motherhood.

One of the reasons Dr. Rombs had rejected most of the items marked “feminism” on offer was precisely because, as she put it, so much of it “left behind motherhood” (her italics). Though she is grateful for the work Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and others had put into fighting “for our right to education, our right to employment, and our right to public office,” nevertheless, for those figures, motherhood had taken “a back seat” at best. For many women of Rombs’s generation, motherhood has come to be seen “as something that will hold them back, as a threat to their greatest success.” In other words, in the way Ann Patchett sees it. Dr. Rombs doesn’t quite say it, but there’s a sense among certain figures that motherhood is really a betrayal of women.

If Dr. Rombs had shed the most noxious forms of this anti-motherhood position by the time of her marriage, nevertheless when she had her first child and was ensconced in the duties of diapers, dishes, and doctor appointments, she was also not sure how to think about her own vocation as a “person groomed for big accomplishments and high productivity” with “an outstanding education and lots of marketable skills.” Had she lost, she wondered, “any potential I might have had for doing something great with my life”? That too many women who had stiff-armed the feminists on these questions and pursued motherhood as a full-time vocation referred to themselves as “just a mother,” with a hint of self-diminishment, did not help her mini-crisis. Were women being crushed between the two millstones of feminist anti-maternity and maternal low self-esteem? It would take a few years of thoughtful wrestling with the question of vocation, much of it with the help of Pope Saint John Paul II, before she would come to grips with her own thinking about how to approach things.

When she did, it was clear to her that what was needed was “a new kind of motherhood: aware of its own dignity and conscious of its own value, not only for the mother and child, but also for the Church and society.” To that end she started a ministry of encouragement to mothers called “Mighty is Her Call.” This book is thus the fruit of two decades of thinking about, experiencing, speaking on, and teaching about how women who are mothers can think of themselves as called to something extraordinary.

Dr. Rombs begins where her own transformation of thought began: John Paul II’s 1988 letter Mulieris Dignitatem, “On the Dignity of Women.” In that work she found that the “feminine genius” had to do with the ability to receive others as persons in their totality and know and protect their dignity. Women who exercise these roles, whether they are biological mothers or not, are enacting what motherhood is all about—and reflecting as they do aspects of the Trinity and the Paschal Mystery, meaning the death and resurrection of Christ. To do so, Dr. Rombs tells us, requires women to exercise wonder at their situations and the people in their lives, and courage in choosing to live such that family is first. It also requires thinking of the vocation of motherhood in different ways to reveal to women the glory that seemed so elusive to her at first. She treats motherhood through four different lenses through the rest of the book: artistic, metaphysical, spiritual, and sociological.

The second chapter, “Making Your Life a Masterpiece,” looks through the artistic lens, asking women to think about how they can act to “design your own life.” While this might sound a bit too consumeristic in the abstract, the chapter is about the use of freedom in the Christian sense and not the secular sense. The former means using one’s intelligence to make choices that allow a woman to fulfill her nature and follow a path back to God, while the latter emphasizes total self-creation—you doing an amorphous you defined only by desires that do not connect to a human nature or a divine plan. This discrepancy means that freedom is only really free when one’s actions are part of a plan of discernment, of figuring out whence the feelings and thoughts one is having about a decision are coming and whither they lead.

Too often women are paralyzed and do not work on completing the masterpieces that are their own lives because they cannot see clearly the nature of that masterpiece. The third chapter lays out the goal of that masterpiece: love. The metaphysical questions of the ends and purposes of life are answered with the many-splendored monosyllable: love. To figure out how a woman is to live out that call requires self-knowledge and the discernment of which she has given a thumbnail sketch already in the previous chapter. Only then can a woman really build and start to ask the tough questions of what is required in her life and family at any given moment.

It is that set of questions that is the subject of chapter four, “How to Flourish.” While the feminists of her mother’s generation put career first in every sense and many traditional women have put career out of the equation (at least theoretically), Dr. Rombs puts it in its place. Agreeing with John Paul’s call for women to be a part of the world of work and transform it, she suggests that some women will be called and capable of participating in the worlds of business, politics, or activism while raising their children with differing amounts of time and energy. Others will be neither called nor capable of doing so. Rather than have women fight “Mommy Wars” (my term not hers), she wants women to support each other in the prudential decisions about how to live their lives best. For some women, working full-time is a possibility and a good, while for many others part-time work outside the home will be the right option for many reasons. For others, working outside the home may be something to put off entirely until a later phase of life. Perhaps one can’t have it all, but one can have a great many things even if not all at once.

Whatever the case, the call for mothers is that of “Becoming a Radical Christian” who understands “Mothers as World Changers” (the titles of chapters 5 and 6, respectively). The reality is that despite all the laments from the secular and liberal religious world about the supposed injustice in not ordaining women as priests, women are capable of representing Christ in a much more vivid way than men are. “Motherhood,” she writes,

stands virtually alone in one similarity to Christ’s crucifixion. Does a priest, cardinal, or pope shed blood for others by virtue of his vocation, by virtue of the sacrament of holy orders? No, his calling is sublime, but holy orders does not involve the shedding of blood. Mothers of many kinds shed blood for others. Has a biological mother shed blood as she delivered her baby? Has a woman struggling with infertility bled—oh, too many times—in anticipation of new life? Not many vocations prompt such a thing. Is it not right to see in motherhood a tiny but singular reflection of Christ’s shedding blood on the cross?

There is something remarkable in this reality, and Dr. Rombs draws out how the entirety of motherhood is a call to embrace Christ’s cross in ways small and large. Even the small ones can have an effect on the world that is outsized if they do, as Mother Teresa put it, “little things with great love.”

The conclusion, “A New Feminism,” is the only section with which I have qualms. Not necessarily on the points made. I have no qualms about the full inclusion of women in almost all areas of public life (with exceptions made for areas such as military life, where the modern inclusion of women in combat positions is a mistake), the idea that women can and indeed ought to exercise a humane influence on a number of spheres currently run in an inhuman way, or the acknowledgment of relevant differences when we think about fair and equal treatment.

But I think the attempt to recapture the term “feminism” is likely not possible or, if possible, not worth the effort. Dr. Rombs acknowledges that many young women wish to distance themselves from the term “feminism” despite being, like me, agreeable to her terms. There is a reason why young and not-so-young women don’t describe themselves with the term: the term is too associated, she admits, with other ideas such as “male-bashing,” “man hating,” “loss of femininity,” and so on. I would say to go with the young women. It is too much work to try to recapture it. Like the term “gnostic,” which some early Christian writers embraced, “feminist” is simply too associated with another group of people with radically different ideas. Most importantly, it is associated with the abortion license.

Despite this objection, I would recommend this book to mothers young and old. I recommended it to a student expecting a baby. She found it refreshing, as she has many of the same worries about using her talents that so many young women do. While men will be less directly attracted to it, the book is also something that they could learn from about the pressures felt by the women they love—and the amazing vocation to which those women are called.

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