Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma
This book has gestated for about five years—at least since the conception of my second son in 1988—maybe longer in less explicit ways. It has assumed many different shapes. But the Thursday I quit procrastinating and sat down to try to put it into final shape, I forgot that that day, the first Thursday in April, was also the day I had signed up to be "Library Mom" at my middle son's preschool. I remembered when he came home from preschool empty-handed. He didn't care much, but I felt sick. And I pondered.
I ponder again when, just as I write this, at this very moment, the phone rings and my sitter tells me my youngest son is crying with a fever. Isn't this--this hesitation to stop my work to go get him--what this book is all about?
This book ponders the virtues of good mother/good worker that frame these trivial, yet revelational moments. These are moments, I have come to believe, that repeat themselves endlessly not only in my life but in the lives of many, many women, in less and more significant ways, often further complicated by poverty, abuse, racism, chronic illness, and other life-changing factors.
And ultimately, this book defies rules that a good person just does not go around defying lightly. It defies the virtue of never hurting another person that defines the "good girl" and the virtue of unconditional love that defines the "good woman" and the "good mother." It defies the virtues of self-fulfillment and self-assertion that define the "good feminist," the virtues of independence, self-reliance, and achievement that define the "good man" and the "good worker," and ultimately, the virtue of objectivity and detachment that define the "good scholar."
But I have not, I tell myself, done anything wrong. I, a mother who writes, would not risk such defiance if I did not believe that theology has some better virtues it ought to be offering in place of these and they can only materialize if theology debunks some old and very powerful myths in the first place.
This book seeks the rightful place of the virtues of self-respect, mutuality, shared responsibility, interdependence, justice, and passionate objectivity in work and in families. More exactly, this book is about being "good enough" together, caring for one another in the midst of our imperfections, instead of "good" or "perfect" alone and the ripple effects of such an ethic in our worlds of work, family, and religion.
. . . . I am a white, middle-class Protestant seminary professor and feminist theologian; I am also a wife and a mother of three sons, eight, five, and three years old. It is the clash of these commitments that provoked this book. It was literally born along with my children, almost as inevitable and yet as precarious as their lives. The one would not have happened without the other; at the very same time the book barely survived the children as they its unforeseen demands. Or so it sometimes seemed.
It is in the eye of this storm over my attention that the core ideas germinated, crystalized, and cried to be picked up and heard. The child, or more accurately, the children, that emerged--that mothers of all kinds must support each other, that the acts and thoughts of mothering are a unique and largely untapped resource for theological reflection, that men must begin to master caring labor, that children themselves deserve greater voice--necessitate nothing less than a radical transformation in religious sanctions about family and work for men and women.
Christian ideals of motherly self-sacrifice and fatherly hard work, as they have been interpreted by church tradition and promoted in society at large, not only fail the lives of many people today, they misrepresent both the intent of God's creation and the promise of the gospel message itself. The Christian feminist maternal theology that this book proposes draws on maternal knowing to challenge the mores of a society that has selectively divided the burdens and rewards of family and work along gender lines. It calls for a rereading of the biblical and theological traditions that have been poorly used to uphold these divisions, and it attempts to reclaim the values of caring labor for both men and women.