On the Home Front

IT WAS AN ORDINARY WEEKDAY EVENING, BUT THE meal was festive. To commemorate my husband Gerald's completion of a difficult writing project, I had prepared two simple and highly spiced Ethiopian dishes for supper. Our sons were pleased that Dad had met his deadline, and even more delighted to rip off pieces of flat pancake-like injera and dip them into the red-hot stew.

While dousing flames in his mouth with great gulps of water, our 6-year-old remarked, "I can't believe it! Just the simplest things at home can be so exciting!" I sank back into my chair for a quiet moment of exultation. Gerald's eyes shone across the table.

Our family likes to celebrate -- not with a lot of fanfare -- but by deliberately marking and enriching moments in time. It's an art we are cultivating after watching too much time slip through our fingers in a frenetic blur. On any ordinary day, there are far too few hallowed moments, particularly in our homes; too few occasions to savor time-honored stories with our children; too few gestures of old-fashioned hospitality; too few festive activities to send our spirits soaring.

Home, the quintessential source of family and companionship, where intimacy and trust are meant to flourish, has become an afterthought, relegated to the fringes of our days. For many families, over-invested or underpaid, wealthy or impoverished, home is a crash-pallet, hardly a place preserved and cultivated for ministry; a battleground, not a thriving hub of simple communal pleasures. The role of "homemaker," for varied reasons, has been maligned almost out of existence.

I think the time has come for a revolution of priorities at home. Home-based ministry, be it to one's own children, to the neighbors, to the elderly, to those forgotten and left out, needs to be reinvigorated. What better place than the home for children to see Christ-like ministry modeled day after day? What is more needed in our isolationist urban-suburban neighborhoods than homes that provide a warm circle of tender loving care? What could give a greater influx of energy to the church than a growing (rather than shrinking) core of folks free to volunteer for service to the community?

I have entered a veritable mine field -- an area of discourse so sensitive and fraught with dilemmas that no matter what is said, someone will feel stepped on. But let me assert that two-parent families that choose to live on one full-time salary or a couple of part-time salaries to free up time for presence at home and voluntary service are making a radical and essential statement about Christian ministry in our day.

I must at least partially qualify what I am suggesting. I know that not everyone has options; very often employment is due to financial or emotional necessity. And surely not every home is made better by having a full-time parent. Many persons (mostly women) who have devoted full time to the home have become disillusioned and bitter. Nor is it always the case that if both parents are employed full time there is no family life or community service. And many single parents manage to hold job and family together with astounding tenacity and valor. Nevertheless, there is good reason to examine further what is at stake in the nurturing of life at home.

There was an article in The Chicago Tribune a few years ago about the world's smartest person -- a woman with an IQ of 230; a woman so smart that she could chop her IQ in half and still be above average. One remark she made in the newspaper interview was this: "I can't imagine just staying home and doing nothing but taking care of someone. Anybody can take care of a baby." This woman also called marriage "stultifying" and said there are too many kids in the world for her to contribute anymore. Clearly the implication to be drawn from the above statement is that if you have brains it is beneath your dignity to care for children; and if you stay home and take care of someone, you don't have brains and are doing nothing of value.

OPINIONS ABOUT WHAT should happen at home are legion. One young mother commented, "I sometimes wish I had lived 100 years ago when everything wasn't a choice. Then I could have been a traditional mother, spent my days with my kids, and just delighted in them without all this ambivalence about career and identity."

Whether this woman's concept of the reality our foremothers experienced is accurate or not, she put her finger on one of the chief dilemmas contemporary women face: There is now no widespread cultural consensus about who we are as women, wives, and mothers, and what we are supposed to do.

Rare is the woman today who can say, as a woman of my mother's generation said, "I felt no other calling than to get married and to have children." We are called in our generation to a new dimension of freedom and maturity, a new dimension of responsibility for who we become and how we will serve amid an ever-expanding array of options.

One young mother will comment, "Some women aren't as happy staving at home with a child as I am. Nobody should be forced to stay home if it makes them miserable, but I know that I could never leave my baby." Another will complain, "Motherhood is an invisible, low-status occupation with no pay and no time off. Worse yet, a lot of hard work and good intentions can result in failure."

One mother will say, "At least I'm there for my kids. You can't just up and make a decision to have kids one day and then expect them to raise themselves. You shouldn't have children unless you can step out of the job market long enough to be with them when they're little." Another will say, "My career is part of who I am. Why should I have to become a different person because I have a baby?" And yet another mother will admit, "I was taught that my career and my family should both come first. I was convinced that I could do it all. But I'm exhausted. I simply can't do it all."

Waves of ambivalence swamp the attempts many of us make to be all things to all people. We sometimes regard women who have made different choices than ours with jealousy or antipathy. Many of us harbor an inordinate amount of guilt for failing ourselves, our husbands, or our children. With heightened expectations about what we can become, and also more knowledge about what makes for healthy children, we frequently incriminate ourselves for falling short on one front or another.

Yet despite the painful self-doubts which inevitably accompany times of intense growth, and despite the accusations and jealousies, we are blessed in our day with an enormous flowering of women's gifts. We've discovered on a large scale that women, like men, are good at more things than the traditional roles led us to believe.

Fifty years ago few married women were able to gain employment outside the home. Now 45 percent of the labor force in the United States is women. Fifty years ago only a few medical doctors were women and still fewer were lawyers or engineers. Today 37 percent of the students entering medical schools are women. A third of all students working toward ministerial degrees in the nation's seminaries are now women.

It is frequently acknowledged that women bring complementary and valued qualities to work teams, including a nurturing approach to pastoral care with an inclination to more participatory and less authoritarian approaches to leadership. Women's contributions are needed and welcomed on many, many fronts.

BUT (AND HERE COMES the absolutely critical question that begs for an answer), who is willing to care for the children? The Children's Defense Fund and other groups estimate that by 1995 the mothers of two-thirds of all preschoolers will be in the workforce, and some estimates project that 80 percent of mothers of young children will be in the workforce in the 21st century.

Obviously, society will have to gear up for a much more comprehensive day-care program than is now available. Such a move will provide much-needed solutions for many parents who have no choice other than to take their children to others for care.

Widespread day care for very young children, however, results in a radically diminished parental role, meaning increased alienation from an integrated, intimate home life as more and more of a child's life is spent in an institutional world external to a parent's direct control. Are we who have a choice ready to see the parental role at home so radically curtailed?

Again I tread on a mine field. Many child-care situations are pleasant and enrich a child's environment, and mothers and fathers who have enjoyable work often make happier parents than those confined exclusively to child care. I for one am a much more obliging mother because I have work in addition to child care that expands my horizons, and my children in their preschool years enjoyed a pleasant day-care supplement. I am also aware that good day care is far preferable to many debilitating home environments. But the disturbing questions related to the home front continue.

As more and more women leave the home to pursue careers, how are the children affected? Is the flow of mothers toward employment in any way being matched by fathers choosing to remain at home? Is it not actually the case that few men are opting to become primary caregivers, and consequently, on a massive scale, our homes are being drained of parental nurture?

I think it would be accurate to observe that the more choices we have, the less often we, women and men, have chosen for children. It also appears that the more possibilities before us to achieve personal career goals, the more we have come to view children as an obstruction; and that the more we feel able to control our own destiny, the less we are willing to deal with the unpredictable, messy, distracting dynamo that is a child.

How can we know that the children and their parents are not both big losers because of the shrinking amount of time they spend together? Might it not be the case that as more and more of us opt for institutional solutions for child care, we will reap, in future years, a harvest of bitterness from our little ones grown tall who remember that they were given, at best, only secondary consideration; and a flood of regret from aging parents who didn't slow down enough to cherish companionship with small sons and daughters who suddenly grew up and were gone?

IF THE NUMBER OF children in trouble in our society is a significant indicator, our children need us now more than ever. The statistics reveal problems of epidemic proportions. Depression among adolescents continues to increase. The suicide rate of children in the United States has risen 300 percent in 25 years, reaching as many as 6,000 suicides and about half a million suicide attempts annually.

U.S. teens under age 15 are 15 times more likely to give birth than their peers in any other Western nation. Among teenagers, drug use remains high, with cocaine use on the rise. The abuse of alcohol among teens is very high, with a reasonable estimate that three million 14- to 17-year-olds are problem drinkers.

The National Coalition on Television Violence reports that the average American child will see more than 800 advertisements promoting war toys in a year; war cartoons on American TV increased from less than two hours per week in 1982 to 27 hours per week in 1985, and the sale of war toys increased 600 percent during the same period. Child abuse and child pornography are on the increase.

The incidence of divorce has more than doubled since 1960, and the number of children newly affected by divorce now exceeds one million annually. Forty percent of black children and 20 percent of all children in the United States live in single-parent families. A 1984 estimate of "latchkey children" put their number at eight million.

It is far from easy to grow up in North America. The prevalence of these troubles raises important questions about the character of our society, contends Perry London, a professor in the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. No one has yet counted how many youngsters suffer from these psychosocial ills, but even the most conservative statistics show that millions of children are directly at risk from them; all other children, indirectly.

London notes that if children are being well-socialized elsewhere, the schools need only supplement a process that is well-advanced before schools become involved. People intuitively know, he continues, that the formation of character in children depends on adult models and on some implied consensus about cultural rituals, ideals, and expectations. The models are parents, siblings, members of an extended family, stable neighbors.

Modern American society, however, has lost much of its dependable common rituals and figures of reverence. Nor are models of socially acceptable adult roles available as frequently or in as much variety as in the past. Traditional agents of character education have been weakened by the fluidity and heterogeneity of American society. Anonymity has replaced community.

London argues that because of the ravages of "social disorganization and family collapse," the schools must now play a more active role in developing programs that protect children and nurture growth of personality as well as of intellect. "When impediments to sane growth are epidemic among the youth of a nation," London writes, "as is true of American society today, the issues that plague the lives of young people are more than personal problems. They are not simply signs of the health and welfare of children, but of the character of the society, the quality of the civilization, and, perhaps, the prospects for its future."

A friend who visited us last month, whose husband is working on a doctorate at a major Ivy League school, remarked that in that university community, if you admit that you are a homemaker, "You count for zero." I'm reminded too of a seminary professor who lamented the injustice perpetrated in families because many wives have been obligated to "forego personal development" in order to care for the family, thus freeing husbands to pursue personal growth.

Where, oh, where did we get this twisted notion that to stay home with children is to stagnate? Who fabricated the fiction that to make a home counts for nothing? Is it barking into the wind to proclaim that homemaking for the sake of one's children and neighborhood is worthy of a woman's and a man's best efforts; and that parenting stimulates unparalleled growth in the parents as well?

A father who has chosen to stay home part time with his children writes, "Watching and helping my children grow is the most overwhelmingly beautiful process of which I have ever been part. My children teach me, play with me, help me grow, and heal me. What a marvel to see their lives unfold before me. What a privilege to participate in this.... The worth of our relationship is beyond measure."

A woman psychologist observed, "Mothering takes much time and energy that is not put into a career. One must accept the fact that one loses time and salary. But on the other hand, my baby helped significantly in recovery of the use of the right side of my brain [the intuitive, creative, feeling side] and contributed to my career as a therapist. If I were a teacher, minister, or business person, I suspect this contribution would be no less significant."

I strongly suspect that we have lost a great deal of our humanity and freedom inasmuch as we. have come to regard the "male" work role as the normative human activity. One must seriously question whether women are liberated simply by being enabled to function like men in the public realm.

Leading feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether contends in her book Sexism and Godtalk that feminism needs to ask whether instead of making the male sphere the norm and attempting to assimilate women into it, it is not necessary to move in the opposite direction. "Should we not take the creation and sustaining of human life as the center," she asks, "and reintegrate alienated maleness into it?"

Clearly, women are not automatically redeemed by being incorporated into male political power and business, Ruether writes; nor will men be automatically redeemed by learning to nurture infants and keep house. Some have idealized the home, overlooking the violence so often present there. And yet there are clues to a better humanity in the virtues often associated with women and home in Western society if those virtues are not locked within an exclusive female sphere.

THE TIME HAS COME to revive the art of homemaking and to rekindle the hearth; to recapture the trembling wonder of a child that shatters one's complacency; to allow ourselves to be baffled and humbled by the daily tasks of child care; and consciously to create a rhythm of meaningful activity, a place of devotion, a house of peace. But we must revive the art on a new footing.

The more women are welcomed into visible ministries and public involvements, and the more apparent it becomes that women are equal and gifted partners with men in all walks of life, and the more readily men demonstrate by their involvement that homemaking is worthy of a woman's and a man's active commitment--then, and now already, mature individuals will freely choose to stay home for a season.

We must revive the vitality of the home or live with the deterioration brought on by a desperately ill life-support system. The true test of our liberation will be our ability to serve the least among us, without expecting much in return. "You were called to be free," proclaims Paul to the Galatians. "But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love" (Galatians 5:13).

Like many other women of my generation, I have often been inspired by Luke's story of Jesus' encounter with Mary and Martha when Jesus commended Mary for sitting at his feet to listen. "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:41-42). I imagined that by going to seminary I was becoming more like Mary, meriting Jesus' commendation for choosing what is better.

Not long ago a woman in my home church confessed through her tears, in the open sharing time of the service, that she so wants to be like Mary, just sitting at Jesus' feet, but the never-ending, urgent household and hospitality chores preoccupy her time. If guests are invited, food must be prepared, the toilet must be cleaned. What does one do to mesh real-life demands with sitting at Jesus' feet?

A wise single mother and grandmother responded. I think we are all Mary and Martha, she said. There is no reason you can't sit at Jesus' feet while cooking a meal or while cleaning the toilet. The key is remembering--remembering that you are free to pray, listen, and worship anytime, anywhere.

The past year put a severe strain on my stock of survival skills. When our second son was close to 6 years old, we birthed a daughter. No falling asleep at the breast for this champion wrestler. She needed to be jogged, and that rather energetically, before she surrendered to slumber--and then sleep seemed just an excuse to waken again.

Would we trade her to a gypsy for a nickel? Only in jest. But day after day she sucked life out of me. And our extended family was an ocean away.

I remember shaking with sobs one day after reading a well-written article. The beauty of the piece pierced me, but more than that, I suddenly realized how eternally long it seemed since I had written a word.

Can I say it, without sounding melodramatic, that this toughest of years has also been most fulfilling? I am given to murmuring on the ragged edges of many days, but nearly every day there are moments when I swell fit to burst with the joy of being with these little people. They truly have remade me, turning a heart of arrogance into a throbbing heart of tenderness. And they continue to convert me day after day toward simple pleasures amid the hurly-burly. The fun, food, and companionship we share, along with another family in the household right upstairs, is surrounding us with a cloak of security, with rhyme and reason, with anticipation and fulfillment, over and over again.

Reclaiming the home turf means resolving to reintegrate men's and women's work and to interweave home and work into a harmonious pattern. Homemaking means to build community with children and neighbors and to establish worship and celebrative rituals that actively shape family traditions.

Children are not liabilities or a drain on personal growth. Nor is home a backwater of ill repute. In our self-indulgent generation, children are a primary source of conversion. Transforming our isolated, privatized dwellings into home-based communities where life and worship are nurtured is a sacred calling.

Now is not the time for airy-headed romanticism that pines for the olden days of little houses on the prairie. Rather, it is a time for hardheaded realism and gutsy determination to make job decisions and personal sacrifices for the common good--the good of our children, ourselves, and our society. With children who thrive on simple pleasures, our work and our entire society can be renewed. We desperately need a revolution of hope at home!

Sara Wenger Shenk is the author of Why Not Celebrate! (GoodBooks, Intercourse, PA 17534, 1987). She lived with her family in Yugoslavia when this article appeared.