10 Things I Learned From Writing a Book on Motherhood
Once upon a time, not even in this century, in the increasingly more remote Anno Domini 1999, I was a freshman in college. And I read a book in French literature class that I somehow still remember rather well. It was the essay collection Mythologies by the twentieth-century French cultural critic and essayist Roland Barthes. In his essay “Novels and Children,” Barthes ridicules one magazine for profiling women writers as follows: every woman’s profile listed the number of novels she has written and the number of children she has. Five novels, three children. Or two novels, two children. Three novels, four children. You get the idea.
Barthes was scandalized. Why would the magazine editors have connected each woman novelist’s writerly output to her maternal productivity? Is this not insulting? It is rather ridiculous (he thought) to insinuate that women are these incredible creatures who birth novels and children in alternation. But also, doesn’t such a pairing hint that women should only be allowed to write novels so long as they continue to birth children?
At the time of first reading, I was a clueless and childless eighteen-year-old college student. I raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and moved on with my life. There were more books to read, essays to write, cafeteria coffee to drink, and a social life to try and figure out. Well, maybe not this last one. I was a double major in the Classics and in French Literature. I had no social life, unless you count study parties. True, many of them were Greek study parties, but they were the sort of Greek study parties where we studied Greek.
Fast-forward to Thanksgiving 2022. I had just completed final edits on my first book, and I definitely was not planning on writing another one right away. I had three kids—the youngest a toddler, although the oldest was a senior in high school. And that Thanksgiving week, I came across a Bloomberg article with a feisty title: “Women Not Having Kids Get Richer Than Men.” I realized at that moment that I had read several versions of this sort of article over the previous few years in magazines like the New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. Social scientists like Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project and Institute for Family Studies have repeatedly debunked such arguments, but they just would not die.
So I started writing an essay in response—about what such a denigrating attitude towards mothers and children says about our society. By the end of the week, I had two chapters of a new book written. I finished the first draft of the book nine months later—an appropriate gestation period—and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politics: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity was published in October of 2024. And now, one year later, I would like to share with you ten things I learned from writing a book on motherhood.
1. This world needs Christian humanists—this means all of us. The humanities, the cliché goes, help us understand who we are as humans. But there is more to that. It is specifically the understanding of the humanities through a Christian lens that helps us understand who we are as humans—why mothers and children matter, at the level most obviously related to my book, but also why all persons matter in a world that increasingly privileges machines. The medieval university saw all disciplines as connected to the study of theology, pointing scholars through every discipline they studied, back to God.
As our society keeps leaning more post-Christian in a variety of areas, the recent flowering of the Classical Christian education movement is not coincidental. Christian humanists in the twenty-first century read many of the same ancient and medieval classics as fellow Christian humanists read a century ago, or five centuries ago. Why do we do it? There is timeless wisdom to learn from great books—and true wisdom is something we all need in our lives, but also our country needs from us. Sometimes we can tell the value of something by its absence.
But the beauty of great books does not just give us wisdom to flourish in a practical sense—although wisdom in our jobs, finances, and family responsibilities is obviously essential. Rather, the beauty of great books over time shapes our souls and minds in the virtues—just as it did for readers centuries or even millennia ago. As Christians, we are all part of a family of God that goes back to first century AD Galilee. And as humanists, we are part of an intellectual tradition that goes back to the time before there was a Greek alphabet, and traveling bards sang the Homeric epics for audiences who drank in these works in all their splendor, knowing that just by hearing them, they were changed forever for the better.
Indeed, it was originally Plato who articulated the idea of the good, the true, and the beautiful—certain absolutes that exist and which we should pursue for the good of our own souls and minds. He did this as part of his theory of Forms, which sought to find the perfect form of each thing that exists. Plato’s thoughts on the subject are a good reminder of how the pagans could see some of God’s truths, even without knowing God themselves. And in our world where the idea of any absolutes is under attack and relativism seeps into every crevasse, being able to dwell on goodness, truth, and beauty is essential—not only for us but also for our influence on others around us.
As Christian humanists, we are constantly engaging in the work of retrieval—the retrieval of the best of past civilizations for the good of our own. And at the moment, I regret to report, Christian humanists are the only ones doing this retrieval. It is on us. So we will keep coming back to this first point throughout the rest of them.
Remember that you are human. That is beautiful, and that is enough. You have a body, and it matters. But no less important, you have a soul, and it also matters very much. You see, the entire premise behind this book is that we need a different way of thinking about pervasive errors of anthropology in our society. Our anthropology (how we think about people) is inseparable from our theology (how we think about God). A false anthropology and a false theology always go hand-in-hand. And an anthropology that emphasizes the inferiority or worthlessness of people invariably goes along with a theology that does not value God.
What does the Bloomberg article or others like it tell us about our society? Put simply, they reveal a deeply post-Christian approach to valuing people. In the age of AI and transhumanist dreams, they show an anthropology whereby only perfect people are worth something—and the rest are worth nothing. In his book Family Unfriendly, Tim Carney calls this “civilizational sadness,” a feeling that none of us are worth anything.
Christian humanists, however, can approach this imperfect world and see it not as it is but as God had created it to be. In other words, we can look at this world with Augustinian vision—the city of God is not here fully, but we know that it is coming and it will be glorious.
But in the meanwhile, we are called to live in this world—and live well in it. But this I do not mean the secular standards of what a good life means. I mean, rather, a life that would end with God’s declaration: well done, good and faithful servant.
3. The doctrine of the imago Dei is the most historically and culturally revolutionary Christian belief. It has shaped world history and Western culture for good for the past 2,000 years. Consider this: the ancient pre-Christian world was remarkably stratified. Society was hierarchical, and there were no social safety nets. The weakest, such as orphans or childless widows, suffered the most. In the Bible, the book of Ruth revolves around this reality. Naomi repeatedly worries that she and Ruth may starve to death. She is not just being dramatic—had Ruth not attracted Boaz, who decided to fulfill his responsibility as a relative by marrying her, she and Naomi may very well have starved. After all, gathering leftover grain from the edges of the field was not exactly a sustainable long-term survival plan. Although, at least, this was better than what the Roman Empire could offer for widows.
Consider this: why does it bother us to see someone suffer? It certainly did not bother a lot of people in antiquity. But it does bother us. Why? Because of two thousand years of the imago Dei—awareness that all persons ever created have been made by a loving God in his image. This abhorrence of suffering is not natural to people—and we can see the cruelty even today in societies where there is no knowledge of the imago Dei. Furthermore, my concern, I realized as I was writing this book, is that as pockets of America move into post-Christian ethos, we too are losing this truth about the priceless nature of persons in God’s eyes. It is up to Christian humanists, as I noted in my first point, to retrieve the essential truths for human flourishing. And this is a key one.
Indeed, the title I had originally proposed for this book was Priceless. Because each one of us is priceless in God’s eyes, and this is so inconceivable in any other framework of the world apart from the Judeo-Christian worldview. And this idea is currently under threat from so many directions. To name just a few, abortion continues to threaten life in the womb, and now that increasingly more abortions are conducted at home by taking abortifacients in private, we may not even know the precise numbers of deaths. On a related note, more sensitive prenatal testing is making it possible for parents to choose to abort children with disabilities—an attitude that is promoted by doctors themselves. Furthermore, IVF and various genetic modifications of embryos before pregnancy are commodifying children using the latest technology.
These are threats to life at the earliest stages of life. But at the other end of life, physician-assisted killing is threatening old age by promoting the message that those who are ill or weak are not worth living. The two threats are connected in ways bioethicist Charlie Camosy documents so well in his new book. Canada has been a few years ahead of the U.S. in promoting MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), so we have a glimpse of our own future, should we continue down this path. It is not just the elderly or terminally ill who are now getting MAID in Canada, but also those with mental illness, including depression. A person struggling with suicidal ideation can walk into a Canadian hospital to ask for help—and be offered MAID in response. In fact, this really happened.
But between these two poles of life—the threats to the unborn and the threats to the elderly and the ill—there are also plenty of other threats now to our personhood from AI. The proliferation of AI dating services, AI friendships, and even the rise of AI marriage, are all built on the denial of the imago Dei. A machine, after all, is not made in the image of God, because no machine is human, no matter how well programmed. Any “relationships” conducted with machines involve a rejection of humanity and a direct affront to the one who made us.
All of this requires us to think more about people and what persons are worth in our society. If God exists and he has made us in his image, then there is only one way to respond to the relentless onslaughts against human life in our society. Our response should be to continue insisting on the preciousness of all human life and to live out this conviction with our actions in our own lives. How we treat others—family, friends, neighbors, and strangers—speaks volumes for our view of persons, God’s image-bearers.
4. Your learning and reading life is cumulative. You might read something in class this year that makes no impression on you. But then this book or article will come back to you in twenty years and will suddenly help you make sense of something in that season in your life. Like that Barthes essay, “Novels and Children,” with which I opened this essay. It means a lot to me now, as a mom and a writer, to think about my children in connection with my writing work. This particular book, of course, would not exist if I were not a mother—because the questions that led me down the intellectual trail for writing this book were deeply personal.
Many of the sources that I drew on while writing this book were ones I had first read in high school or college. Re-reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as a wife and mother makes me feel a much greater degree of compassion for the mothers in these epics who loved their children very much but could do nothing to protect them. Similarly, re-reading Euripides’ Medea, which I had first encountered in Intermediate Greek class during the second semester of college, now makes me feel even more pity and rage for Medea, the discarded wife and mother who realizes that in the pagan worldview, she is indeed worthless. The tragedy in which she finds herself is the realization that someone like her could never have a happy ending.
But also, re-reading Augustine’s Confessions and City of God as an adult makes me appreciate him so much more than I did in my late teens or early twenties. To my young self, he seemed rather annoying. But now, I can read, yet again, with a compassion that relates to something we all experience if we are blessed to live long enough: our lives never turn out exactly as we had hoped or planned. But God is in control and the plans he has for us are much better, richer, more imaginative than our own.
5. You can fill the largest of buckets with a teaspoon. Have you ever played that game in camp or a birthday party? You have maybe two teams, and your task is to work as a relay team to carry water in a teaspoon from one bucket to fill up another one, across the room or field. And did I mention you only get a teaspoon to do it? It is all very chaotic, and perhaps a lot of water gets sloshed out in this scenario, but the point is, eventually it gets done.
This is a great analogy for real life. People are wired to be motivated by instant gratification, but the reality is that you cannot accomplish many big tasks in a single day. Except laundry. If you crave that instant gratification, you should do laundry, because you do get quick results: in just a few hours, a massive mound of dirty laundry will be rendered clean. It is like magic, really. Very exciting, and I sometimes secretly enjoy doing laundry for this very reason.
But to get back to the filling buckets with a teaspoon. I am a homeschooling mom, and I have a lot of obligations to my people. Plus I have a part-time editing job. All of this put together means that I do not have a lot of time to write, but if I do a little bit every day, it all somehow gets done. It turns out that you can write a book in an hour a day, just as you can learn a new language in an hour a day (as some of you are doing). God redeems little seeds and makes them grow.
6. Some of the most beautiful things in your life are also the hardest. This includes motherhood. Possibly marriage. Maybe college too. And perhaps book writing. All of these are sanctifying processes—they refine our souls. They require not only that persistence that we just talked about—that work of filling buckets with a teaspoon for days, months, years, decades. They require also wrestling with something that was never meant to be easy for anyone. Wrestling with ideas is difficult. But even more difficult is wrestling with our own selfishness. But perhaps the common denominator to all of these beautiful things I have listed is that they take us out of ourselves and make us focus on others.
In his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch bemoaned the devolution of our society into self-focus. In this book and in others, he noted the decline of the family in America and noted the crushing repercussions. Narcissism, it seems, is a vicious cycle that begets and facilitates more of the same.
But if we value the beautiful things in our life and recognize their call to take us out of ourselves, we are shaped by other-mindedness that, too, is a call of Christian humanism.
7. Your life will be richer and so much more beautiful with good friends in it. Man was not made to be alone. Neither was woman. And yes, when God first articulates this truth in Genesis, it is in reference to marriage. And marriage is good. It is very good. But that is not the only deep connection we get in life. Another, no less important one is friends. Maybe you grew up in a small town, and you have had the same friends since infancy. Or maybe you moved around a lot—perhaps you were in a military family, or your parents’ work transferred you all over the place—so making friends was harder. But I have good news for you. You can just make friends. Now. And you should. Loneliness in America has been classified as an epidemic and a health risk—by no less authority than the Surgeon General.
As it happens, both motherhood and writing can be very isolating tasks. I homeschool. I am an introvert. I need a lot of time alone to recharge, and I usually do not get it. But we all also need other people—these friendships encourage us.
If you have read Anne of Green Gables books, you may remember the concept of “kindred spirits.” Anne loved meeting kindred spirits and becoming friends with them. It is part of what made her Anne. If you read Augustine’s Confessions carefully, by the way, you will also notice that friends were also an integral part of his life. Maybe they were not always the best people—but then prior to his conversion, he too was a general mess. Still, friends kept him at least somewhat grounded even in those phases of his life.
As I have been writing over the past few years, I am in daily communication with two good friends (Ivana D. Greco and Dixie Dillon Lane) who are fellow homeschooling moms and writers. I am in awe of these two friends, who are brilliant, talented, are committed Christians, and are just phenomenal moms. They remind me that what we are doing in our respective homes is good, true, beautiful—and so worth the hard work. They also remind me that our writing is worth the time and effort we put into it when we might have been getting some sleep.
But also, this friendship allows us to discuss the everyday difficulties that do weigh on each of us. Something is always broken in one or more of our homes and lives. It could be the coffeepot, which is truly tragic when that happens. It could be sick children—or serious sickness for one of us. It could be increased responsibilities of a day or a period. Or it could just be that general pervasive fatigue of motherhood—that feeling that descends upon you when your first baby is born and leaves . . . well, I am not sure when it leaves, actually. But as we deal with it all, we at least get to laugh at it. And that is something wonderful that friends will do with you—they will weep when you weep and will rejoice when you rejoice. They might also tell you if you are being unduly cranky and need to just go eat lunch—and then you might realize that you indeed skipped lunch this day. No wonder you are cranky.
Friends also remind us that thinking about the preciousness of persons in God’s eyes ultimately is not just an intellectual exercise. It involves thinking about specific persons. We certainly think about the preciousness of our kids and spouses. But thinking about our friends and trying to see them as God sees them is beautiful too.
And then, of course, there is the obvious truth that friends are fun. Maybe I should have just started with this.
8. All the best things in my life have come at the expense of sleep. I can list several things here by way of example. Take learning Greek. I spent more very late nights and a few all-nighters in college studying for Greek quizzes. Or that semester I took Homer’s Iliad, and we read the entire Iliad in one semester. In Greek. Let us just say no one slept much that fall. At the end of the semester the professor invited us all to her home for dinner. I have to tell you, even her dog looked exhausted. But it was also so, so fun! And it stuck with me.
But the sort of sleep deprivation I experienced in college is nothing compared with the sleep deprivation of motherhood. My youngest daughter is now 6, and oh, she is so, so cute. And every now and then, parental amnesia sinks in, and I say something like “she was such a good baby.” And every time I say that, my husband looks at me in a special sort of way and mutters, “she didn’t let us put her down for even a second the first month.” She would just wail and wail.
So we came up with a system. Around 8PM each night, I would feed her, then give her to my husband for two hours while I went upstairs and slept for those two hours. And Dan would just pace the house with the wailing baby for two hours straight. He would also sing those old church invitation songs to her, because they do sound soothing.
It never really worked, I guess, but this sweet girl did start sleeping without someone walking around with her once she turned one month old, although she would still get up plenty of times each night. Even now, on occasion, kids still wake me up at night, although now it is rare and only happens when someone is sick.
Parenting is a modern ascetic practice. You could go into the desert and commune with God in solitude for years. Or you could have children and write books and thus experience a different sort of ascetic practices.
I think about some of the Late Antique desert fathers and mothers, these intense believers who were worried about other people distracting them from hearing God’s voice, so off they went into the desert where they could live for the next ten, twenty, and more years on two figs and a cup of water a week. Some of them also tried to deny themselves sleep. They felt like this did help them with the sanctification process, although it was complicated, and many complained that they still found themselves sinning.
But here is the good news. You do not have to travel to the Egyptian desert or do anything else if you are a parent. You can just focus on serving the very needy tiny persons in your life. The sleep-deprivation will just happen quite naturally as part of the process. Guaranteed.
We can joke about this, but there is, yet again, something beautiful about this process. The life we live, the decisions we make—all these shape us.
9. Everything we do in life is formative—it is forming us as persons towards God or away from God. I am not saying this to stress you out, but I do want you to think about this. And I certainly need to keep thinking about it myself. The cliché is that we are what we eat. But this also applies to what we consume in other ways—what we read, what we hear, what we think. It is all a cumulative effect, and then you see the effect on the person.
I see some of this in the quality of literature published today. Not invariably, but mostly. Consider the books that were under discussion most recently in the Mahmoud v. Taylor case, on which the Supreme Court ruled earlier this summer. Yes, the discussion was about the subject matter of the books, but we should also consider the quality of writing in them. Charlotte Mason talked about twaddle—books of no redeeming value. Do not let twaddle form you.
10. Everything we are given is a gift. Take nothing for granted. Nothing that we do in this life is guaranteed. We have dreams, longings, goals. They are vapor, but sometimes they materialize, by the grace of God, into something concrete, even greater than anything we dreamed of. I think about this sometimes as I look at my husband and kids. How did I get so lucky to live a life with these beautiful, wonderful people? And I get to write. What a gift this is too. And as I look back to previous years, experiences, even sorrows—they appear suddenly as gifts, even if they did not seem it at the time. When you accept gifts gratefully, everything changes.
EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Christendom College earlier this year.
