Radical Motherhood - finding joy at home

How to be a stay-at-home mom Living your Faith

What does it mean to trust God?

I have come to terms with the fact that I do not have time to write long, well-thought-out blog posts with beautiful photos.

It’s probably a stretch to say that I’ve ever written really well-thought-out blog posts with beautiful photos anyway.

I still feel sad and a little (just a little) bit resentful about it, but I feel almost like I’m being CALLED to write something here, even if it isn’t perfect.

So, rather than continue to stew about it and post nothing, I’m going to try sharing the stuff I’m thinking about, even if it isn’t quite the way I want it to be. I know that the message and mission of Radical Motherhood is important, and I’m praying for guidance on how exactly I’m supposed to share it.

So. I’ve been thinking a lot about trusting God lately. It’s an idea that’s pretty relevant to our current times, and it’s especially relevant to moms who are considering leaving a fulfilling career and income to stay home with their kids.

If you know that God’s got your back, it’s a lot easier to make tough decisions. You know, like the decision to cut your family’s income in half, spend all day every day with your children, and form a whole new identity apart from your work.

For most of my life, I’ve thought of trusting God as kind of a hope against all odds that he will stop bad things from happening, if I can manage to anticipate them and pray about them first. God, please keep my kids from getting sick. Please protect my husband’s job. Or, on the other side of it, as a way of getting what I want from God, if I’m good enough and pray hard enough, and my motivations are pure enough. God, I said a Rosary today. Please heal my friend.

That kind of trust never really felt like trust. Instead of worrying less, because I was trusting God to take care of me, I worried more. Was I praying correctly? Was I praying enough? Why would God answer my prayers, if even the saints had prayers go seemingly unanswered? How do I know whether God wants the same thing that I want, and if he doesn’t want what I want, am I ticking him off by continuing to ask for it? Am I actually changing his mind when I pray for something to happen? Is that even possible?

It doesn’t take much to prove that God allows hard things to happen to the people who love him. Look at the lives of the disciples. Look at the lives of the saints. Heck, look at the lives of the Christians in our own times. Misery and tragedy touch all of us, even the best of us. God asks a lot of his followers, and he tells us repeatedly that he does all of it for our own good. Sometimes, we suffer, and that’s part of his plan for us.

What I’ve learned is that, while God does want to know the desires of our heart, prayer isn’t about convincing God to do things for us, or to spare us from suffering. Trusting God doesn’t mean that you trust him to protect you from every bad thing, or to make everything easy for you, or to give you what you ask for. It means acknowledging that he’s smarter than we are, and he loves us even more than we love ourselves.

So what does it mean to trust God? Simple. It means that you surrender. You allow him to be God. You spend more time asking what he wants than explaining what you want. When a prayer goes unanswered, you trust that he has something better in store for you. When you suffer, you trust that he will give you the strength to keep going. You have confidence that whatever is going on in your life, he is using it for your good – your eternal good.

You can’t change God’s mind. You don’t need to. He’s never wrong. His plans are never bad. If he wants something for us, and we want something different, the odds are 100% that we are the ones who need to change our minds. To me, that revelation was such a huge relief. I can still tell God what I want to happen, and because he loves me, he will listen. But I don’t have to worry about trying to control everything by praying for it. All I have to pray is that God’s will be done, and that he gives me the grace to align my will with his.

If you’ve been asking God to protect you from something, or to deliver something good, or to make something easier, I challenge you to stop, right now, and ask for something else instead: Ask him to help you to trust him. Ask him to give you the grace you need to do what he wants you to do.

If you’ve been thinking about becoming a stay-at-home mom, but it seems like there are too many obstacles and too many sacrifices involved, ask God to strengthen your will – so you can break your attachment to your current lifestyle, to sharpen your mind – so you can come up with a transition plan that works, and soften your heart toward your vocation as a wife and mother – so you can put first things first without resentment or bitterness.

March 30, 2020 0 comment

Homeschool

Homeschooling is not the same as being quarantined

written by Allison Schoonover

I follow several homeschooling moms online, and I’ve seen a LOT of “here’s how to homeschool” posts from them lately. I think they’re attempting to help other parents who have unexpectedly been faced with school closures, and I think that’s admirable.

But misguided.

I would love to think that one silver lining on the coronavirus cloud is that more parents will attempt homeschooling and fall in love with it. However, my advice to anyone who is suddenly at home all day with their children (or maybe still working full time and wondering how to keep up their kids’ education while school is closed) is to ignore all of those posts.

I’m already a homeschooling mom, and I don’t even want to homeschool right now.

I don’t think it’s fair to you, to your kids, or to homeschooling, to try to figure it all out in one month. Let alone a month like this one.

I don’t know about you, but despite my best efforts, I find myself obsessing over the coronavirus – be it watching the news or Googling it or talking about it or dreaming up worst-case-scenarios. Even when I’m not consciously thinking about it, it’s there, gnawing at the back of my mind. It makes me feel restless. Irritable. Make that very irritable. Exhausted. There seem to be a million things to do (make homemade hand sanitizer? research toilet paper alternatives? can a bunch of vegetables?) but I don’t want to do any of them. A million voices are out there promoting a million different ways to feel, opinions to have, facts to analyze, and supplies I should buy. I feel paralyzed.

Even though my family spends 90% of our time at home all year round, I suddenly feel trapped. Would I be able to do something like start homeschooling from scratch RIGHT NOW? Um, no.

Now, homeschooling does not have to be overly complicated. I don’t want to make it seem like you need any prescribed amount of preparation or education to teach your kids. Under normal circumstances, I think that anyone who wants to do it can homeschool their kids. But if you want it to work, you have to figure out how your kids like to learn. You have to figure out how you like to teach. You have to pick some kind of material to teach from out of the oodles of homeschool materials out there. You have to do it from a place of confidence and peace. You have to be able to observe, reflect, make adjustments, observe some more. Sometimes, you have to scrap everything and start over. I don’t think you can do any of that in such a short period of time, and I don’t honestly think it’s worth trying.

I say, give yourself and your kids a break. You all deserve a break. If you have extra time together, spend it doing something enjoyable. Watch a movie. Play a game. Talk about something.

I DO want other families to try living on one income, and homeschooling, and all of the other wonderful things we talk about on this blog. But I don’t want anyone who has lost their job indefinitely and/or had their school announce a month-long closure to think that this one month of insanity could be anything like the true experience of being a homeschool family.
This is not a season that is, for many of us, going to be productive in the traditional sense. There are a lot of things we would normally get done, like schoolwork, that are just not going to happen.

That’s okay.

Slow down.

Be unproductive.

I think we need to let go of the idea that time is only well spent if we have a worksheet or a report or a completed checklist to show for it. If the only thing our kids learn during our time in quarantine is to enjoy us, and to enjoy each other, would that be so bad?

March 26, 2020 0 comment

Finding Joy Why be a stay-at-home mom?

Practicing Downward Mobility with Henri Nouwen

written by Allison Schoonover

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a blog post, hasn’t it?

Every day, several times a day, I think of something I want to write, but there is never any time. Sometimes it’s impossible, because one of the toddlers is crying or in immediate danger of choking, falling, or making a gigantic mess (approximately 95% of their waking hours). Then there’s homeschooling, and feeding people, and keeping a pathway shoveled through the toys and laundry. Most of the time, I really do love and find joy in taking care of everyone and everything at home, but it isn’t always easy to lay down my desires for the sake of the greater good. There are days when I serve my family (how to say this nicely?) not-so-joyfully. There are days when I really want to watch a grownup show on TV. Or go for a walk. Alone. Or relax, in silence, in the bathtub, without anyone coming in to use the toilet. There are times when I think about all the other things I want to do or could be doing, and it’s a struggle to maintain perspective. Even ten years after choosing to become a stay at home mom – nearly 20 years after first becoming a mom (!) – I have to continually recommit myself to doing it with joy and love.

Henri Nouwen and Downward Mobility

When I came across the ideas of voluntary displacement and downward mobility in Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Direction, I immediately thought of motherhood and how important both of them are in helping us stay faithful and joyful in our calling. More on that in a second. The author, Henri Nouwen, was a Catholic priest, pastor, and professor at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. Then, at the height of his career as a sought-after Ivy League professor, writer, and speaker, he chose to travel to France to live and work in a community for disabled adults. He left everything he had worked his whole life to build to serve a group of people who are, in the eyes of the world, nobody. And he admits that it was hard; that everything in his nature wanted to cling to the prestige and honor and comfort of his old life.

Can anybody else relate to that?

I think there’s a parallel here in the lives of many mothers, especially stay-at-home mothers, who choose to leave a career and possibly a big chunk of their self-image to serve their families. To devote oneself to the care of children is, in the eyes of the world today, a pretty lowly occupation. It goes against our culture’s obsession with upward mobility – the idea that, in Nouwen’s words, “…the only way to go is up. Make it to the top, enter the limelight, break the record – that’s what draws attention and gets us on the front page of the newspaper and offers the rewards of money and fame. Our culture values ‘upward mobility’: staying on a secure career path, maintaining the status quo, appearing to others as an interesting person, succeeding in business, politics, sports, academics, or even spiritual practice.” Is there any lifestyle less glamorous than being a stay-at-home mom? Where’s the career path, the money? What interesting things do moms do, or think, or talk about?

Does what you do really matter if no one “important” sees or cares about it?

Motherhood IS downward mobility

The way of motherhood – real, radical motherhood – is the way of downward mobility. It’s the way of Jesus. “It’s going to the end of the line, staying behind the sets, and choosing the last place.” Jesus lowered himself by not only becoming human, but by living in poverty and dying the death of a criminal. And he did so by choice – choosing to give everything for us because he loves us. We need to embrace downward mobility, as Jesus did. Unless we do it willingly – joyfully – we aren’t really taking up our cross and following him. Nouwen refers to this as voluntary displacement. “We are called to follow Jesus on the downward path of ministry and to go where God is leading, even if that place is ‘somewhere we would rather not go’ (John 21:18).” Voluntary displacement is what we do when we choose to leave what Nouwen calls the “net of the ordinary and proper.” When a woman leaves a good job, especially one that took years of education and training to earn, we often see it as a violation of what is “ordinary and proper.” How could she waste all of that time and money? What kind of example is she setting for her daughters? Aren’t women like her destroying the feminist movement? Wouldn’t her children be more normal if she put them in daycare (and school) like everyone else?

Wanting to do work that is unpaid and unseen is definitely outside the “net.”

But, as Nouwen writes, “Voluntary displacement unmasks the illusion that we have to ‘make it to the top’ and offers us a glimpse of a deeper spiritual reality. It puts us in touch with our own suffering and pain, our own woundedness and brokenness, our own limitations and powerlessness…The discipline of displacement calls us away from the comfortable place and the easy oasis.”

Persevering faithfully in our unspectacular lives

It’s easy, when you’re doing work that the world sees as worthwhile, to feel powerful and independent. To think that what you are and what you have belongs to you and is because of you. It’s much harder to feel that way when you’ve spent your entire day trying (and failing) to just get a shower in and brush your teeth. My children have taught me over and over and over again that I am limited. That I am broken. That I am very, very ordinary, and I need a lot of help just to make it through my boring little life. That God is the only thing keeping it all going, and without him, I am not even a speck of dust. Which, it turns out, is the very thing Jesus wants us to learn. Nouwen says, “For many people, displacement means persevering faithfully in their unspectacular daily life, leaving grand fantasies aside to be faithful to their ministry…”

What we are called to do

Most of us aren’t called to riches, or fame, or even to raising perfect children in an immaculate home. We are called to know God, and love him, and recognize that without him, we are, quite literally, nothing. To find the beauty in the unspectacular. So, we persevere faithfully in our unspectacular daily life. We choose to leave the net of the ordinary and proper and serve those who have no power, no status, nothing of earthly value to give us. We stay behind the sets, take the last place in line, admit to our limitations and powerlessness. It will always be a struggle, sometimes at least, to renounce what the world has to offer. It’s easy to focus on what we could have had, could have been – even when we know that none of that is really what it seems anyway. The only way to embrace the downward path is to ask Jesus to help us; to help us lay down our lives for what we know he has called us to do – then we can live our ordinary lives with extraordinary joy.

We can pray for help!

The Litany of Humility is probably my favorite prayer. I say it often, because I NEED it often. Maybe it will help you on your downward journey too:

O Jesus, meek and humble of heart,

Hear me.

From the desire of being esteemed,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being loved,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being extolled,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being honored,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being praised,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being preferred to others,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being consulted,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the desire of being approved,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being humiliated,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being despised,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of suffering rebukes,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being calumniated,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being forgotten,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being ridiculed,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being wronged,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

From the fear of being suspected,

Deliver me, O Jesus.

That others may be loved more than I,