Catholic parents, do your daughters know that it’s okay—even good and holy—to desire a life as wife and mother, even above (and even forgoing) all other earthly considerations? Have you told them explicitly that they are free to pursue Holy Matrimony (a woman’s natural vowed state of life) as a goal in itself, bypassing the culture’s worldly expectations for young women today? If you have, praise God! This article is not for you.
For the rest, consider these personal stories:
After I graduated from my large, public, Arizona high school in 1985, I went on to a top private New England university, graduated summa cum laude, and then was off to a Southern graduate school where I had been awarded a coveted assistantship. Every marker for worldly success was on the table, and the world was my oyster!
However, not once did I actually consider having a career. I knew what my real goal was from the time I was a small girl—and it wasn’t to join the workforce, compete with men, climb the ladder, and make a lot of money (or “make history”). All my heart truly desired was to get married and have babies. I’d never even been around babies growing up, but I wanted to be a stay-at-home wife and mom, just like my own mother and most of the women in my 1970s neighborhood when I was in grade school. (Knowing there was a mother behind the door of each house was such a comfort and a gift to all the neighborhood kids walking to and from school or playing outside all day!)
But before I could live my dream, I had to get through college as expected. I’m not exactly sorry that I went to college—as that is how I eventually met my husband—but even that detail served my plan; as far as I was concerned, I was there to get my “MRS” degree, as they used to say. In that regard, I was not really an anomaly, as most students my age still expected to find a spouse in college and get married soon after; but a good percentage of the women expected to forge a career, too.
Meanwhile, one good friend of mine from high school didn’t go to college but instead married her high school sweetheart at age 19—a teen bride! I couldn’t attend her wedding in our hometown, as I was far away in Boston, finishing up my freshman year. I distinctly remember sitting on my bed in my tiny dorm room on the day of her nuptials. I was wistful, joyful, and envious, all at the same time. She was living my dream.
To be sure, being a young bride without a college degree was certainly “not for me” (skipping a bachelor’s degree was not an option in my world, or even in my own mind), but my longing for what she had was real and primal. I knew I had years to go before it was my turn, so I told myself to suck it up and deal with it. I watched from afar as my friend easily conceived and bore one baby, then another, in her prime fertile years.
Even though I was not supposed to feel it, I had such admiration for her. I looked up to her—and not down on her—because, in my mind, she was already living as an adult, unlike me. I envied her life as a grown-up wife and mommy with a home of her own while I plodded through my (often questionable) courses and lived in the artificial, debauched, and degrading arrested adolescence that is the college scene.
Thankfully, the Lord can work within a mess of darkness, and I did meet my future husband during those college years. We became engaged six weeks after graduation, and I felt like my adult life was finally about to start. I dropped out of grad school after the first two weeks because my life was not about that anymore. I could throw off the shackles of “gain another degree, get more accolades, go out and change the world!” and free my heart to get ready for my wedding and a perfectly natural future of housewifery and babies, just like my—and everyone else’s—ancestral line of hardworking, noble foremothers.
After an unnecessarily long engagement (short engagements like my parents’ and grandparents’ were irresponsible, you see), we were wed a year later. I worked at a small, women-only ad agency until just before our first child was born. I have been home ever since and have never looked back.
Money was tight, and we lived in apartments for those first years. My husband worked as a room-service attendant when employment was scarce. But my heart was overflowing. I loved everything about being a woman, wife, and mother; and I had a husband who understood that his manly task was to protect and provide.
Okay, so that’s all well and good. That was the late 1980s and early ’90s, when a holdover nostalgia for homemaking may have still captivated the hearts of young women at the time. But what about more modern women? Surely, after 30+ more years of nonstop feminist brainwashing and a push for a genderless, androgynous society, female hearts are finally free from those strange longings for a husband and babies and making a home; that interior pining was only a “social construct” after all, and young women today are not “limited” by the constraints of tradition, right? I am not so sure.
When I was writing my old Little Catholic Bubble blog, there was a regular reader and commenter who went by the username “college student.” She was not Catholic; she was a feminist, a vocal proponent of the hook-up culture, a Planned Parenthood and abortion supporter—basically, a liberal Democrat—who sparred with me often. But, although things were contentious in the comment boxes, we befriended each other privately.
She was about the age of my oldest child, and I had a maternal heart for her and grew to love her. This beautiful young lady graduated, joined the corporate world, had lots of boyfriends/dates, and became successful in all the ways the modern world expects of modern women.
But in private, she had a confession. The secret longing of her heart was to find a good man, get married, and have babies. She said that when she and her feminist friends spoke privately, they talked about “weddings and babies.” I told her that was perfectly normal and rightly ordered. This draw toward hearth and home is the natural desire of the feminine heart since the beginning of creation when God made Eve a wife and a mother. It is certainly nothing to be ashamed of!
I gave her a gentle challenge: Why not break the taboo? Why not put her true desire out on her social media and tell folks that her dream was to be a wife and mother? She said, “Leila, you know I can’t do that.” My heart felt sad for her—and for a nation of young, stressed-out, medicated, lonely women, many of them “boss babes” who cannot even identify why they ache so much and so deeply.
These stories are representative of millions, of course. And there are many reasons given, even by Catholic parents, as to why their daughter “should” do this and “must” do that long before she gets serious about finding a husband, getting married, and starting a family. After all, there is that degree to be earned, career to be launched, debts to be paid, fun to be had, serial dating to experience, “independence” to be established, and oh my, the travel! There are also extended family, friends, and a world of social media to impress with all her personal accomplishments first. We all know how things are today, and the pressure to “do all the things” is heavy on our girls.
