Are College Degrees and Motherhood Compatible, the Shape of Life with Infertility, and More

Weekly Notes

---

Calling all readers in Western Ohio and Eastern Indiana. Next Saturday evening, July 19, Chris and I will be speaking together in Russia, Ohio. The event will include talks from each of us—I’ll be talking about our infertility journey and IVF, Chris will address about how we can become better witnesses to the faith in the midst of our daily lives—as well as a Q&A with both of us. The event goes from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Russia School Local Gym (100 School Street). Admission is free. Doors open at 6:00. Reach out to Kathryn Francis with questions.

---

Sorry for the unexpected week off last week. It was not my plan to come back from vacation and drop the ball on the newsletter. But I also wasn’t expecting quite the flood of emails awaiting me at home—emails filled with many and varied tasks for my upcoming book launches. I’ve written a lot of books in my life. I’ve promoted a lot of books in my life. But I’ve never promoted three books at one time. I’m also working with three different publishers who are heavily invested in the success of these three books, so the marketing groundwork is intense right now.

For those who have been asking, though, pre-orders for the Around the Catholic Table cookbook start July 29 (the feast of St. Martha!), with a launch date of August 12. Pre-orders for The Story of All Stories, the Word on Fire Votive Children’s Bible will start soon after that, with a release date of October 13. And I am still waiting on a release date for Sacred Wine. I promise, you will hear more from me about all three than you ever wanted to hear!

In the meantime, I’ve got a Q&A for you this week and next, followed by a full subscriber only essay during the third week of July. If you don’t want to miss that and want to help keep these Q&A’s coming in the midst of all the insanity three different marketing teams have planned for me this fall, I hope you’ll consider upgrading your subscription. Honoring my commitment to full subscribers is the best motivation to keep me writing in the midst of this madness.

Question Box

What should the life of a Catholic couple who are infertile look like?

In the broadest parameters, it should look like the life of every other Christian. It should be a life marked by sacrificial generosity, by the giving of self, and by the laying down of one’s life for another. It also should be a life lived joyfully, even under the weight of the cross. It should be a life where virtue is pursued, grace is received, and the poor—in mind, body, and community—are cared for. And it should be a life where both husband and wife live as the spiritual father and mother God made them to be. In sum, it should be a life lived in conformity to Christ’s own life.

Single, married, fertile, infertile, celibate, consecrated—it’s really all the same. We’re all called to holiness. And that only happens when we conform ourselves to Christ.

Beyond that, there is no one single way that the life of every infertile couple should look, any more than there is one single way that the life of every family, priest, religious, or single person should look. God has a particular path for each of us. He has different people for us to love, different work for us to do, and a different witness for us to bear in the world. That’s the glory and the drama of the Christian life. It’s what makes this journey so exciting. And sometimes a little terrifying.

For Chris and me, our infertility came with a call to adoption. But that’s not the call of every infertile couple. For the Venerable Mother Luisita (Maria Luisa de la Peña) and her husband Pascual Rojas, infertility came with a call to embrace the poor as their children. The two built a hospital together and cared for the destitute there. For other couples I know, infertility has come with a call to serve the Church or their parents, patients, clients, students, or communities.

Only you and your husband can discern the shape of your particular life together. And that discernment, like all discernment, requires taking account of your desires, your abilities, and your opportunities. What do you want to do? What are you able to do? And what ways of loving and serving have been presented to you or are open to you? Those are the questions you need to ask as you figure out what comes next.

Maybe that discernment will lead you to adoption, like it did for us. Or maybe it will lead you to pouring yourself out for family and friends in need. Maybe it will lead you to some entirely different form of service that would be impossible with children. Again, that’s for you and your spouse to figure out together. Just don’t forget that one right answer rarely exists. God wants you to follow Him. Following Him will always involve giving of yourself, radically and intentionally. It will always involve honoring obligations that go beyond your own interests and desires. As long as you’re doing that, while honestly seeking to His will, you will be doing something pleasing to Him.

I’m praying for you.

How would you respond to someone who thinks college is a waste of money for a woman who just wants to be a wife and mother and that higher education does more harm than good for women?

How would I respond? Probably, I would start by asking them why they think that. I’d want them to explain themselves a bit more so that I understood their reasoning. I’d also want to know if they thought this were always true or if they allowed for any exceptions. I mean, are they just talking about certain programs at certain schools or do they really think higher education always does more harm than good for all women? Because that’s certainly not what the Church thinks. If it did, the Vatican would have shut down the countless co-educational Catholic colleges and universities around the world long ago. They also never would have permitted religious sisters to found hundreds of colleges exclusively for women.

I would agree with them, though, that college isn’t for everybody, whether we’re talking about men or women. I would also agree with them that some colleges and some degree programs are minefields, which many young people struggle to navigate well. And if they were concerned about a young woman taking on debt to earn a degree that she would never use professionally, I would concur up to a point, since excessive debt, for both women and men, is bad regardless of what one’s career plans might be.

I would also point out, however, that good Christian husbands can’t be conjured on demand and that the future is unpredictable. No matter how much someone might want to marry young and stay home with their kids, those aren’t always things we can control. Sometimes, the wait for a husband can be long. Sometimes, husbands die … or leave. A degree that might seem unnecessary to a girl and her family at 17, might seem to be the most helpful thing in the world to a single woman at 27 or a widow at 37. We just don’t know what’s coming, and a little preparation for the unexpected can often go a long way.

It also might be worth pointing out that, with some exceptions, the best place to meet a young man who will one day be capable of earning enough to support a family on one income is still college.

More than anything else, though, I would push back on the idea that the only benefits of a college education are professional ones. Yes, many degree programs are little more than vocational training, but that’s not true of every degree program at every college. Any school that has a solid liberal arts core, along with professors who value truth, beauty, and goodness, has the potential to offer its students formation not just for a job but for life. In other words, it has the potential to make you more human. That’s the goal of a true liberal arts education, which, when done well, can have the most beautiful impact on how we, as women, care for our families and homes.

Personally, I am incredibly grateful for the years I spent in school, both as an undergraduate and graduate student. I can’t imagine my life without the education I received, first as a History, English, and Political Ccience major at Miami University of Ohio, and later in the Masters of Theology Program at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

All my studies, not just the theology, shaped who I am and how I see the world. I learned empathy from reading great books, gained wisdom from studying history, and grew in my understanding of the world from analyzing political systems. Then, theology tied it all together, helping me to see the meaning behind the literature, history, and politics. It brought me face to face with the One to whom everything else was pointing.

I am a better writer for those studies. But I also am a better wife and mother for them.

To my husband, I’m a better friend—a better companion and helpmate—for all that I studied and learned in school. Our conversations are more interesting, and the counsel I give to him is sounder. I think more broadly, communicate more clearly, and reason more reasonably for my years in the classroom.

Our life together is also more rooted in the Catholic vision of the good life because of those studies. My education taught me that there is more to life than what the culture hands us. I know God calls us to something richer, deeper, and more mysterious than the life social media and reality tv dangle before us. And so I’m willing to sacrifice alongside my husband in order to pursue that call.

As for my children, my education has brought all sorts of practical benefits. My soldier-obsessed sons have a hundred questions daily about trench warfare and D-Day, Roman soldiers and medieval knights, power hungry kings and petty tyrants. I can answer all those questions (or most of them) with ease thanks to my history studies. Likewise, the shelves of our house are lined with books for every age. I’ve put those books there, carefully curating a library of good stories filled with adventure, courage, sacrifice, romance, faith, suffering, loneliness, endurance, and the occasional fairies. Those books are all ones that have opened new worlds to me, giving me glimpses into rich and varied hearts and helping me to understand better what it means to be human. I am more capable of loving my children as they need to be loved because of those books. And my hope is that those books will do the same for them. That is the enduring gift of my study of literature .

As for political science, my moods are less affected by the evening news because I understand how much more there is to every unfolding crisis than the television or Internet conveys. I’m a calmer mother for that knowledge. I’m a more focused mother, too, less distracted by political upheaval, because I know the most important struggles are not waged on Capitol Hill, but rather in the human heart. My degree (and my time) in politics taught me that. They also taught me at least a little bit about negotiating with toddlers … who are not unlike terrorists at times.

And as for theology … it has helped me in a million ways: in understanding my children’s dignity; in answering their questions about who God is and what He wants from us; in knowing how important my presence, attention, and affection are to their development; in relaying to them the story of salvation history; in teaching them about God’s mercy and generosity; in helping them to encounter Christ; in preparing them for the sacraments; and in helping them grow in virtue through all the quotidian moments of our life together. Truly, there are too many benefits of studying theology to name. Besides God’s grace, nothing has served my motherhood more than my time at Franciscan University.

Those are all tangible ways higher education has benefitted my motherhood. But so much is intangible. My intelligence, my strength, my love of order, my virtue, my sense of humor, my discipline—all that was sharpened and refined by my studies. I am a better, more virtuous woman for the education I received in college and grad school. Which is to say, I am a better mother because of college and grad school.

And yes, maybe some things about motherhood are harder because of my education. Motherhood has often upended my sense of competence. It doesn’t come with the dopamine hits of praise that academic accomplishment does. Raising children in the hidden life of the home has been a good corrective to some of the bad habits of mind and heart I picked up along the way. But on the whole, for me, I think the benefits of higher education have far outweighed the costs. Motherhood is always going to be challenging in some way. Life is always going to be challenging in some way, too. As the saying goes, nobody gets to heaven on a feather bed. But I’d rather have all that my education has given my family and me, with the necessary correctives to my vanity, than not have those gifts.

Again, college isn’t for everyone. Not every man or every woman has the aptitude for or interest in higher education. And an education filled with lies can absolutely make it harder for a woman to enter into marriage and motherhood and for her to live those vocations happily.

But an education rooted in truth and goodness, an education that helps a woman know more and love more, will always make her a better wife and mother. That kind of education is never a liability to a good life in the home. It’s an asset. And there are plenty of schools, secular and Christian, offering that kind of education.

That’s a long response to your question. If you still want more, though, I’d encourage you (or the person you’re asking about) to read Edith Stein’s essays on women’s education, included in the second volume of her collected works. Her work is a solid primer in a truly Catholic vision of women’s education, one that reflects actual Catholic teaching, and not the mere opinions of those who have been formed more by the fundamentalist corners of the Internet than they have by Catholic tradition.

Five Fast Things

1. I haven’t had it in me this past week to write about the tragic losses in Texas. I have been praying and grieving and praying some more, but seeing all those beautiful little girls’ faces, so many of them just a year older than Toby, took the words right out me. If I could have found the words, though, I would have written something like this: The Blanket By The River.

2. This past week I decided it was time to re-read one of my favorite Wendell Berry novels, Hannah Coulter. I loved it deeply when I first read it 20 years ago, but I haven’t read it since Chris and I married and welcomed our children. It hits differently now. It’s more beautiful, more painful, more true. It’s hard to explain. But the dimensions of the book have shifted in the light of the life Chris and I now lead together. I’m so grateful I picked it up again and absolutely encourage you to pick it up (again or for the first time), too.

3. Speaking of reading, while we were up in Door County, I read the last three quarters of The Vanishing Woman in one sitting and have since ordered more books in The Father Gabriel mystery series, to which it belongs. I am eagerly awaiting their arrival. The story was excellent, and it absolutely had me guessing to the end. You can use my code VISITATIONNOVELS to save 15 percent on the Father Gabriel Mysteries or any other novels from Ignatius Press through August 31.

4. When Beautycounter relaunched as Counter last week, one of its new products was the Counterglow Hyaluronic Moisture Mist, a toner that doubles as a facial mist. I purchased it, knowing people would ask for my opinion on it, but not really expecting much. I already had a toner I loved and what did I need with a facial mist? Apparently a lot, as I have been spritzing my face with it multiple times a day since it arrived. I don’t use it as a toner (I have the Countertime Mineral Boost Hydrating Essence for that), but a light spritz a couple times a day gives my skin a healthy glow and somehow seems to refreshen my makeup every time. Also, not gonna lie, in this heat it feels super refreshing. If you have questions about navigating the new Counter, feel free to email me at emily@emilystimpsonchapman.com or text me at 412-426-3671 (I use both that email and text exclusively for Counter clients).

5. A few weeks back, I made the mistake of reading the ingredients on what I thought was a fancy brand of ice cream. It horrified me more than just a little. Having now resolved to learn to make homemade ice cream, I’ve been looking around at various recipes for what seems easiest. (Yes, that is my main qualifier. I have no time for complicated recipes and an actual ice cream maker is not likely to be a budget priority until 2036 … if then). I found this recipe somehow on Instagram (someone else must have shared it, but I don’t know who), and it was really quite good. My kids loved it and I plan on trying it again with fresh fruit, chocolate chips, or homemade caramel sauce.

*This recipe made enough to give 10 people one scoop each

Ingredients

• 2 cups heavy whipping cream

• 1 and 2/3 cup milk

• ½ cup honey

• 2 Tablespoons vanilla extract

1. Combine milk and honey in a small pot; simmer for 20 minutes or until the mixture thickens (basically, you’re making homemade sweetened condensed milk)

2. In a mixing bowl, beat whipped cream until stiff peaks form (I used my Kitchen Aid); add milk and honey mixture, plus vanilla, and continue beating on low until incorporated;

3. Cover bowl (or transfer to Tupperware) and freeze for at least six hours.

---

Shop Beata Home

For those who have asked, yes our code for Beata Home is still good. You can shop all her curated prints and frames and receive 15 percent off with the code Emily15. We absolutely love the print of the Visitation we ordered through her shop and can’t wait to get it hung in the new podcast studio (which is currently 5,000 degrees and too hot to work in … but we’re getting there).

Buy My Books

Our little online bookshop us open for business year-round now. We are working on upgrading my website to improve the checkout process. until then, this Google Form will have to do! Chris is shipping books every Thursday or Friday after the order and will be e-mailing tracking orders after books are shipped starting next week.

---

In Case You Missed It

Welcoming the Wholeness of Women: The Catholic Vision of Feminine Dignity (Unlocked)

Why the Devil Wants Women to Do It All: On Knowing Our Limits, Living Our Vocation, and Learning to Say No (Full Subscribers Only)

The Sources of Our Discontent: On Happiness, Feminism, and Our Grandmothers (Full Subscribers Only)