Beyond Sound Bites

On the dangers of extremes and the need for nuance

The plague has not lifted. As of today, we are on day ten. Chris—the first to succumb to it—bounced back the quickest. He returned to school on Monday, but the kids and I have limped along, struggling to recover. Fevers finally seem to be gone, but we still have coughs, sore throats and runny noses. We’re also all a little on the crabby side. Especially a certain three-year-old, who becomes such a tyrant when he is sick that he would give Genghis Khan a run for his money.

On the upside, after eight straight days of me being sick, my hair has finally stopped hurting.

Obviously, this has not been an environment conducive to answering deep theological questions (or even simple ones). It’s mostly only been conducive to watching Scooby Doo reruns and every single episode of “Tumble Leaf.” But I do have a few things I want to share with you this week, and Chris is home today (because the transmission died on his car last night…which we just paid off three weeks ago). So while he figures out what we’re going to do about a second car, I’m making an attempt at something that might pass for a newsletter. We’ll see. You can be the judge.

Anyhow, last week, I sent out an essay for full subscribers: The Sources of Our Discontent: On Happiness, Feminism, and Our Grandmothers. The response was overwhelming, and I’m really grateful for all your kind comments and for those of you who became full subscribers because of it. This week, I want to add a few more thoughts for all of you regarding what I wrote in that essay.

As I mentioned last week, like many people, I am of the mind that social media, for all the good it offers us (and it does offer us good), has done serious damage to the way we think. The abundance of information and the speed at which we need to process that information have shortened our attention spans and led people to argue in sound bites. When that happens, nuance goes out the window, and the only positions that can clearly be expressed are extreme ones. That can (and does) push many of us to the extremes as well. We get squeezed into opposing corners and find ourselves thinking in black and white terms about issues which are anything but black and white.

Feminism, which I talked about last week, is one such issue. Motherhood is another—particularly the questions surrounding the work mothers do inside and outside the home.

This happens on Instagram almost daily right now. Women who have the good intention of wanting to help women use their gifts in the world can (and do) end up implying that if we’re not using our gifts for profit or in some kind of public way, then we’re wasting them. In other words, they’re telling women who have chosen to stay at home that being “just a mom” is beneath us; that it’s poor stewardship of our talents.

At the same time, women who have the good intention of affirming women in our choice to remain at home with our children can (and do) unwittingly find themselves implying that working mothers are failed mothers or bad mothers, who’ve outsourced the raising of our children and the making of our home to others.

As a mom who both stays home and works, who has made serious professional sacrifices to be home with my children and still had serious professional accomplishments since becoming a mom, I feel the sting from both sides. Depending on whose reel flits across my screen on any given day, I am as likely to have my intelligence insulted as my love for my children questioned. It’s always painful, never helpful, and usually divorced from my everyday experience of reality.

Like most moms I know, I am in a constant state of discernment about what my children need and how to best give that to them. Chris and I together are also in a constant state of discernment about what God is asking each of us and our family to do. We’re not rethinking decisions daily. But we are always trying to keep our minds and hearts open to the Holy Spirit’s guidance as our children grow and change and our lives change right along with them.

The bifurcated dialogue on social media, where babies and dreams or motherhood and work are always depicted as opposites, not simply in tension with one another but actually destructive to one another, does nothing to further that openness or help my decision-making. Nor, I expect, does it do anything for most women, other than induce guilt, increase anxiety, and cultivate defensiveness.

This is probably one of the reasons why I strive so hard to have a different kind of conversation here. Over the past two years, I’ve shared my own wrestling with these particular questions in multiple essays, reflecting on the Church’s teachings about women, marriage, homemaking, discerning God’s will, and more. These are not sound bite essays. They are, I hope, thoughtful, deliberative, and deeply rooted in Scripture and Tradition. They’re also not comprehensive. No one essay says it all. Rather, each is a bit like a building block. Every single essay is part of a larger whole. They’re part of my attempt to piece together a helpful, faithful framework that I hope you can use in your own discernment and decision-making about these questions.

I also hope that regardless of your vocation, these essays pull you out of the sound bite culture war conversations which dominate social media and reduce people to “sides” or “camps.” As I said last week, truth is not relative, but life and people are complicated, and the path to holiness for each of us is both more winding and more surprising than any Instagram reel can convey. Continuing to mature as a Christian (and helping others mature as Christians) depends on us recognizing that. It also depends on us developing both a deep sense of compassion and a healthy sense of humility in the process.

Of course, the vast majority of you who are reading these words right now haven’t read the essays I’m talking about because I wrote them for full subscribers only. It’s important for my family’s budget to have some incentive for people to upgrade their subscription, so I can’t eliminate the paywall altogether. But what I can do is unlock some of my favorite essays that touch on this question. (Not The Sources of Our Discontent from last week, though; that’s still too recent. Plus I want those of you who subscribed because of it to feel like you got your money’s worth. 😁)

I’ve decided to remove the paywall from some essays not because I think my essays are particularly brilliant or life changing, but because the conversation on social media about motherhood and women is spinning out of control in the most polarizing of ways, and I don’t think me weighing in with a reel of my own will do anything for anyone’s heart, soul, or sanity. But maybe, sharing these essays will.

These are the essays (all with audio versions, for those who find listening easier) which I am unlocking.

1. The Deep Work of Homemaking: On Acknowledging the Difference Between House Work and Heart Work (print, audio)

2. Discerning the Will of God: On Babies and Dreams (print, audio)

3. Tending the Garden, Part 1: On Understanding God’s Plan for Marriage (print, audio)

4. Tending the Garden, Part 2: On Redeeming the Family (print, audio)

5. Welcoming the Wholeness of Women: The Catholic Vision of Feminine Dignity (print, audio)

I do hope you find these helpful. Even if you disagree with me, I hope you can appreciate the spirit in which these essays were written. I recognize that my particular gifts, education, and skill set have given me a freedom to both work and be at home that many women don’t have. But being both a stay-at-home mom and working mom, a homemaker and a writer, has also given me a unique vantage point from which to examine these questions. I see so much that I wouldn’t see otherwise because I live simultaneously on both sides, and I know that the overwhelming majority of you reading these words are truly striving to do your best in the midst of a complicated, broken world. So, even if your conclusions are different than mine, please know I’m not judging you. Just praying for you to have the grace to do what God is calling you to do, whatever that might be.

As always, I am incredibly grateful for the existence of Substack, which has given me a way to explore these topics in a way that allows for nuance, but doesn’t require me spending weeks or months waiting on a magazine or journal to publish them. I’m also grateful to every one of you who buys me a virtual cup of coffee each month as a full subscriber, allowing me to devote time to this work and still be able to pay the mortgage. I don’t know how important anything I write is in the grand scheme of things, but this forum has been a blessing to me if no one else, and I have you all to thank for that.

Miscellany

1. Quite by accident, Chris and I found ourselves watching the Hungarian romantic comedy “The Courtship” last week, and it was so, so, so good. I know the word “Hungarian” was enough to turn a certain percentage of you off right quick, and I get it. I used to love foreign movies, but then life got exhausting and subtitles started feeling like an awful lot of work. But this movie was not work. The writing was beautiful, the plot delightful, and the set design gorgeous. If you love period romantic comedies (ala Emma, Pride and Prejudice), you will love this one, too. (Note, the movie is very clean, but there are two brief nude scenes in the context of art not sex, so consider yourself warned on that).

2. I have a newfound appreciation for Donald Duck. A deep, deep, appreciation. I came by this appreciation in recent weeks, as one of our current favorite family activities (especially when running fevers) is to watch the old Disney shorts from the 1940s. There are so many good ones (the Goofy “How-To” shorts are particularly hilarious), but our favorites are the shorts featuring Donald Duck and Chip and Dale. The animators want you rooting for Chip and Dale (which sometimes I do), but even when I am rooting against Donald, I am also identifying with that crotchety, aggrieved, persnickety old duck more than I ever thought possible. If you too ever feel like the world is going to hell in a hand basket and nobody but you sees it, go spend some time with Donald. It will help.

3. The boys are going to a wonderful Catholic Montessori preschool in the mornings, and their fundraising gala is coming up. That meant I needed a new cocktail dress (because perimenopause is showing everywhere and none of my old ones fit right), but given everything in our life right now, I had no time to find one. I remembered someone mentioned Baltic Born had nice, affordable cocktail dresses, so before looking anywhere else, I went there. The first dress I saw looked lovely and flattering, so rather than waste one more minute looking, I ordered it on the spot—probably one minute after logging on to the site. I immediately regretted being so rash, but when it arrived Wednesday, it was perfect—perfect fit, perfect color, perfect cut, perfect everything. It was a weekday miracle. I’m sharing partly as a praise story, but also in case you are in a similar spot and need a recommendation for a quality, affordable dress. This is the dress I ordered, which is a perfect 10 in my book, but there are other ones that are lovely, and the quality of mine was impressive for the price.

4. If you’ve been wanting to try one of Beautycounter’s ultra-clean, high-performing skincare regimens, but have been on the fence, maybe this will help. Beautycounter recently adjusted the prices so that all regimen bundles are 20 percent less than buying the items individually. Which is good. Even better? For the first time ever, the first time buyer code CLEANFORALL20, works on the regimens. That means you can now try an entire regimen for 40 percent off. Feel free to email me or dm me if you need help selecting a regimen that is right for you.

5. I have been super slack on developing new recipes lately (moving and sickness will do that to you, but I did make this recipe for Chicken and Dumplings from Budget Bytes last week, and everyone devoured it. Even Becket, who mostly likes chocolate chip muffins, declared, “This is really good, Mama!” The only changes I made were adding about half a cup of white wine to the veggies before adding in the milk and then adding about a cup of half and half at the end to make it a bit creamier (and go farther). The recipe was quick, easy, and really perfect for a cold winter’s night.

6. Chris and I are going to record a pilot episode of a podcast tomorrow night that we are thinking of starting with our dear friends Kate and Casey Stapleton. Casey is a high school teacher like Chris, and he and Kate are both musicians, who spend their summers on tour in a big blue bus with their six small children. They are way cooler and more interesting than us and possibly even more opinionated. I know there are a million podcasts out there, and I am quite happy to keep on writing and not talking, but I think my husband has wisdom the world needs to hear. I also think that a podcast of married Catholic friends, just talking about the things we talk about when we get together for dinner, might make for a nice change of pace in the podcast world. We’ll see. Prayers for our initial recording are appreciated, and if it’s any good, you will be the first to hear about it when it’s ready to go.

That’s all for this week, friends. Pray we are all in good health by Monday, and I can both get back to answering your questions and wrapping up the Word on Fire Children’s Story Bible project, which has been on pause these past few weeks.

Can I ask you a favor? If you’re enjoying my monthly essays, can you help spread the word about this newsletter? Email it to a friend, share it on social media, or just mention it to someone you think would enjoy it. At this point, nearly all of this newsletter’s growth depends upon readers who love it sharing it with others. So, I would be very grateful for any way you can help. Thank you!

Also, did you know Substack now allows you to give gift subscriptions? You can do that by clicking here?