Tending the Garden, Part 1

Understanding God's Plan for Marriage

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My great-grandmother Mae drank. She drank a lot. She drank so much that one night she stumbled out into the street in front of her home, sat down in the middle of it, and was run over by a car. It killed her. 

I don’t know why Mae drank. Nobody ever talked about it. My best guess is that she was grieving her first husband, who had died years earlier. She remarried. She bore two more children, one of whom was my grandfather. But she never was happy. Maybe because of her first husband’s death. Maybe because of some other loss, trauma, or abuse that goes unrecorded in our family history. 

Either way, her son, my grandfather, drank too. He drank a lot. By the time I was born, he had done the hard work to get sober and was a changed man. But the wounds inflicted on his family, by the man he was before, endure to this day. 

My dad’s mother came, I think, from a happy enough home. I never met my great-grandfather on that side. But I still remember my great-grandmother Theresa (we called her Mamie). She was lovely and kind and baked pumpkin pies with me when I was a toddler, so she must have had the patience of Job. 

That’s one side of the family. On my mother’s side, both great-grandfathers drank, too. One abandoned my great-grandmother Naomi (Mae’s best friend) immediately after she gave birth to my grandma, her fourth child. Naomi suffered a stroke during the birth, and it left her unable to walk or care for her children. That was too much for her husband, and he left, never to return. 

My other great-grandfather drank so much that he lost the house he built for his family and had to move them into a shack down by the Rock River. His wife, however, my German great-grandmother, Rose, was a saint. Her most treasured possessions were her Catechism and her Rosary, and that woman held onto Jesus for dear life as she pinched and saved to keep the family afloat. 

The children of these two couples, my mom’s parents, had a beautiful marriage. My grandpa said he knew he wanted to marry my grandma from the first second he saw her. He was 14 at the time. She was 12. They married six years later and grew up together as they raised their five kids. I adored them both, and the saddest sight I’ve ever seen was my grandpa, laying across my grandma’s coffin, sobbing and calling out her name, “Maryanne.” 

These six marriages were all “traditional” Catholic marriages—not just traditional the way the Church means it—one man, one woman, joined in a lifelong union—but, at least for a time, traditional the way certain reactionary movements within the Church mean it: men at work and in charge; women at home, cooking, cleaning, and rearing a passel of babies. Of those six marriages, one (maybe two) were happy. The rest were miserable. One ended in death. One ended in abandonment. Two more could have ended in divorce, but didn’t. 

This little slice of my family history is partly why I tend to be so skeptical of all the Instagram and Twitter accounts that tell women how much better the world, the family, and their lives would be if they’d just give up their work, keep to the house, and do as their husbands tell them to do. It’s not that simple. If it were, my family’s history would involve a lot less trauma … and a lot less alcohol.

I do get the attraction of certain reactionary promises, though. Women are increasingly recognizing that we have been sold a bill of goods by the Third Wave Feminist Movement. We have been told that if we want to matter, if we want to have value, if we want to find happiness, then we need to deny our femininity and our fertility in pursuit of wealth and power … all while looking like perpetually youthful supermodels and possessing the bedroom skills of a porn star. We’re also told that it’s our happiness, our fulfillment, our dreams that matter most, and anything getting in the way of that—a relationship, a spouse, time with our children—needs to be jettisoned. It’s confusing. And maddening. 

So, I understand why some women hop on the pendulum and ride it all the way back to the other side, embracing an idealized vision of marriage and family life straight from the sets of 1950s sit-coms. The problem is that vision only ever existed on TV. What existed in real life were real marriages, with real people—sinful, wounded, traumatized, struggling people—who were called by God to give themselves to each other and to Christ and to be transformed through that giving. Those who answered that call found happiness and holiness. Those who didn’t, found misery.

Today, you and I and every person who is called to the vocation of marriage will only find true happiness in marriage the same way: by embracing God’s plan for marriage and rejecting all counterfeits from left and right.

But what is that plan?

Rise and Fall

Marriage is part of God’s plan for our sanctification. And God does have a plan for marriage—for how it should be ordered and lived. But that plan is no more what we see when we watch The Donna Reed Show, with Dad trotting off to the office and Mom sweeping the floors while wearing her pearls, than it is what we see in most of the culture today, where the family is largely absent from the home, living life apart and on the go. 

Saint John Paul II tells us that if we want to understand God’s plan for man, woman, and marriage, we must look to the beginning, before the Fall, in the only Eden that has ever existed (Familiaris Consortio 10). There, Eve was created from man’s side, as his equal in dignity, a true image of God, a subject with her own thoughts, gifts, and relationship with her Creator. With her husband, she received the same charge as him:

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,’” (Genesis 1:28).

Together, man and woman were to tend the garden. Together, man and woman were to exercise dominion over the world. Together, man and woman were to build a family.

But before they could do that, Eve ate the forbidden fruit, Adam followed suit, and with his decision to listen to his wife instead of God, the whole universe fractured. Nothing was left untouched. Adam and Eve’s loss of divine life in their souls reverberated through every atom of creation, upending God’s plan for them and the world. 

Whole books can and have been written about that upending, but for marriage the single greatest consequence was the fracturing of the unity of the spouses. Instead of a relationship where each existed for the other, giving themselves freely in love, the woman became victim to male domination and possession: “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you,” (Genesis 3:16).

From that point forward, the history of man and woman becomes marred by the effects of Original Sin, with man seeking to dominate woman and woman seeking to avoid domination by manipulation. 

That domination took different forms in different cultures and different eras. Through the centuries, men have dominated women through polygamy; female infanticide; marrying off prepubescent daughters to spouses of the father’s choosing; denying their daughters an education; denying women the right to vote, own property, inherit, work, or even remain with their young children after their spouse’s death. Men sinned sexually with women then went on with their lives while women paid the price. Men used women as prostitutes. Men discarded women as they grew old or when they were unable to bear children. Men infantilized their daughters and wives, then dismissed them as ignorant, irrational, and weak. They blamed women for man’s sexual desires, man’s inability to control his lust, man’s own weaknesses. Husbands made themselves feel big by making their wives feel small. They abused their authority and instead of loving their wives as Christ loved the Church, ruled over their wives like despots. And God’s plan for marriage suffered. 

Women weren’t innocent bystanders, though. They henpecked and nagged their husbands, seeking to control rather than be controlled. They used their sexuality to get what they wanted, wielding it as a weapon not a gift. Many became experts at lying, scheming, and maneuvering, dealing duplicitously with men and one another, rather than cultivating gentle honesty and directness. Others gave their time and energy to cultivating external beauty and charm, rather than growing in wisdom and virtue. Women envied and competed with other women, vying for attention from men and finding their value in what men thought of them, not God. They refused to trust. They refused to respect. They refused to be the hearts of the home Christ called them to be. And through it all, women undermined God’s original plan for marriage right along with men.

Were there exceptions? Of course. Were there good, beautiful, holy marriages throughout human history? Absolutely. But a steady current of domination and manipulation still runs deep through the story of man and woman, with each new generation going against God’s plan in little and big ways.

With one exception. For centuries without number, one part of God’s plan remained almost unchanged: men and women tended their gardens together. 

Unmoored

For all of human history, until the historical equivalent of a minute ago, the locus of both work and family life was in the home. There were no factories, no corporate offices, no business trips that took one spouse or the other off to the other side of the country on Monday mornings. Occasionally, there were wars, which men left home and family to fight. A relative handful of men engaged in trade that took them from home—sailors and certain kinds of merchants. And there was the unspeakably evil treatment of African and Native American families, who were enslaved and forcibly separated from one another.

Those and other similar examples, however, were not the historical norm. The norm was that for generation after generation, married men and women worked together in their home—farming their land, running a shop, working a trade. And they truly did work together, Wives didn’t simply observe their husbands’ labor. They were their husbands’ partner and co-worker. They milked the cows and milled the grain and balanced the books and tended the shop and fed the workers and did a thousand other things that helped the family enterprise thrive.

Children, too, worked alongside their parents, while the babies ran around the farm or slept in the store front or were tended to by the elderly aunts and grandparents who, as often as not, lived with them. Most education happened in the homes and was ordered towards helping the children learn the family trade. Or any trade. 

And through it all, life­—imperfect though it was—was lived together. Family time was all the time, not just random hours snatched on evenings and weekends (which also didn’t exist until a historical minute ago). 

Then, came the Industrial Revolution. Slowly, factories went up., Among the poor, men, women, and children were pulled out of the home and off the farm and into a new and grueling form of servitude. Elsewhere, men and boys left their homes to go down in the mines and dig for the precious coal that fueled industry. Their wives took in sewing and laundry and farmed the backyards, trying to keep their families from total dependence on the company store. Other men left to sit in offices and walk the factory floors. Their wives stayed at home, with servants to manage and charities to run. 

More years passed. More money was made. And the men in the factories started earning enough for their wives to stay home and manage the house. For the first time in history, in a radical break with the past, the overwhelming majority of married couples spent their days apart from each other. With the beginning of widespread public schooling, they also spent their days away from their school-aged children. The family was divided and separated. Within decades, the home became a place of consumption, not production. And as consumption went up, the economy changed yet again. So did the family. 

The model so many think of as “traditional” today—father at work, mother at home—was only a blip on the historical screen. It lasted just over a century. Soon enough, both spouses were again working for the family’s daily bread. But not together. Apart. On different sides of the town or even country. The children went from daycare to school to soccer. And more and more families fell apart.

As for those families who remained intact, the life once lived together—the working together, eating together, laughing together, playing together—went on … only with other people. The greater part of each family member’s life was lived more with friends and co-workers than family members. Life became unmoored from the home, and attached itself elsewhere: the office, the school, the playing field.

And an already broken society found even more ways to break itself.

Now, here we are: a culture unmoored. Not just from the home. But from each other. From God. From decency and common sense. From our very selves. Families aren’t tending their garden together anymore, and this sinful, broken world has gone completely adrift. Widespread depression and anxiety among school-aged children, teens, and their parents; drug abuse, promiscuity, self-inflicted starvation, virtual escapism, pornography addiction, religious indifference, atheism, rampant violence, the slaughter of innocents inside and outside of the womb, and deep-seated confusion about the fundamentals of biology and identity—all of this is what our final and complete abandonment of God's plan for marriage and family has wrought. It's chaos. And it is not sustainable.

So, what to do we do?

To be continued later this month…

What We’re Watching

If you love Agatha Christie, run don’t want to subscribe to Brit Box so you can watch, “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans.” It is hands down the best tv/movie version I have seen of an Agatha Christie mystery since David Suchet twirled his mustaches. All pure campy fun, with no weird sex stuff or action movie nonsense, it is three hours of pure delight.

What We’re Eating

Farro and Herb Salad

Serves: 4-6

Cook Time: 40 Minutes

My new favorite summer salad is a twist on an old summer favorite, just punched up with more herbs and flavor. If you don’t like these particular herbs, just throw in the ones you do.

• 1.5 cups farro

• 4 cups water

• 2 tablespoons salt

• 1 pound cherry tomatoes, halved

• 1 pound chick peas, soaked and drained (or one can, drained)

• 1 handful of chives (about 1/4 cup), chopped

• 1/4 cup Italian parsley, chopped

• 1/4 cup basil, chopped

• 1/4 cup dill, chopped

• 1/4 cup chives, chopped

• 1/2 red onion, minced

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

• 2 Tablespoons lemon juice

• 1 garlic clove, minced

• 8 ounces feta cheese, crumbled

• freshly cracked pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Combine farro, water, and salt in a large pot; bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer until tender (about 30 minutes); drain and cool;

2. While the farro cooks, chop your tomatoes, onion, and herbs; set aside in a large bowl.

3. Whisk together the oil, lemon juice, garlic, and pepper; set aside.

4. Combine the farro, tomatoes, onion, herbs, dressing, and feta. Chill or serve at room temperature.

Summer Savings

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Read More

Want to know more about the Church’s teachings on marriage and family or the history of women and work? Here are a few places to start.

Church Documents

Humanae Vitae

(And the accompanying study on it I authored for Endow)

Familiaris Consortio

Books

Man and Woman by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love by Edward Sri

Love and Responsibility by John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)

Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body by John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)

Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian by Benedict Ashley, OP

Crossing the Threshold of Love by Mary Shivanandan

Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States by Alice Kessler-Harris