The Weeds and Wheat of Motherhood

On Chappell Roan, Babies, and the Light Missing from My Eyes

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The fates have been conspiring against me writing anything of substance this week. Between turning in one book manuscript on Tuesday (a children’s book about Saint Joseph) and getting back proofs on Thursday for the forthcoming Word on Fire story Bible (The Story of All Stories), there has been precious little time for doing a Q&A here. Throw in coughing kids, more sickness for me, and serious wrangling with the Ohio Department of Health over the lead abatement order we inherited, and that precious time quickly became no time.

So this morning, I want to do something a little different, and share a few thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head about the pop star Chappell Roan’s remarks about motherhood.

For those who missed the social media dust-up earlier this week, the 27-year-old Roan recently went on the uber-popular podcast Call Her Daddy and made a remark about motherhood that has since launched approximately 800 million responses on social media. What she said was this:

“All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I don’t know anyone who’s happy and has children at this age… anyone who has light in their eyes.”

Let’s make that 800 million plus one responses, shall we?

For weeks now, even before Roan’s remarks became the hot topic of the day, I’ve been pondering my own paradoxical feelings about motherhood. These feelings are mysterious. They don’t always make sense. You see, some days, when I am the most tired and the most overwhelmed, I’ll catch myself longing for some of what I had when I was single. Namely, I find myself longing for time. There was so much of it. Although I had no clue how much. During those years, I thought I was so very busy. But now, it is hard not to envy my younger self, who, in comparison to present day me, had vast quantities of time—time to work, rest, pray, host, travel, clean, organize, exercise, talk with friends, and simply sit in her living room, staring into a fire.

Because of all that time, younger me never missed deadlines, never gained weight, never went to sleep in a messy home, hardly ever missed daily Mass or a daily Rosary, and never lacked for close friends. That was a nice way to live. I was happy. My life looked good from the outside and felt pretty good from the inside, too.

Nevertheless, if given the chance, I would have traded it all in a hot minute for a husband (the right one!) and babies. I couldn’t wait to escape my single life. I wanted to escape it. Desperately. It was a good and beautiful life. But it wasn’t enough for me. And I knew it.

Now, I have that for which I would have given anything back then. I’m living the life I desperately wanted. And it is such a mess.

At this point, I haven’t slept for eight hours straight in seven years. Heck, I can barely sleep for three hours straight most nights: someone is always up or in our bed. No matter how early I wake or how hard I work, I’m still behind on every deadline and always fearful that editors will stop wanting to work with me because of that. Despite my best efforts, my house abides in a state of chaos that younger Emily would have judged and judged hard. There’s never enough time for exercising or friends or even my husband. Jesus sometimes gets the short shrift, too. As a mom of little kids, I struggle to find the time to get to Confession, let alone adoration and daily Mass.

Some days, I am so worn out with worry and so wracked by guilt, feeling like I am never living up to my own expectations, that I am pretty sure, if Chapell Roan unexpectedly popped by my house, she would say that I too have no light in my eyes.

But despite all that, if someone tried to take this life away from me, I would claw their eyes out. I would rip them from limb to limb. I would go as wild as the wildest, maddest, redheadedest Mama Bear in the forest, fighting tooth and nail, body and soul, in spirit and deed, to hold onto every sacred scrap of the life I now lead.

I was never scared of losing my exciting, productive, well-ordered single life. Never. I wanted to lose it. I wanted to give it away, toss it out the window, hurl it over a cliff.

But I am terrified of losing this life I have now. I fear losing my husband and babies and our chaotic, messy, exhausting days like I have never feared anything else in my life. It is precious to me. It is holy—a thing of wonder and grace and beauty. I love it. Despite all the chaos and exhaustion, I love it—so completely, so wholly, so deeply, so gratefully.

This doesn’t immediately make sense. Certainly not to someone on the outside. How could it? They can’t see what I see. Some days, I’m so tired, I can hardly see what I see. But the goodness of it is there just the same. It is there in a million mysterious, wonderous, chaotic moments, none of which can be captured with a photo or put into a caption or made into a reel, and almost all of which would look exhausting to someone standing right in front of me.

And I do understand why they would think that. It is yet another one of motherhood’s great paradoxes, where some of the very things that make me the most tired, like a little girl who wants to use me as her pillow at 1 am every night, are also the things that make the most grateful. Some of the moments that are the most exhausting, like herding small children through puddles of mud on the way to school, are also the most precious. Some of the struggles that make me feel the most inadequate, like keeping company with a child who is breaking down in rage and frustration, are also the most sacred.

That’s motherhood. The hard and the beautiful aren’t just nestled up together. They’re tangled up together in the tightest of knots—a knot that’s almost unbreakable. It’s like the weeds and the wheat of the biblical parable. In this world, there is no separating them. They will always be bound to each other in time.

Again, though, how do you explain that to someone on the outside? How do you help the growing number of young women, like Chappell Roan, who fear or disdain motherhood, see what we see? How do you show them that exhaustion and joy, guilt and wonder, fear and laughter, resentment and gratitude, hell and heaven can all not just co-exist together, but co-exist in such a way that you will gladly endure 10,000 hard days for the sake of one quiet minute, with a heavy little head, resting on your shoulders, arms wrapped around your neck? How do you help them see that their friends who are struggling aren’t in hell, just because their lives don’t look like a heavily edited reel on Instagram? How do you help them see that it’s not a bad thing that the hard can’t be separated from the beautiful of motherhood—at least not in this life? How do you convey to them that the hard is actually an integral part of what makes the beautiful possible.

I don’t think there is an easy answer. My guess is that it involves less social media, more time with families in real life, and a whole different way of educating our children for life, love, and virtue. Less sin clouding up everyone’s vision would probably help, too. But that’s an essay for a different day.

For now, I’ll just leave you with this—the thought I always come back to on the hardest of days, when I am most struggling under the weight of my own inadequacy as a mother.

Someone once told me that if your life is easy, you’re doing it wrong. You can quibble around the edges about that statement, but there is a lot of truth to it. Very little that is good in this life comes without suffering and sacrifice. Building a career, mastering a skill, making a home, staying happily married, growing in virtue, becoming fit and healthy, aging well—all those things and a hundred more require work. That work usually exhausts us. It can make us question our sanity. In the midst of the hard, we can lose sight, for a while, of why we’re doing it. Christ on the cross didn’t lose sight of why He was suffering and sacrificing in the midst of His pain and sorrow. But He’s probably the only one of whom that can be said.

The rest of us have to struggle for the good. And this is as true of motherhood as it is of everything else. More true than most things, actually. Because careers and homes and muscles aren’t made to last forever. Children are. They have bodies and souls made in the image of God and destined for eternity. The stakes surrounding them are vastly higher. And so the work of raising them to eternity will always be more fraught with effort and struggle than earning a degree or writing a book or building a home.

Which is to say, that experiencing the weight of the work of motherhood is not a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It’s just a sign that you’re doing it. You’re doing work that is challenging, stretching, exhausting, demanding, taxing, frustrating, annoying, and often maddening, but also eternally important, a wonder, a mystery, and oh so very beautiful, not in spite of everything else, but because of everything else.

And that’s as much of a thought on this as I have time to work out today.

Quickly, though, before you go…

Five Fast Things

1. Registration for our family friendly Christmas Jubilee Pilgrimage to Rome launches next week. The dates are December 26-January 4. Full Subscribers to this newsletter and Visitation Sessions will get all the details first and have the first chance to sign up, but please reach out before then if I can answer any questions and help you discern coming with us!

2. Watch Ludvig on BritBox this weekend. Thank me later.

3. I finally picked up a copy of Abigail Favale’s children’s book Here I Am, and it is wonderful—the perfect introduction to Theology of the Body for toddlers and preschoolers. I wish I had written it!

4. Did you catch our most recent episode of Visitation Sessions: “Let’s Talk About Sex.” It’s a conversation with Monica and Renzo Ortega about their new book, Lovemaking: How to Talk About Sex with Your Spouse, and has been one of our most downloaded episodes ever.

5. The family and I will be in Buffalo, NY, on May 3, so I can speak at the Buffalo Catholic Women’s Conference. If you are within driving distance, I would love to have you join us and get the chance to meet you in person. We’ll then head to Ottawa, Ontario, just a few days later on May 8, so I can speak at the March for Life’s Rose Gala. We also hope to hang around Ottawa for an extra day to see more of the city and have a little meet up with Canadian readers. I’ll post more details once I have them, but in the meantime, pencil it into your calendar!

In Case You Missed It

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The Marital Debt, Mary, and the Feminine Genius (Free for All Subscribers)

Thank you so much for spending a few minutes of your day with me.

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