Part I
With special thanks to my Mother and Elizabeth Smailes
Melancholy people really are getting at something, something that is thirsty, sad, and beautiful; the sort of beauty channeled by artisan saints and poets. As a mother I have become a real crier. Motherhood induced a pressure valve of feelings in my soul; sometimes I’m crying and not even sure what is provoking the tears. Subconsciously (and against my will) I’ve been inducted into a guild of sorts. My soul rewired so that parenthood would be the thing over which I would labor forever more.
I undertook this project because I wanted to get to the root of feelings of melancholy which I didn’t see as different than depression. When I found the root, I realized that– instead of finding a way to escape melancholy forever, I wanted to embrace the purpose and power of (some of my) intensely sad emotions which are totally righteous.
Much of the art of motherhood is frankly spiritual, nuanced, non-verbal, intuitive and subconscious; and it took me awhile to learn that it is better to lean into those elements as part of me and part of my work rather than avoid them. This side to Motherhood did not come naturally to me at all- but I don’t think it comes naturally to anyone now that I understand better. My joy and understanding of this role and its deep underpinnings come at the rate of real growth; over years of spiritual toil.
Rather than thinking I am doing something bad to feel these feelings, I can just explain that they are evidence that I am still emotionally invested in qualitatively being a good parent. All this melancholic longing has developed my spiritual senses and opened the power of my heart, and in this attitude, I will attempt to explain the essence of what it means to be emotionally home.
Penelope’s character in Homer’s Odyssey is really getting at this vein. Her character really works for me. This 28-century old story has an on-point description of the universal predicament of every woman- how to be emotionally home.
By an observer she may appear to be playing a game against the suitors. Everyone thinks she’s playing an immature, romcom, suitor, hard-to-get part but her role is deeper than an impish adolescent chick flick about refusing to be won. She is not playing hard to get. Her heart is just bound to the righteous life she started and she’s refusing to play the suitors’ game and that’s bringing on their punishment.
Odysseus (her husband) is a lost man. And Penelope is husband-sick, yearning to finish the life she started with him 20 years ago. They have both become very deep souls in the years of carrying on in life despite the great cost it is to be miles away and uncertain of the other’s survival.
Odysseus had gone off to war and never come back. She was required to eventually remarry. She had a son named Telemachus. She had hoped for years that Odysseus would return, and yet her resources were being drained more and more every day by the suitors who came to stay and subsist off her stores until she chose one of them and could officially send the rest away. So, every day, to maintain her sanity, to buy herself one more day in the game of life, she weaved another section of her “father’s funeral clothes” and then secretly unraveled it in the night so that the garment never really would be finished. She was dealing in uncertainty, unsure of what could even happen to get her out of her situation; but she chose to keep the story unfinished hoping for a miracle. She nobly chose to hold on to memories for and in behalf of her husband who couldn’t.
What better shows strength than to see her situation getting harder while she still digs deeper, keeping suitors at bay hoping for a miracle? She did the same repetitive work every day and undid it all again before the next- a total portrait of the repetitive toil of family life. Surely she thought about doing more for herself to feel like a winner. Don’t we all?
But she didn’t decide to become a winner. She chose to be home, she chose to be home (however you want to read it) – because without home there is no return. Her husband, so lost he can’t remember home, will take the entire saga to arrive.
Penelope doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting, of being entirely lost. Though she is not at her best most of the time, she is exquisite and sublimely noble because she plays no games besides her one timeless and noble aim- to remember home while Odysseus cannot.
Penelope represents the spiritual woman, the kind who gives the extra years of her life trusting that she can finish the life she started. She did what it took even when she was not at her best; and only women of a noble character are emotionally engaged enough to get and keep sight of such a huge aim.
Having a family is a spiritual saga that takes more than anticipated from every, every woman. It is not a place of easy wins. It is not a calling that’s going to make them feel like a winner most of the time.
The reason we do not talk about motherhood enough is because our society focuses on winning instead. Paychecks feel good, buying things feels good, remodeling a house and selling it feels good. I like the wins of graduating from college, of getting high scores, or my husband getting a yearly bonus from work. Wins feel good.
Winning especially feels good when we can avoid personal cost. In Highschool we can “win” a lot without a lot of personal cost. In school, how many meals do the kids prepare for themselves, how much of the school are they responsible for cleaning? How many aged or disabled people do the students take care of? In a way school leaves people unused to work that personally costs them. So, culturally we don’t glory in motherhood because it is work that costs, and we’re not used to talking about how that kind of work might be a good thing.
When people start families, they are shocked by the amount of work that pulls on them, costs them. I was in that boat. Parenthood doesn’t feel like winning; but as this work has pried open my stubborn heart, I’ve determined that this costly work yields dividends because: it has made me willing to forego the ways I love to win. It has made me the person who will feel after my kids when they’re wandering in the dark, and, if nothing else, be company to little souls on a big journey. Everyone is faced with the choice of how much of their time they will spend accumulating wins versus aiming for a noble life path. Most people spend their lives playing for finite wins, but for those who tap into the divine nature of their family role, they level up to playing an infinite game with eternal impact.
This experience, of saying yes to the work that costs me, even when it means I will win less is perhaps the only space where I exemplify nobility.
Nobility is the space where women say yes to personal cost; where they would feel after wanderers, where they do not trade the cherry-blossom moments away to maximize wins. Not every woman chooses this.
In our society we don’t explain this dilemma. We tell girls, women, and mothers to do it all because everyone else is (though nothing could be further from reality.) According to popular culture, the quicker wins are all the better. Maximize wins! Is the battle cry. Telling women they should be able to do it all sets them up for a sense of shame, failure, and burnout as they unrighteously externalize everything upon themselves.
Most lighthearted movies aim to last about an hour and thirty minutes. Mother stories are expected to come together in an hour and thirty minutes, no more. We expect it to look neat and tidy as a finite game. I do think this kind of short storytelling leaves people with a subconscious expectation of resolution. This cheap damsel life, playing in romcom style for a trophy win is a glamorized media portrayal of motherhood. Life is portrayed this way because it’s entertaining and because we’re out of touch with what it’s like to help children develop and be functional.
As evidenced by an Eastern European mother’s experience – shared in General Conference, ” Kristina’s difficulties are completely ordinary for a young woman learning how to be a mom and a wife —yet the prevailing attitude among her generation is that life’s difficulties are a threat to one’s well-being and should be refused. Do she and her husband argue at times? Then she should leave him, they say. Are her children annoying her? Then she should send them to day care.
“Kristina worries that her friends don’t grasp that trials, and even suffering, are a normal part of life —and maybe even part of a good life, if that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind and loving. …
“… University of Notre Dame sociologist of religion Christian Smith found in his study of adults [ages] 18 to 23 that most of them believe society is nothing more than ‘a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.’” [1]
In our secular age, the public is generally too agnostic to identify a spiritual essence contained in each of us. This lack of language to discuss the spiritual causes a loss for words when it comes to motherhood. [2]
We see ordinary difficulties as a threat to wellbeing. We don’t see the sublime creative act it is to prevail.
But it is just that: a sublime creative act.
A woman’s tears can be over many things- the least of which would be the princess movie playing in the background as she cooks dinner. Are the tears because she self-abusingly expects to do it all? Or does she weep as she sheds that cruelty? Perhaps her tears express a delicate mixture of joy and pain as she rises above the difficulties of normal life to prevail with Christ as did the noble Penelope.[3]
Noble tears come when women feel a distant call in that foreign, subconscious language of the soul. Many, many women are feeling the desire to prevail, to keep trying to live the life God wants to give, [4] but that doesn’t make it easy to leave behind the finite games of life for an infinite divine one.
Life is more melancholic for joining the guild and practicing the art of parenthood. Yes, women toil. Yes, they work against tough odds, and yes, it takes all their years just to figure out what they’re making happen. A mother’s work is perhaps the most beautiful thing on planet earth. What she does is a wonder, and it’s a wonder that she does it at all.
[1] Christofferson, The Doctrine of Belonging, October 2022 General Conference, Dreher, a Christian Survival guide for a secular age
[2] Kaufman, Cain, (330) Susan Cain || The Beauty of Bittersweet – YouTube, 2022, said in reference to psychologists
[3] The Odyssey does not have Christ in it but the couple’s yearning for reunion smacks of the Plan of Salvation.
[4] Divine Discontent