Motherhood and Kenosis

On the Limits of Self-Sacrifice

ANASTASIA FARISON

The transition into motherhood is a momentous shift for any woman. It’s a universal, yet completely personal, transformation, and one that demands universal, yet completely personal, attempts to remain whole. Personally, as a young mother, I struggle most with the all-consuming nature of life with little ones. Every moment of every day belongs to them, is full of them—not only with their needs and desires, but with cries and laughs and pounding of tiny feet. A ten-minute activity brings a hundred interruptions. I’m not sure I’ve had a coherent train of thought in months. I miss silence and focus more than anything—but quiet moments with children in the house are enjoyed at one’s peril! Balancing the reality of continual parenting with the necessities of housework, cooking, relationships, and a spiritual life seems close to a recipe for catastrophic failure, and yet I am constantly being told to savor the beauty of these fleeting moments.

Despite all this, I know myself well enough to be grateful for, and somewhat in awe of, the salvation being worked upon me. Motherhood subjects me to a perfect obedience that I could never have achieved through my own paltry will. Sheer necessity, the clear grace of God, and the hormones ruling my nervous system have all brought me to a place of blessed self-forgetfulness that my painfully self-conscious soul desperately needed. I am beginning to feel and understand for the first time how true obedience might bring true freedom.

However, I also recognize (in my more lucid moments) how easy it is to fall prey to that idea of self-sacrifice. Obviously, it’s impossible to always remain grateful for salvation. Salvation in my life these days mostly looks like explosive diapers, projectile vomit, and constant tiny voices singing, crying, asking asking asking. Because this way of life is all-consuming, one of the easiest ways to cope is to simply abandon ourselves to the role of motherhood. We subconsciously conclude that to hope for anything else is to be disappointed, and the energy and planning it takes to find a break from the children never seem worth it. We might as well resign ourselves to the necessities of life, give up that shower or the book we thought we might read during nap time, and resolve to make our lives entirely sacrificial. We are walking in the footsteps of the Theotokos, after all. This, we assume, is what salvation requires.

As heroic as that sounds in theory, I have realized that this kind of self-abandonment is not the path to Christ. I have not found peace in my sacrifice: I “obey” in a spirit of hopelessness, feeling ever more burdened rather than ever more free. I become lost in the Sisyphean nature of both housework and parenting, and by the end of the day, I don’t feel that I exist to anyone except my husband— sometimes not even to him. The resentment that follows, toward anyone who is not “suffering as much as I am,” clearly negates any possibility of salvation through the experience. Sometimes I can’t even practice compassion toward mothers who have fewer children, even though I clearly remember struggling in their shoes.

There are more and more conversations happening within the community of mothers to address issues like these. There is a push to enumerate the infinite mental tasks and the vast emotional burden placed on a mother, with the desire for others to understand and honor her work. There is also the push to encourage mothers themselves to practice “self-care”’ as part of the effort to not lose ourselves entirely in the struggle. However, “self-care” is often just language we use to let mothers attend to their own basic needs without guilt, which is an absurdly low bar. When I snatch five minutes to shower for the first time in five days, I am in no way attaining personhood— I am merely relieved that I “feel human” again. This is the absolute bare minimum for survival, let alone to fill myself with the love and grace I need to raise my children! Even activities that seem frivolous (as if frivolity were not an acceptable source of joy) often only help me attain that minimum: driving into town by myself to get a coffee or sitting in the bath for half an hour are just excuses to give my body and mind the chance to rest from the usual hectic pace. I’m pretty sure that my toddler having to ask my husband for snacks once in a while is a necessary part of life, and not some sort of extraordinary circumstance.

So, how do we kenotically pour ourselves out without emptying ourselves, in a way that is both fulfilling and salvific? Especially as an Orthodox Christian, I struggle daily with this question. We are called to die to ourselves, of course—to sacrifice, to be changed utterly. But I would argue that we are also called to participate in the Resurrection. For mothers, this does not necessitate a total erasure of the people we were before, but a transformation. Motherhood will certainly be our first and foremost role for many years, but it will not be our primary role forever, and it prevents us from participating fully in our many other relationships with our friends, family, or spouses. In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis points out that we cannot pursue a meaningful relationship with God until we can meet Him face to face: that is, “till we [ourselves] have faces.” That feeling of ceasing to exist amid the all-consuming work of motherhood makes it difficult to respond to text messages, or to interact with my husband as anything other than a “chore machine,” and definitely means any prayers I may remember to say are purely rote, often prompted only by the guilty feeling that I should be teaching my children to pray. I am not even sure that this kind of “work” put into parenting is the kind that results in meaningful relationships with my children.

I am coming to believe that what is needed to perfect our individual motherhoods are precisely the interests that marked us as individuals prior to having children. If we took pride in being writers, athletes, cooks—that is the work that can still rejuvenate us, even as mothers. I know women who will spend every possible moment across three different nap times writing a blog post, or finishing a workout, or cooking a five-course meal. Those pursuits are chores for me, and if I spend a day doing too many of them I will be grumpier than ever by the end of it; but if I spend a day reading a new book and ignoring the children while they trash the house, I will emerge cheerfully able to handle the chaos. Sometimes it can take more emotional work to allow ourselves those “luxuries,” and it is certainly more work to make space for them consistently. But if we as mothers allow ourselves (without guilt) to do the things that truly matter to us, that make us Persons, we will be able to do our work without bitterness and sacrifice greatly without resentment. We will finally be able to encourage other mothers with true empathy and to keep our friends and husbands close. Sacrifice alone is not enough to attain salvation unless it is accompanied by our true and joyful participation in that sacrifice, in the Death and Resurrection of Christ. We must do whatever it takes to accomplish this in our hearts, even if it means being “bad housekeepers.” We will be better mothers for it, even if—especially if!—it keeps us from catering to our children all day long.

Of course, knowing what is necessary is different from accomplishing it. It’s taken me a lot of gray days to reach these conclusions, and a lot more to figure out what I, personally, truly need. The main enemies are usually guilt and my own good intentions: I, as I think most mothers do, maintain a constant internal dialogue about how I “should” be parenting and spending my time, and I’m remarkably good at overestimating my own capacity. But I think the effort is necessary. Even the small successes can make my days significantly happier. The only other option seems to be “wait it out—it gets easier”; but waiting—how many years? two? ten?—only consigns the present moment to despair. If I can spend any portion of these frantic years living, instead of surviving, perhaps I will occasionally meet Christ face-to-face—in my children, in my family, and as Hopkins had it, “in the features of men’s faces.”