The Buried Wife
Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
“You are throwing your life away.”
That’s what my English professor told me when I declined the opportunity to graduate with high honors. I had decided to finish my bachelor’s degree early and get married. I didn’t think twice about turning down a delayed graduation, even one with honors, in favor of my wedding day. But when I told my professor, her disgust embarrassed and ashamed me.
I explained my situation – the firm timetable and the need to be a legally recognized spouse in order to travel with my active-duty fiancé – but I left my favorite professor’s office feeling the weight of others’ opinions about my choice to prioritize marriage over education and career. It was the first time I realized people thought I was wasting my life, but it certainly hasn’t been the last.
Living contrary to expectations, becoming a wife at 21 and a homemaker and mother at 24, has been an eye-opening experience. It turns out, in many circles, that a woman can be anything she wants to be except stay-at-home.
In the eyes of my professor and countless others, I became a buried talent. The woman at home, subservient to husband and a slave to her children, never improves or grows; she is an ornamental object whose duties a maid and a nanny could easily fill. The patriarchy buries her.
I agree sometimes. I’ve witnessed women lose themselves in the tasks of family life. I’ve listened to a friend talk about her domestic concerns and wondered if the individual I once knew was still in there, hidden under the labels of wife and mother that seemed to consume her personhood. When a friend starts a sentence with, “Well, my husband thinks I should…” I flinch internally. I’ve caught myself thinking the same thing about a friend that my professor thought about me: Your talents are wasted.
Early on in my days of motherhood, many of our friends were young, single, military officers, like our good friend Tom. In the middle of the first year of my eldest son’s life, surrounded by cloth diapers and piles of laundry, Tom asked me, “I hope this isn’t offensive, but what do you actually do all day?”
His was a question that I heard between the spoken words in many conversations during that time. Tom said the silent part out loud. I often wondered myself, in those baby and toddler years, if I had become invisible. With more demands than time, more stress than joy, and no break in sight, I questioned if I would still remember how to be me if I survived that season. Perhaps I heard the questions of others more loudly because they echoed what I asked myself.
These doubts haunted me. The predictions of my personhood crumbling into non-existence lurked in the background of everything I did. Sure, I kept my kids alive and managed my home, but was my effort worthwhile? Especially when others, even within my own family, felt so strongly that “not working” effected my ultimate value.
The weight of the negative assumptions about my life buried me. I let the postmodern world suffocate me with condescension about the littleness of my life. On the other hand, my husband and children took great pleasure in my work to care for them. I am not a talent buried in my home but a good and faithful servant of the Lord ministering as He asks. It’s ironic that the very groups that most want to “free” me from my work most objectify me, flattening out the great joy in my daily sacrifices and trivializing my work in its ordinariness. They see me as a talent. I am learning to see myself as my Savior does – as a worker receiving His gifts and producing the fruit He sees fit to grow. It is in this hidden work, for which I will never be paid, that I am most valuable.
That’s not to say that religion doesn’t bury women. Growing up I bristled in Protestant churches where women always wore dresses and never spoke or led prayer during worship services. As a Catholic, I baulk at depictions of Mary that belie her strength and determination. The ways to stifle women seem limitless, but so are the ways to work for God’s good.
My rebirth out of these assumptions happened as I understood the eternal importance of this little life of mine. Proverbs 31:31 proclaims, “Give her a reward for her labors, and let her works praise her at the city gates.” The wife receives her reward in her work not her ornamentation. If the world seeks her flattening, then it is in her vocation she is most enfleshed and enheartened.
I was 36 years old when I graduated with my master’s degree in pastoral studies. I worked for three years to earn that degree. I took one online class each semester, using every pocket of time in my days to read and write and pray. During those years my three children were in elementary school and they said things like, “Mom is studying Jesus right now,” and asked questions like, “What did you learn about God today?” They were my biggest cheerleaders, and everything I learned converted me more and more into the wife and mother I wanted to be.
When I finally graduated, we all flew across the country for the ceremony in New Orleans. I flew out a day earlier than my family to receive an award for my academic excellence and to meet the committee who had nominated me for graduate student of the year. I didn’t win, but I was so excited and flattered to be recognized. At the reception, I sat with my award plaque on my lap and remembered fifteen years before when my English professor predicted I would lose myself in my marriage. In that moment, holding the shining accolade for the achievement she thought I needed to justify my existence, I missed my family. My distinction held less meaning than I’d expected without the people that had given the academic work its value.
Not just my immediate family but our larger community of family and chosen friends attended my graduation. My husband ended up having two meals catered for us at restaurants because there were 19 of us there to celebrate. We passed babies around, my own children scattered to godparents, cousins, and grandparents, the conversation humming around me. Those meals, even more than the graduation ceremony itself, are some of the happiest memories of my life.
Every act of vocation, even and especially those hidden within my home, receives full meaning and reward though society doesn’t acclaim them. My individual achievements are encompassed by and take on their fullest expression within this family life. The talents have grown, sometimes mysteriously and supernaturally, and I haven’t buried anything which I regret surrendering. I didn’t waste my life in my motherhood, I found it. I wasn’t buried, God gave me the holy work of my vocation.
😭😭😭. This is beautiful.