Pastor Bob noticed that she didn't leave when she finished eating. He wondered if she was lingering for a reason. So he motioned for Edna to bring him another cup of coffee (decaf) and sat and stared out the window. Once Edna had gone in the back and seemed to have left them alone, she broke the silence.
"Pastor, did you hear my good news?"
"I'm sorry, I don't guess I did. What's up?"
"I found out I'm going to have a baby."
"Well congratulations. I'm very happy for you. I'll bet Don is very excited."
"Oh, Donnie is going nuts. He won't let me take anything but aspirin and is on me all the time about what I eat. He's already planning on remodeling the spare bedroom for the baby. And I'm only 8 weeks along. I can't imagine how bad he'll be when the baby gets here."
"Well I can't wait to see Donnie's daddy with the baby. I'll bet he'll be a sight with that first grandbaby."
"Yeah, and I'm afraid his mom is going to be just as bad."
"Well I'm sure it will be a great time for your whole family. But it's a big responsibility too," he said intending to give her an opening if that was what this was about.
"Yeah, that's what worries me."
"In what way?"
"Well, I guess I should quit my job and stay at home with the baby," she paused and looked at the Pastor trying to gauge his reaction. He didn't react. When he didn't, she continued, "but I don't know how we can afford it. Donnie's business is growing but without the money I bring home . . . "
"You know my wife worked when our kids were babies," Bob interrupted. "The pastor of a tiny country church sometimes can't make ends meet without help from a wife's income. Do you really want to quit your job?"
"Not really, I know I should stay home for the baby's sake but I really love my work at the center and I feel like I'm really able to help those girls. A lot of the people that work there don't understand where the girls are coming from but I grew up in that environment. I know what they are going through. If I quit the center, I don't know what will happen. Pastor maybe this is bad and I don't want to sound like I think I'm better than others but I'm afraid some of the girls will quit the center if I quit and who knows what will happen to them then."
"I'd heard you were doing good work at the center. Ms. Martin is very complementary of your work."
"Yeah, Ms. Martin is cool."
"But, you feel like you need to be home with the baby?"
"Well, I don't know but everybody says God has special blessings for the "stay at home mom" and that the strength of the family in this day and time depends on strong Christian families, so I guess . . ."
Bob interrupted, "Of course you realize that the idea of a stay at home mom has only been around for a few years. That certainly wasn't always the way it was."
She looked at him quizzically. This wasn't the response she'd expected.
"Take my grandparents for example," Bob continued, "granddad worked the fields all day and grandma stayed around the homestead with the kids but she wasn't anything like the modern concept of a 'stay at home mom.' At least when they were starting out (which was when the kids were little) all the money granddad made went to buy more land and pay for machinery. The family lived on what grandma could earn. Grandma gathered eggs, and milked the cows. Then she'd candle the eggs, separate the cream, churn butter, butcher a few chickens, pack it all on ice, load it in a buggy, hitch up the horses, load up the kids, haul it all into town, make the rounds selling cream, milk, butter, eggs, and chickens to various outlets (she mainly dealt with the grocery store and the hospital kitchen). Meanwhile the kids basically had to take care of themselves. The older kids took care of the younger ones."
At this point Bob realized he'd started preaching, but what the heck, he was a preacher; so he just decided to finish it.
"Grant it, grandma was the responsible adult and she was never more than a few minutes away but still she had work to do. In addition to the income producing activities, she had to wash all the diapers on a rub board, hang the clothes on a line to dry. There was no permanent press. Everything had to be ironed. There were no automatic washers or dryers. There were no dishwashers and no gas ranges. If she was going to cook, she had to chop wood and build a fire in the cook stove.
"No, grandma didn't have very much quality time to spend with her kids. My dad was the youngest and he used to say that he really felt closer to his oldest sister than to his mother. He felt like she had raised him.
"Sure there were some women in the towns who didn't work. But they were the wives of the wealthy bankers who stayed at home and got high on bromides and cocaine while their husbands were out foreclosing on the farms of the working people. These women were hardly the ideal of motherhood.
"And my grandparents weren't unusual for the day. My wife's grandparents were sharecroppers and her mother always tells stories about how her mother would put the kids on a blanket at the end of the cotton field and leave them there to play while she picked cotton.
"The modern idea of a stay at home mom didn't develop until after the industrial revolution. Then everybody moved into town and the men went to work in the factories and left the women home to take care of the kids. Even then there was only about one generation of stay at home moms before the Second World War broke out and the women had to man the factories. Then after the war, when the men came back there was about 1 generation of women who didn't work while the economy was adjusting to the end of the war. Then the women all had to take jobs to help support the families like it used to be before the industrial revolution. Wives have nearly always made an important contribution to the family income."
"But doesn't the Bible," she started
"The Bible doesn't tell us the occupation of all the men and women in
the Bible stories. We don't know what line of work Ananias was in, for
example, but we assume he had some occupation. Lydia was a seller of purple.
Joseph, Jesus father was a carpenter. Mary, Jesus mother, ran a catering
business in Galilee. She did weddings for people in Nazareth and nearby
villages and took the boys along to help with the work. That's how Jesus
got to the Wedding at Cana.
The Bible doesn't tell us the occupation of all the women but you can
bet they had one.
The Biblical "ideal" for a woman is given in the "virtuous women" chapter
in Proverbs (Prov 31:10-31). The woman described there is too perfect to
be a real person but nonetheless she is described as a highly skilled businesswoman.
She ran a cottage industry weaving cloth and making leather goods that
she supplied to the tradesmen. She is described as having employees for
whom she was responsible. She supervised the night shift. She uses the
profits from her well-diversified industries to purchase land and plant
a vineyard. This was no stay at home mom.
"Not that I am down on stay at home moms. Stay at home mom is a very high calling. To stay home and raise Godly children is a high calling indeed. I just don't see anything in the Bible or anything in Christianity that says staying at home is any higher calling than working outside the home.
"In fact Paul did not want women to be without work and speaks of the dangers of idleness in a couple of places. (1 Tim 5:11-15 and 2 Tim 3:6)
"At the present time, with all the modern conveniences and appliances in a typical home, there is no way that keeping house and watching 2 kids is a full time job. Women who are successful at being stay at home moms have to discipline themselves to avoid idleness. The most successful stay at home moms see themselves as community resources and make themselves available for a variety of service positions which working moms may not have the time for. A stay at home mom can spearhead the fund raisers for the band, be president of the PTA, can organize "Operation Graduation" the all night after the Prom chaperoned lock in for High School grads and projects like that. If a family can afford to live on one income, it is a tremendous contribution to the community and to the church for that family to make the wife (or husband as the case may be) available in that type of service capacity.
"But not everybody should be a stay at home mom. When my sister got pregnant, she decided to quit her job (which she loved and was very good at) to be a stay at home mom. We visited in their home many times while her kids and our kids were little. Her house was so clean you couldn't believe it. She ran around behind everybody constantly cleaning. It would have driven me crazy to live like that. It drove my kids crazy to be there. Several times, I thought to myself, if you don't get a job and get out of this house you are going to drive yourself and your kids crazy. Her kids needed to be in daycare. They weren't learning to play with other kids, they weren't learning to share, they couldn't deal with distractions and chaos; I didn't think having a stay at home mom was a good thing for those kids at all.
"Fortunately, my sister figured out that she needed something to keep her busy so she started volunteering for various organizations and getting the kids into play groups and she was able to turn it around.
"So if you do decide to quit your job and take care of the baby, just remember, it takes a lot of discipline and planning to fill the day of a stay at home mom.
"I'm sorry, I've been preaching.
"That's OK," Maria said. "I'm really glad to know that not everybody thinks that you have to quit work and stay with the kids to be a good mom."
"Well, Pastor," said Edna, who had apparently come in unnoticed and heard most of pastor Bob's tirade. "Well, Pastor, I can tell one thing, you've never been a stay at home mom if you don't think that keeping house and taking care of 2 kids is a full time job. Of course I've always had to run the Cafe but the women I talk to complain constantly about how much work it is to keep house and take care of two kids."
"I suppose that may be true, Edna, but I was as close to a stay at home mom as a man can get. When Esther and Josh were little, their mom worked full time at the drug store in Cartersville. I was pastor of the church in Hanson and there weren't any daycare centers in Hanson and we couldn't have afforded to put two kids in daycare anyway. So Mary would go off to work every morning before the kids woke up and she'd get home about supper time in the evening. I was the primary caregiver and homemaker for about 4 1/2 years. So I know what it takes to cook and clean and do laundry and take care of small children. Of course there were some older women in the church where I could leave the kids for a couple of hours while I visited the sick or made hospital rounds but most of the time it was the kids and me.
"It seems to me that there is a lot of truth to Parkinson's Law: "Work expands and contracts to fill the time available to do it." If you've got 6 hours to clean the house, it will take 6 hours and you'll barely get it all done in that amount of time. If you've only got 3 hours to clean the house, you get accustomed to doing it in three hours and its a push, but you manage to get it done. That was what was happening to my sister. When she was working, she could clean her house in 4 hours on a Saturday morning. After the kids came along she started cleaning 10 hours a day every day and was still not getting everything done."
Edna conceded, "Well, I guess. I know I was able to keep the Cafe and raise two kids in here. And this town was a lot busier in those days too. Sometimes at lunch you couldn't find a place to park on Main Street. For several years, I had to set up a picnic table out on the sidewalk because there weren't any place for the people to sit in here during the lunch run. And we had a line of tables down the middle here too.
"And before they closed the dance hall, sometimes on weekends, . . . "
Edna had started to reminisce, Maria slipped out, and Pastor Bob was trying to figure out how he was going to get out of there.
Copyright © 2003 Steve Falkenberg