An Alien in Her Own Parish

Priscilla McCaffrey

pjvmccaffrey@gmail.com

An Alien in Her Own Parish

            I’m not speaking of migrants or transnationals.  I am speaking of someone even stranger to the local parish: the woman with six children in the pew and one on the way.  Perhaps her parish will arrange to help her with dinners when the new baby comes.  More likely her parish doesn’t even think of that because there are so few young women who have so many babies and youngsters.  She’s not even a demographic on their ‘to do’ list.  They are more likely to feed the city poor and unchurched than the family in their own backyard.  Oh, did I say she was poor?

            Does she have to be?  Have women forgotten what stresses a new mother has to cope with in a large household when mom’s energies are diminished and there is another one on the way?  Alas, they have not forgotten, because they never knew; most of them did not share that same experience of accepted fertility given over to God and in the service of the new children He would send.

            Women usually segregate along the lines of open to life and not.  We don’t take a survey, it’s just the vibe we pick up. When a mom says she had the first two at St. Mary’s and the third at MoBap, that’s code for “had my tubes tied with the third (at Missouri Baptist Hospital).” Women can have different friend groups for different functions, like playing tennis or working with community sports, but their close friends and confidants will be with the open to lifers, if they are open to life.  They want the sympathy — not the pity — of other women who understand the choice they have made because they have made the same choice.  They don’t want the admiration of someone who loves their passion for their principle of non-contraception; they want someone who loves the principle.  Among these non-contraceptors, possibly one mother has many children and another woman has one.  Still, these two who are opened to life have vastly more in common than either does with a woman of one child who practices artificial birth control.

            I have never understood how a parish can function with this great divide.  I am not talking about a divide based on guilt, but of a cultural divide, because contraception creates a different culture.  We expect to be in Church with sinners. There might be adulterers in the congregation while most are not.  Still, it is not likely that there is a culture among the families which supports adultery and a culture which does not.  And that’s for the good of all. Even honest sinners want to be pulled out of sin by the witness of people around them. But in most parishes, there are two cultures at work: the contraceptive and the non-contraceptive.  It astounds me that no one speaks about that.  A woman who does not use birth control lives a completely different life from a woman who does.  Both women need the Church and the parish; both need redemption.  Both need the fellowship of other good women.  And both need the truth firmly preached and accepted.  However, the orientation of the parish must be totally around, in support of, in service of, with gratitude for, that woman in the pew with her 7th on the way.  I’ll have to repeat here that the point is not that the couple has a lot of children, but that they live in charity with a welcoming attitude toward life.  This means, minimally, that they don’t contracept.  The amount of charity they bring to the arrangement is not anything the rest of us can judge.  Love your neighbor who supports you in your embrace of the Church’s principles.  Christ will judge their generosity.  He will judge yours.

            Some young couples are overly fearful of embracing the non-contraceptive life.  They are unaware of the many things that affect family size.  Young couples should understand the biology here— it is not common to have 14 children over 18 years of married fertility even if the couple never practices abstinence. (They might be practicing exhaustion, which is a church approved method of child spacing.) It is not common for non-contracepting couples to have just one child.  But both happen. Young people who lived in communities before the introduction of easy contraception experienced a more natural unfolding of fertility. For all their innocence of sex, they still knew what the norms of fertility were in their communities.  Today we have just the opposite: many young couples, knowledgeable about sex, know nothing of the norms of fertility and live in fear with the idea of not controlling it.  They don’t know the norms because contraception has skewed the statistics and their experience.  And once they begin to control their fertility with artificial means, the control is a chief cultural component in their lives. 

            Even their doctors don’t know what is normal.  There is nothing abnormal about a woman age 36 having a baby, but on today’s charts she is marked as an ‘older mom,’ as if that were a dangerous situation.  Years do make a difference in blood pressure and recovery, but the medical world should not be translating this as abnormal or risky. 

            Many young couples have learned their high school lessons well: children do not come from love between a man and a woman, or from having sex.  Children come from having unprotected sex.  The idea of having unprotected sex becomes terrifying. You face having a very, very large family, right? We know that is very bad biology, but as far as the secularists are concerned, that’s good sociology: make them fearful.  Young people did not experience that, say, in a parish of the early 60s. Some couples had big families, some little.  Some none. It varied from couple to couple.  Women’s bodies have built in spacing, but this is highly individual.  Nursing helps to space children, but this also varies with the woman. There are lactation fascists who insist as soon as you give your baby a bottle your body clicks into reproduction mode.  If there is one thing my eight sisters and I have learned among ourselves and our young parents (35 couples and growing), is how little is set in stone.  We can say things like: “for the most part,” “it varies along a wide spectrum,” “this seems to be the pattern in our family,” “not a problem for me but terrible for her.”   And so we live with experience, some science, but very much anecdotally.  This is human.  I have also seen professionals — nutritionists or lactation specialists or doctors or nurses—completely intimidate a woman, suggesting that her knowledge is deficient because she does not have a degree.  This is hyper-unsettling to the new mom who learns best from the women around her, and learns over time how to make use of professional assistance. 

            Those who fear the culture of openness to life deserve some practical wisdom on the subject to allay their fears.  It is not enough to say this is what the Church wants, so embrace it in your ignorance.  Let’s make these young people comfortable.  Bless the parishes that have NFP programs. Also, if a parish had an active ministry to young moms to help them out, this might take care of some of the awkward times at the pulpit.  I personally don’t want to hear about artificial birth control with children around me.  Still, the message has to be lived in the parish.

            Back to the Catholic mother who lives in her parish where most of the young couples contracept as did most of their parents, now in their 60s.  Let’s call her Mary.  How is her culture different?

            Physically, Mary’s home will be more battered, her car less fragrant, her food and doctor bills higher.  Her upholstery will often seem moist. There will be more emotional stresses and physical demands on her with, likely, less sleep.  She will fudge on the car seats. She will forget doctor’s appointments.  Her figure will likely wax and wane and her closet will be forever obsolete.  Her nails will get done, someday, and she’ll try for a new dress when she knows what size she will be in 2 months. Maybe.  Humiliations?  She no longer counts.

       But I have found that in Mary’s house, there is typically laughter, good meals offered, a sympathetic heart— but with no room for indulgence, so sometimes her advice is brisk and to the point and often delivered with a self-deprecating story.  Mary has put herself in a position to be detached from possessions.  The whole time she and her husband are figuring how they will make enough money to support their family, they have firmly put their feet down on that road to detachment from worldly goods. She is not just learning about detachment, she is demonstrably showing detachment. So many times Christ says those uncomfortable words about a man and his riches.  We like to think He is just speaking about attitude, but He is talking about detachment, as in detachment—something you act on and don’t just think about.  The more children you have, the less your treasure is in your pocketbook, for the obvious reason that your wallet gets thinner and thinner.  You have decided to part with money for the love of others. 

            This is no guarantee of sanctity, and in Mary’s house, with all her opportunities for fails, she will probably notice her deficiencies more than contracepting Alice. She is constantly aware of her inadequacies and sins.  But while she is surrounded with people who need her attention, she can pray for forgiveness and get back to work.  No lingering over the importance of her insufficiency.  That’s a given, something she learned around the 4th baby.  Praying is life blood; meditating — that’s done with the laundry or late-night feeding or when she gets a moment alone in the dentist’s chair. 

            So when she meets up with contracepting Alice, they don’t have a lot in common.  Yes, Alice talks about the craziness of her two kids’ schedules, but it is hard for Mary to connect.  When Alice asks her what camps she will be sending her kids to, Mary draws a blank.  Camp?  Am I supposed to send them somewhere?  She doesn’t even know what’s available.  But even non-contracepting Beatrice with one child sees through the anxiousness of Alice.  She wants to support Mary; she doesn’t confuse Alice’s busyness with self-giving. 

            Are we morally obligated to seek the more difficult life?

            No.

            But we are obligated to seek the moral life. THAT IS ENOUGH.  (Not good when people impose further burdens on lovely, self-sacrificing Catholics.)  Sometimes our moral choices come without cost.  It is not difficult to not kill our boss; we can often avoid people who make life difficult.  But the choice to not contracept comes with a very definite cost for many people.

            A young mom could continue to attend her local parish with hope.  She will hear the call for stewardship from the pulpit.  She will be one of the non-participants, for now.  She is too busy keeping order in a household with six children.  And she homeschools some of them.  There is no house keeper.  She and her husband save up for a babysitter.  Her name will not be on the Good Stewards list.  She is not on any councils or in any parish groups.  She can’t even do a Bible Study because she can’t get that babysitter. She never seems to have time to join a Church ministry.  No wonder they don’t know her. There is a feeble pro-life effort in the parish, but no one is to talk politics.  They do not want to hear her partisan enthusiasms.  She signed up enthusiastically for a November Holy Hour, and attached a prayer to the group to pray for the pro-life candidates.  She was told not to post political views. They do not want to hear her complaining about girls on the altar and women handing out the Holy Eucharist in their running clothes.  She knows the parish is vibrant and faith-filled because it says so in the bulletin.  But her kids are the ones always making noise at Mass.  The occasional hearing aid malfunctions, but generally the congregation does not disturb.  Now she could remain loyal to that parish, after all, these are also her neighbors, and she wants to pray for them, and greet them on the streets in her town.  But, they are so different.  She could wait for a new priest to bring out better things in his parishioners.  But her parishes have always been like this, only her situation has changed.

            She could organize herself, become an activist in her parish.  She can’t do it over the long haul because she needs change in religious formation now for her kids.  She can’t do it over the short haul because there aren’t enough hours in the day.  She’d have to completely shunt her family aside to serve the parish. 

            Or she could go to a Mass where there are other women like her, where the older women were like her, where young girls look forward to marriage and family, where people at least understand and accept her way of living as an observant Catholic.  They all talk some politics, but talk is also practical and a lot of information on raising a family on a budget is exchanged.  They talk thrift stores and inexpensive vacations, and who is selling a car, and what teen wants to start a business.  And Mary’s little sons could start right away with the big guys on the altar. But where is that parish? Likely it would be the Traditional Latin Mass across town.