Motherhood, More than a Hobby

Recently, My family attended a company day of recreation where workers were allowed to bring their family and friends. We had our four children under 4 and had our hands full (literally) but we were not short on help being surrounded by friendly people willing to help us out.

In fact a couple of my coworkers also brought their children with them, including their babies. So it made a certain statement made by a guest particularly flummoxing when they referred to having children as an expensive hobby to another person who was kindly pushing a baby stroller for us.

I shot back that a hobby was something unnecessary that we do for pleasure, the person acted as though they did not hear my remark and remained silent after that. Later, when I looked up the definition of a hobby I was pretty close to the mark: “an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.”

There are some people who hate mankind, or perhaps wish to see a significant portion of mankind die or not reproduce in the name of population control, but she did not refer to my children as parasites, but hobbies. In the misanthropic view, they are at least something that is powerful, powerful enough to destroy the world, but in this view they are something that is not even necessary.

Even Marxism, which hated the family, still valued the importance of having children, if only to further the revolution. This hit home with more force recently when I was finishing recording a new audio book on the Divine Maternity of Mary, by Abbot Vonier, when I read this:

“True civilization is easily tested by its attitude towards motherhood. There can be no real refinement of human feeling where mans heart is not full of delicacies for the dignity of motherhood; therefore there can be no true civilization where motherhood is either shunned or degraded. If there is anything that belongs to the health of the nations that dwell upon the earth, it is a loving reverence for the burdens of human motherhood. ” An Invocation, The Divine Motherhood of Mary

People forget that the 4th commandment is put above the 5th for a reason. Without parents a person would not exist. It is a tremendous evil to take another persons life, but God put the 4th above the 5th because it is a terrible sin to not show reverence for the parents that bore you, no matter how good or bad parents themselves are. Those who live lives of nihilistic despair, and hate living every day I can imagine hate their parents, the damned in hell hate their parents. Both are full of this hatred because they wish for the suffering that they are enduring to go away, and because it will not they wish they had never been born.

“Christianity’s moral power, Christianity's social contribution to the life of mankind is the sanctity and obligatoriness of the laws that govern the birth of man.” The Divine Motherhood of Mary

To date, Christianity as a whole has failed to make that social contribution since the sexual revolution. When women started bringing home little packages of pills, motherhood itself become compartmentalized, something that people were told could be turned on or off. Motherhood was no longer viewed as a duty of the married women to her God, to her family, to her country but a personal choice that at most might include her husband. To many in the west sex was no longer for procreation but pleasure, and so the begetting of children is now not viewed as a duty but as an optional, expensive, pleasure. In a word a hobby,

Yet, the reality is different even while we live in this age of sexual revolution. Once a mother holds her child and that child and her love one another, that is to say that the women suffers for the well being of the child, any idea that a child is a hobby would be quickly displaced by that reality of sacrificial love. That love of the father to the mother, of the mother to the father leading to a child that loves them both and that came from both of them is one of the most beautiful things our eyes probably will ever be privileged to see in this life, as it is a reflection of the love that exists between the persons of the Most Holy Trinity.

Motherhood is worth fighting for, it is worth suffering for, it is worth dying for, it may not be life itself but without it you and I would not exist.

Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us.