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Friday 12 August 2022

It's Called A Husband


Image: Unsplash


This woman wants society to create her some kind of supportive structure to enable her to stay at home and be a mum: 

"I want to be able to choose to be a mother, and only that, and not feel the oppressive weight of expectation to have a career at the same time.

I want my daughter to be able to choose to take a decade out of the workforce, be valued by society for her choice, and then be supported and equipped to re-establish her career, rather than feeling the whole time that the workplace has moved on and that she has lost all that she has worked so hard for.

I want her to live in a society that values full time mothering as much as it values a pay cheque or a job title.

Support for women who choose to step back from their profession and physically raise their own kids until they go to school is severely lacking in this country. It’s lacking in government policy, in the workplace and in society in general...

...For a start, we should be talking about re-skilling, up-skilling, compensation for lost super and tax incentives. Isn’t really short term maternity leave support and a policy framework that encourages women to return to work ASAP just a backhanded way of saying, "You’re more useful to society in the office, just put your kids in day care.""

It's called a husband. That is who you should be expecting to provide for you to be able to stay at home. Not the state, not the taxes of your fellow citizens. There is already too much government support to pay women to do what their husbands should be providing them with the resources to do. Forget society, God created the husband to be the provider so the wife and mother could hone in and focus on her actual calling: to manage the home. 

Where I agree with this woman in this article though, is that our society does not value mothers as it should. Women are trained from the time they are little girls, in school, to desire to become anything else other than a mother. No one is asked on career day: what kind of mother do you want to be. They are asked: do you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a marine biologist, or anything else, but motherhood. Our society trains young girls too see motherhood as an obstacle, not their most vital contribution to society. 

So let me address these women: you being a mother is of more value to society than any other career you can possibly imagine. You having kids and raising them in the home is of more value to society than any profession or hobby. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are wrong. No, not every women gets this privilege of being a mother, which is a sad reality in our fallen world, but this doesn't change the fact the this is a woman's highest calling and what society needs from women, more than anything else. 

That desire you have to be a mother, and to raise your children should not be suppressed. It also should not be funded by the state, it is your husbands responsibility to do that. Men, make sure your wife knows that her being a mother is not a stop gap between career climbing opportunities, it is the most valuable thing she can contribute to your family, other than being your wife. 

We need more women like this woman who want to raise their own kids, and less women like this woman who want society to pay them to do it.  

She also asks a powerful question: 

"Where are the policies that recognise and incentivise the critical role mothers are playing in raising the next generation? Where are the figures on our contributions to the economy by raising our own kids, just simply through the unpaid labour? Where is the data on how raising your own kids contributes to social cohesion in the broader community and healthy social and emotional development?

These things should be the clarion call of the Church. The bible is not silent on how vital women in the home are: 

"14 So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander. 15 For some have already strayed after Satan. 16 If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her care for them. Let the church not be burdened, so that it may care for those who are truly widows" (1 Tim. 5:14-16). 

This idea that it is vital for women to manage the home is taught again explicitly in so many parts of the Bible. This woman has questions that the Church has answers for, yet much of the Church is busy promoting the lie that women can, and should, have it all. 

More women are crying out about how our egalitarian way of life hurts them. Church get your act together. 


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