Small Interruptions
My Son's Hospitalization (and a Few Thoughts on the Humanizing Influence of Women)
Well, I had a Substack I was working on and preparing to send out a couple of weeks ago, with assorted thoughts about the beauty and importance of having a sacramental view of the world, but alas, my three-year-old son was admitted to the hospital a little over a week ago for pneumonia.
So there I sat for three and a half days in the children’s hospital, the movie Minions playing for no fewer than eight times during our stay, while Sam intermittently watched while munching on pizza, and played with a large plastic dump truck and cars. He was supposed to be moving around and being active and blowing on pinwheels and such, but he seemed to find Minions pretty compelling, and really ought to have it memorized by now.
Even though we were only in the hospital for two full nights, it felt much longer than that, and I’ve rarely been so happy as I was at 9 pm on the night they let us go. (It always feels a little bit like you’re escaping from jail when you walk out the doors.) A hospital stay, especially when it concerns a small child, is just one of those things in life that you are ultimately so grateful for, while simultaneously really, really wishing to not be there at all.
But then, that’s life, in all of its messy glory. Motherhood is really just one big series of successive moments where you say “Well I wasn’t expecting that”, and “This is not going the way it was supposed to go”, and “I guess we’re doing this now?” You can’t orchestrate every last detail of the universe, it turns out. Who knew?
And as disruptive and potentially upsetting as illness and hospitalization certainly can be, there is also the reality that I had nowhere else and nowhere better to be those days than with my little boy. As a Catholic I believe that my vocation of marriage and motherhood is oriented towards love, and that’s everything that any day ought to hold for me. The other stuff can wait.
Love itself of course is mysterious, and so much of how it manifests itself in real life really comes down to this simple matter of bearing witness. Accompanying. Nurturing amidst circumstances I am powerless to change. I couldn’t take away Sam’s lung infection, or this or that issue plaguing any one of my kids, but I can be here. Present. I can encourage and pray and grab some graham crackers from the hospital snack room. I can hit the play button on Minions for the sixth time. I can climb into Sam’s hospital bed and let him fall asleep snuggled up next to me.
It’s not so unlike Mary, Jesus’ mother, standing at the foot of the cross with the apostle John. It’s of course impossible to imagine the sheer horror of those particularly helpless, powerless moments for those who knew and loved Jesus best, but we get small glimpses of them when we see our own loved ones struggling and suffering in the everyday trials of life.
I’ve been reading a bit about womanhood and feminism lately, a long-held interest of mine and a subject which I would suggest all modern women are wise to consider and explore. The modern conceptualization of being a woman, deeply and initially influenced by enlightenment-era thinkers and philosophers like Mary Wollstonecraft, is generally taken for granted—and not without good reason. It is the very air we breathe, our cultural ideas about womanhood and the potentiality for motherhood, how our biology ought to impact (or not impact) our daily lives, and how we women should approach work and relationships and personal fulfillment. These things are good things to think about, because they ultimately amount to a consideration of the dignity of women. And women, in spite of the significant influence of decades of feminist thought upon both individuals and society, remain vulnerable precisely because they are women.
And while much could be said about all of it, I will for now simply suggest that both men and women are called to a life of love and a life of meaning, and that both have the potential to bring unique and vital gifts to the world. Women in particular do not need to become more like men by denying their own biological reality in order to become self-actualized persons—quite the opposite, actually. I love how Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism, became a nun, died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, and later became known as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, wrote about women and the distinctly humanizing influence they bring to society. She once wrote for example that “Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning.”
As a woman I do not, regardless what radical secular feminists might say, have the modern and much sought-after luxury of being a perfectly atomized, autonomous individual capable of setting and maintaining my own, unalterable schedule, desires, or life path. Instead, my life as a woman is intrinsically ordered towards love and towards others, on account of who God created me to be. Because I am a wife and a mother, I am wholly and undeniably connected to both husband and children, and I may do or accomplish many other things but I do them as a woman with these particular ties and loves.
The answer is not, therefore, for women to perpetually resent or fight against this tethered-ness, or alternately to aspire to a particular stereotype about women marked by checking all of the boxes of what has been traditionally perceived as female versus male, but rather to simply embrace who they are, body and soul, and to move through life as embodied persons who bring their womanhood to bear upon both the home and the public square.
So if you are a woman (or a man) presently sitting bedside at a hospital, attending an uncomfortable meeting with a principal at a school, or tending to some sort of otherwise chaotic and distressing life event precipitated by the needs of someone you love, fear not. You are living out your God-given calling right this very moment, thus impacting the world and gifting the culture with a personal and humanizing influence.
(In case you were wondering, Sam has been back home for over a week now, and is no longer coughing like a life-long chain smoker. And I do intend to get my other Substack finished up soon, the one about the sacramental life, wherein I quote Walker Percy and which will, therefore, be worth the wait!)
Love this Brianna. So much what has been on my mind this year. I suspect I’ve read several of the same books as you. Plus walking through death and birth and motherhood and letting go and all the things, as a woman.