#3. Duty Devouring Motherhood
We are confused about duty. That is more reason, not less, to recalibrate our relationship with it.
Duty is not a loveable word. Most of us hate it. I did. Duty was the thing I didn’t want to do, but had to. A stiff-lipped, heartless, mechanical task. An impersonal job description. The prison of someone else’s expectations. A lever in dysfunctional relationships where one person makes improper demands of another. The sort of word which kills relationships and joy, calling for total allegiance to faulty parties. In the culture I grew up in, it was an insult to accuse someone of doing their duty. Duty meant the act lacked love and authenticity, that the good thing would have been better left undone.
Duty is bitter as the cud, because, by the millions, it has spilt blood for ignoble ends (cue the totalitarian regimes and wars of the twentieth century). Duty has enabled the worst evils in the world; people failing to do the good owed or demanding allegiance to evil. Demanded duties fuel abuse: It’s your duty to give me x. If you really loved me you would… Duty disgusts us when it cheapens and devours people. We’re right to reject this. Like all good things, used the wrong way, duty destroys.
These days, the idea that we owe duty to someone else is receding, but our sense of other people’s duties towards us is swollen. We meditate on our entitlements. Other people have a duty to protect our feelings. The State has a duty to fund my choices. The government owes us better educational outcomes. Schools are held accountable for poor literacy and numeracy. Have you noticed our blame culture? No one wants to be caught holding the hot potato. To avoid liability, a whole lot of good is left undone. In its place, we settle for the appearance of doing what is good (usually in the form of paperwork).
When there is a problem, we believe that someone somewhere else must be held responsible. Someone higher up has failed in their duty. We blame institutions and they then find individuals to parade as the corporate scapegoat. We want to be the beneficiaries of others doing their duty (as defined by us), but being the person of whom duty is required is distasteful to us. Offensive, even. Any strong obligation we do feel is soon satiated by the right hashtag and waving the right flag (lest we be blamed for not). It’s tempting to care more about being seen to be a good mum than actually doing what is good for our kids. Filters, edits, boxes ticked. Things look right from the outside, but we leave actual good owed in face-to-face relationships undone.
We have signed up to a new tyrant. Our highest duty is now to Self. Our great work is to invent our own identity and secure our own happiness. We cultivate and eat ourselves from the inside out and wonder why we’re so hungry and diminished. We try to grasp hold of comfort, health, safety, freedom—all the things which duty threatens to take away. We fiercely strive to preserve our own innards. This is the new bravery, the courage of doing whatever it takes to feel the way you want to feel. Anything which threatens our happiness is stamped as toxic and edited out. We sacrifice goodness for the sake of happiness and we lose both. Motherhood is the place where this expensive experiment is most intense.
Motherhood is distressing when our primary duty is to Self. The relationship between a mother and child is asymmetrical for a long time. If we are used to thinking about duty only as something other people owe us, and we’re suddenly faced with a completely dependent person who doesn’t owe us anything, but who needs us completely, we have a crisis. Having someone depend so entirely that they will die if you don’t spend yourself for them runs upstream on the river of Duty to Self. It just so happens that the very thing which threatens to rob us is really good for us. Jesus was right. Lose your life to gain it.
The need to push outside ourselves brings new parts of our personality to light, and we wouldn’t want it to be different. Parenting forces us to unlearn selfishness that we didn’t know we had. The problem is, as long as we are running on our default settings, we unselfishly spend ourselves in a disordered way. Whenever God is taken out of the picture, we are left with a duty that will embitter us. And we’ll be more likely to end up making foolish choices because we’ve cut ourselves off from wisdom. Leaving God outside our motherhood is not peculiar to people who aren’t Christians. It happens when Christian mums think that Jesus is only Lord of church gatherings and Bible reading time.
When we are not consciously acknowledging that Jesus is Lord of it all—every square inch and every second and every crumb of every task and every interaction bound up in mothering—then we end up mothering no differently than if we were an unbeliever. Good gifts and good duties will be distorted. It is possible to have a very strong sense of duty as a mum, but for it to be directed to the wrong person, or lived out in ways which wither us.
When we grow into our responsibilities as parents, the “good” we feel duty-bound to give varies. We get better at sacrificing, but we spend it on the wrong ends. For example, when parents feel a duty to validate every emotional expression their child makes, even if the child’s emotional habits are destructive. The deification of the feelings is based on the idea that all feelings are neutral, (which only holds if there is no such thing as sin and if humans are mere biological matter with impulses they need to learn to regulate for their own survival—which is the opposite of what Christians believe). Duty to the child’s feelings is made supreme over what God says is good. Which turns out to be bad for the child and everyone who is around him. It’s a paradox, that our desperation to honour the personhood of our child is based on a philosophy which denies personhood (because it denies the God who gives it). These inconsistencies make the work harder. We’re trying to find our way on knotted paths, in the dark.
Parents often learn to sacrifice their own Self-actualisation project, but then make their duty about their childrens’ Self. The child’s interests and activities determine how the whole family’s money and time are spent. Every opportunity is hunted down lest a child misses out. We usher very young children into a digital existence, not because we’re convinced it is good for them, but because we feel a duty not to let them be outside the norms. We think we’re being unselfish in our quest to always know and do what our child wants. There are duty and sacrifice, but they’re disordered.
Duty alone is not good. Duty has to be for God and governed by his definitions of good. Anything else ruins.
We don’t make things better by refusing to use the word. Duty isn’t the problem. Disordered duty is. Duty unhinged from God becomes a foolish end. It rots and is rotten. Duty not built on what God says is good distorts our humanity and makes us miserable. Life, relationships and joy are messed up when anyone less than God himself defines who owes whom and what they owe. Motherhood only becomes enlivening and nourishing, a duty we want to do, when we understand what rightly ordered, God-centred, goodness-governed duty is. Duty lightens when it’s ordered God’s way.
More on what God-centred duty is next Friday.
