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The emotional and spiritual toll of stay-at-home mother-hood is tremendous. The stay-at-home moms I surveyed spoke of the loneliness, boredom, and depression that come with hanging around with kids for hours at a time and from the constant sense of not being up to the challenge of raising a human being. Anna wrote, "It can be very isolating being at home all day without any other adult interaction. I can usually handle it for a day or two at a time, but I have to make a point to get out of the house and see other people at least a couple of times a week, otherwise I start to feel kind of crazy." Alana says,

"I got blindsided by the responsibility, the emotional ties, the worry, the exhaustion, the discipline issues, and the day-to-day care of children. The reality for me is that motherhood is very draining and tiring and humbling. On a regular basis I feel like a failure as a mom. My walk with the Lord has suffered since I became a mom. Spending time with God feels like another obligation?just one more person wanting something from me."

Nora's two children are adults now, but she says, "One of the greatest frustrations of my early years of parenting was having to put my dreams on hold. It was humbling, boring, tiring, and lonely at times (actually a lot of the time). What most stimulated and satisfied me was often not possible to have in my life. It felt like a wilderness wandering time when I learned my hardest lessons about being a servant. I felt?and still do feel?incredibly insecure about entering my parenting journey. Even to this day I think it's God's grace that has allowed my kids to become the people they are."

These are the women sitting in our churches, the women who are doing their best with very little rest or support. These are the women we are telling to do more and to do it better. And we are killing them.

Sadly, so many of us hide our sense of disappointment and our discontent with our lives as stay-at-home mothers because we've been taught that this is the life God wants for us, that to want something more is selfish and worldly. We are afraid to admit that our lives aren't what we hoped for because to do so would be to reveal some deep moral flaw. That fear isn't irrational. Unfortunately, it gets reinforced on a regular basis.

In a recent article in The Christian Century, writer Debra Bendis reviewed four secular books on motherhood. Each of the books discussed the "hidden" side of motherhood; the stress, the loneliness, the fears, the superwoman complex, and so on. In her discussion of Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, Bendis notes that Wolf is whiney and seems very caught up in her own life?a critique of the book I've seen in other places. But she then launches into a paragraph that left me gasping. She wrote,

While [young professionals] have been able to achieve much in a professional world, which supplies a social life as well as a career, they seem not to have developed the capacities for family life. They seem never to have learned about sewing, gardening, cooking or puttering?the "soft" activities that can make home a comfortable and welcome place instead of a prison of isolation. They may have prepared the occasional gourmet meal for 12, and can find the best price for a Club Med vacation, but they have never prepared three meals a day, or abandoned the gym for walks through the neighborhood. Without a habit of being at home, the mayhem of a toddler lunchtime or the tedium of a rainy day makes a day at work look like rescue?while home is only a punishment.1

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