The Catholic Working Mom's Guide to Life. JoAnna Wahlund
I faced while using natural family planning to avoid pregnancy. Often, my Catholic views on hot-button issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage (I’ve been asked to leave more than one secular online mom’s group due to perceived bigotry) or even something as simple as finding a Mass time outside of working hours on holy days of obligation would sound the death knell for a friendship.
I did make some friends, both Catholic and non-Catholic, but I often wished for a circle of women who could understand the struggles I faced as I juggled my multiple roles of wife, mother, and employee. For a long while, I felt utterly alone. We moved across the country a few years later, and by then our family had expanded from one child to five.
I balanced (often awkwardly) my faith, my work, and my family life. I struggled with feelings of isolation and loneliness as I read with envy the “mommy blogs” of Catholic women who stayed at home with their children and electronically eavesdropped on their lives in various Facebook groups for Catholic mothers — groups in which I always felt like something of an outsider.
One morning, I received a Facebook message from Jenny, a friend of a friend, who introduced herself as a fellow Catholic working mother with small children. Our mutual friend had suggested that she contact me since we were in similar circumstances — both of us reluctantly working full time, because our families needed the income.
Jenny remarked in her message, “I hope we can be a source of community when nobody around us understands what it is like to live like we do.”
She’s absolutely right, I thought. We really needed a source of community, given that it seemed as if no one around us understood what it was like to constantly try to balance faith, work, and family in a culture that was increasingly hostile to Catholicism. I wondered, not for the first time, why no one had created a Facebook group specifically for Catholic working mothers.
At that moment, I could almost feel the Holy Spirit figuratively smacking me upside the head. Why haven’t you started one? I could almost hear him asking me.
I think my hesitation was a result of viewing my status as a Catholic working mother as temporary, just until my husband was earning enough to allow me to stay at home. But here we were, almost fourteen years and five kids later, and I was still working. My husband had been laid off from his job several months before and hadn’t yet found another — making me the primary breadwinner, at least for the time being. He had finally earned his degree, and the prospect of him quickly finding a job with an income large enough to cover all our expenses as a new college grad was very slim.
“I’ve been feeling guilty about being away from my kids so much, and I was talking to my therapist about it. We came up with the idea of not a single ideal, but an infinite amount of families with an infinite amount of right ways to run their families … everybody doing what’s right for their own families. I’m a Trekkie so it made me think of the Vulcan ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations.’ So now every time I feel guilty, I just think of Spock applauding all these working mamas’ infinite combinations!”
— Rosie H.
It was time, I decided, to embrace my life and my status as a Catholic working mother, instead of treating it as a temporary condition that would someday end.
On August 8, 2014, with a few clicks on my smartphone, the Catholic Working Mothers Facebook group was born. Less than a year later, it had more than four hundred members. As of this writing in 2019, we’ve grown to more than five thousand. I’ve gone from being the sole administrator to managing a volunteer staff of seven additional moderators who help keep the group running smoothly.
It’s truly an amazing community of women that has spawned some very close-knit ties and friendships. As C. S. Lewis says in The Four Loves: “Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself.’”
It has become a source of encouragement and inspiration for those of us who are struggling to balance the duties of their vocations as mothers with the responsibilities of being wage earners, whether outside of the home or from the home.
Without a doubt, the most common refrain I hear from fellow Catholic working mothers when they happen upon me or the Facebook group is something along the lines of, “I thought I was the only one!” One woman, upon finding out about the group, quipped, “I can’t believe there are more people like me. I felt like a Catholic unicorn.”
According to the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of working mothers in the United States are the sole or primary wage earners for their families.1 It’s getting harder and harder to support a family — especially a large family — on one income alone.
There are Catholic families for whom the mother is the primary breadwinner because the father stays at home with the children, or is disabled, or absent due to divorce or abandonment, or deceased.
More frequently, though, rising food and housing costs, medical insurance needs, and crippling student loan and medical debt all contribute to a situation where both a mother and a father need to earn income to support their family.
If you’re Catholic, there’s a good chance that your family may be a large one by society’s standards, which already sets us apart. If a Catholic working mother is a unicorn in today’s world, even more so is the Catholic mother who works and has four or more young children. I regularly saw dropped jaws and bugged-out eyes when people found out that I had six children and worked full time outside the home.
This situation can feel extremely isolating, and very, very lonely. Added to that is the difficulty of finding and making other Catholic mom friends when you work forty hours per week (or sometimes more) and need to spend evenings and weekends doing housework, laundry, grocery shopping, etc.
“Some of us choose to work because we love our careers. Some of us have to out of necessity. Regardless of why we work, we do our best each and every day to ensure that our kids are holy, healthy, and loved!”
— Angela M.
However, if you are a Catholic working mother of any variety, know this: you are not alone!
We are members of a very diverse Church, and as such we are a diverse people. We are of different races and ethnicities; we’re located in the United States and in other countries around the world; we inhabit
different economic and educational tiers. While we come from unique backgrounds and have differing perspectives, there are three common threads that tie us together:
We are Catholic. We are lay Catholic women—cradle Catholics, converts, or reverts — who are faithful to the magisterium of the Catholic Church. We hold, believe, and practice all that the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church teaches, believes, and proclaims to be true, whether from the natural moral law or by way of revelation from God through Scripture and Tradition. We strive to live out our faith in word and in deed in every aspect of our lives.
We are working. We earn a wage in addition to our responsibilities as mothers. Some of us work part time; some of us work full time. Some of us are freelancers or in-home daycare providers; some of us are executives, teachers, nurses, or retail employees. Some of us have spouses who work, and some of us are the primary breadwinners for our families while our spouse is in school or stays at home. Some of us are single, separated, divorced, or widowed. Some of us are working by choice, called by God to fulfill a specific vocation; some of us work because our income is necessary to support our families and meet our financial obligations.
We are mothers. Some of us are pregnant. Some of us have children by adoption. Some of us have one or two children. Some of us have three or more children. Some of us have children in heaven. Some of us have stepchildren. All of us recognize that our vocation as a mother is one of the most important jobs we will ever have.
We don’t compete with stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) — we complement them. We both have tremendously important responsibilities with equally difficult concerns and unique challenges. Some of us may transition over time depending