and equilibrium she harmonized the demands of mother, wife, doctor, and her passion for life.”7
It is true that Gianna had made the decision to give up her medical practice once her fourth child was born, but her decision was not because she had come to the conclusion that working outside the home was somehow wrong or inappropriate. As her husband, Pietro, said in a biography about his wife:
Already during our engagement, Gianna had asked me about continuing her profession at least as long as her obligations as wife and above all as mother allowed it. I did not oppose that because I knew well how enthusiastically she practiced medicine, how attached she was to her patients. Later, by mutual agreement, we made the decision that she would stop at the birth of our fourth child. In this understanding, she continued her profession until her last confinement.8
A study of Saint Gianna’s life, including the letters she wrote to her husband, reveals a devout woman who had been immersed in the teachings of the Catholic Church from childhood, and who was devoted to serving God in all aspects of her life. She lived a life of heroic virtue, as is evidenced by the fact that she was canonized as a saint.
May we all be so skilled as Saint Gianna in managing our varied vocations as wives, mothers, and working women!
Chapter 3
Finding Peace When You Don’t Want to Work
When my husband and I married, he did not have a college degree, and he was working as an independent contractor for an IT staffing firm. I had just started my junior year of college and was working part time. Our plan was for both of us to obtain our degrees before we started a family. Then, we figured, we’d have three or maybe four kids. Once we were done having kids, one of us would get sterilized.
Our carefully laid plans were completely upended by our conversion to Catholicism two years later. For the first time, we learned about the Church’s teaching regarding the gift of children, responsible parenthood, and discernment of family size. We also were introduced to Natural Family Planning. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, NFP “represents the only authentic approach to family planning available to husbands and wives because these methods can be used to both attempt or avoid pregnancy.”9 To our surprise, we felt a call to become parents much sooner than we’d originally planned — after I had earned my degree, but before my husband had earned his.
Because I had a college degree, I had more earning power than my husband. I became a working mother; and as events transpired, I was a reluctant working mother for approximately thirteen years. I wasn’t working because I felt a calling to be in that particular field, or in that particular profession, or at that particular company. I worked only because we needed my income to help pay our bills.
Yes, daycare was a significant cost; in fact, our daycare bill was more than our rent, and then more than our mortgage, once we bought a house. Yet I still made enough money after daycare expenses and taxes to pay bills. I was sometimes the sole provider of health insurance for our family as well.
I’ve had many conversations with other Catholic working mothers who are in the same boat. It is getting harder and harder these days to scrape by on one income alone. Inflation has skyrocketed, along with the cost of living, but salaries haven’t kept pace.
Job security is a thing of the past — it’s increasingly rare to hear of someone who has stayed at the same company more than ten years, let alone someone who started out in an entry-level role and worked up to a senior role.
Another factor is that so many of us have graduated from college with crushing student-loan debt. When I was in high school, the prevailing attitude seemed to be that you needed a college degree to get a decent job, and that student loans were a necessary evil. As such, I went to college and acquired a massive load of student-loan debt — debt that I am still paying off.
It used to be that you could work part time while going to college, or perhaps work full time during the summers, and use the money you earned to pay your tuition as well as your living expenses and textbooks, but that simply isn’t feasible anymore.
College tuition isn’t the only expense that has skyrocketed in the past few decades. Groceries, housing, utilities, and gasoline have all gone up, and wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. When you consider the cost of groceries, utilities, and healthcare — all necessities — it proves difficult to pay even the basic expenses without two incomes.
“I don’t get over [the guilt] altogether, but what helps me is a) taking a look at our budget and knowing that we realistically could not make it work for me to stay home right now and b) recognizing that God reveals his will through circumstances, even if I don’t like them. Since our circumstances are pretty clearly indicating that I need to work right now, I recognize that my feelings of guilt are unwarranted, and use them to pray for trust and detachment — we are stewards of our children, but they ultimately belong to God. Whenever I have rough drop-off days, it helps me to remember to say a prayer to their guardian angels and the Blessed Mother to keep them safe and happy.”
— Lisa W.
Thus, many Catholic mothers need to work, either part time or full time, to help support their families. There are families for whom the mother is the primary breadwinner because she has the higher earning potential; in some cases, the father stays at home with the children or only works part time.
Some Catholic mothers work so that their family can afford Catholic school tuition for their children, as that expense has also skyrocketed in the past few decades. Could a family make it on one income if they put their kids in public school or homeschooled instead of sending their kids to Catholic school? Maybe, but for those parents, a Catholic education is a priority, and not all parents are cut out to homeschool.
Then there are the Catholic mothers who need to work due to difficult family circumstances: They are single, separated, divorced, or widowed, and they are the only means of support for their children.
Whatever your situation, you can find comfort in the fact that you are doing what is necessary to support your family. However, knowing this intellectually doesn’t stop a working mother from being emotionally plagued by guilt.
Guilt: The Working Mother’s Constant Companion
The reasons a family might need a second income are many and varied, but that doesn’t prevent others from thinking they know better than you do when it comes to your family’s circumstances.
While the Church does not teach that mothers cannot work, that doesn’t keep others from sharing their opinions on the subject. It’s difficult to battle the perception by certain fellow Catholics that you don’t need to work; in fact, it’s remarkably similar to battling the perception by non-Catholics that you have too many children (or the perception by some Catholics that you have too few children).
I once had someone message me on Facebook and say that she could tell from my blog that I didn’t need to work full time, since I’d hired a professional photographer to take pictures of my kids — obviously, if I could afford to do that, I could afford to stay at home if I just gave up such luxuries.
The reality was that the photo shoot was a mini session that cost $50, one that I paid for with birthday money I’d received earlier in the month. The shoot also paid for itself because I turned those pictures into inexpensive Christmas gifts for grandparents by creating photo
