Oppression Versus Service

The other day I was watching a show on the OWN network (don’t judge me, I love Oprah). The show was about single motherhood.

I have been a single mom. I would say that I was a single mother even while married to my first husband because anytime he went on a binge, I was stuck raising my kids on my own. I was in charge of all the bills, of working to pay them (sometimes double work to make up for the money he would steal from me for drugs), getting them to school or daycare and making sure that I spent time with them. Not only without his help, but with him actively working against me. I also had to make sure that my children didn’t really know that their father was a drug addict who was constantly choosing his crack pipe over his family. I didn’t want my children to know any of that, so I worked really hard to make sure that they didn’t.( In other words being a codependent enabler is hard.) That isn’t so easy anymore now that they are older and they get what is going on. They get that he chooses something over them, which hurts me. I wish I could go back to being able to protect them from that knowledge. Also, I was raised by a single mom. So I get the struggle from both sides.

One thing that bothered me about this show though was a woman who said that she felt it was really important to teach her son that it’s not a woman’s job to serve him. I had to really think about that one for a long time because I have three sons and I get where she is coming from on some level, but serving another is part of life, and part of marriage, part of parenting and part of being a sibling too. It seems to me like the world doesn’t know the difference between service and oppression.

The greatest act of love to ever occur in the world was God coming down from Heaven, becoming man and serving others. I saw a meme that said all the Apostles fought over who was greater than the other and when they did so, Jesus took a towel and washed their feet, but none of them fought for the towel. Isn’t that so true? Who among us fights for the towel?

Women are meant to serve their family. Their children and husbands are ours to care for and we have all been given gifts to do so. They aren’t all the same gifts, but the gifts that God knew we would need to take care of our families. We may work outside the home or we may not, we may work from home or we may have a great career in corporate America, but none of that will give us a free pass on our vocation as wife and mother. I think that most women know this.

When I walk into daily Mass, what I see around me are women. We women hold the Church up with our prayers, our tears, our heartbreaks, our sacrifices and our hard work. It isn’t oppression; it is service. I don’t think President Obama or anyone with his worldview get that. I heard part of his speech about women not making the choice to stay home. I didn’t read the whole thing and I get that women shouldn’t have to make either choice, but they should be free to choose for themselves, I just don’t think that the world knows what service is. What a gift it is to serve and that is what we are created to do.

It’s not just women, but men too. Husband are supposed to lead their families to heaven. They are to love their wives as Christ loves the Church and that means taking the towel. So I don’t think that anyone who says they are raising their sons to not expect to be served by a woman really knows what they are saying. What they are saying is that they don’t want to raise men who oppress women. That is noble. The part that I don’t think a lot of these women get is that everyone submits to someone, whether it be political figures or God.

The group of women who feel free because they can work and leave the care of their children and husbands to someone else have already fallen for a lie. The idea that you can have the government help you to do these things is a trap. It’s so easy to think that is freedom, but true freedom is being able to have and raise however many children you want and to be able to take care of them without worry that if you have “too many” you won’t be able to work if you want or need to. Freedom is being able to be a wife and mother and still do what it is that you want to do career wise, even if that means not being in the workforce. Freedom means no woman ever having to choose to end the life of her child because she is the one responsible to make sure she doesn’t get pregnant after being told that it is possible to have sex without consequences. Abortion is not free, it is oppressive and the one being oppressed by it is the woman who has to go into that clinic, have the procedure and deal with it for the rest of her life. Everyone else involved can go on with their life because it was not their body, their choice or their child.

Yes, we should raise our sons to not oppress women, but that is not the same as teaching them that no woman should serve them. We need to teach them what service is and that they are also responsible for serving their wives and children. We should teach them to never put a woman in a position to have to make the choice to end their child’s life or to raise a child with a man who won’t marry her. We need to teach our daughters that serving their family doesn’t mean neglecting to take care of themselves, that they have a right to be their own person, to have their own friends and hobbies and that isn’t selfish of them.

So many people think that smart, faithful Catholic women are oppressed blind sheep. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We are not blind at all. I would rather be oppressed by my Pope and my husband than by the President of the United States, regardless of which party is sitting in the oval office. Why? Because the President isn’t laying down his life for me, but my Pope and husband are because they are called to serve the way that Jesus did.