It IS interesting, isn’t it, how, in the last decades, women are made to feel as if they are being “losers”, “nobodys” if they are dedicated to the home. They are not using their talents if they aren’t out working in the world.
Truly, I find that illogical. How many talents does it make to run a pleasant home, raise good children, have a healthy relationship with someone you rub shoulders with night and day? That, in itself, is a full-time job…not to mention if some are homeschooling, seeking out healthy alternatives, helping with their parish life, etc., etc.
No, it takes a brave, committed, responsible, hard-working adult to do what it takes to raise a Godly family in today’s society.
And for those women who have to work on top of all that, what a load, indeed! My own mother had to work for a period in our lives and it was very difficult!
Father Lovasik, in this excerpt, talks about happiness in marriage, and how it must be worked for…
Painting by John Sloane
by Father Lovasik, The Catholic Family Handbook
Happiness in marriage must be earned. It is something you must work out for yourself, chiefly by forgetting yourself and serving others.
Marriage involves the art of human relations, the psychology of children, the economics of running a home, the maintenance of health, but, above all, the development of the moral and spiritual life of the family.
All this demands a wide range of talents and skill. No marriage is a success unless less you make it so, and that takes persistent effort and, still more, a constant and humble reliance on God.
The supreme object of your effort and striving is the family. You worked and saved in order that you might be married and have a home of your own. Once married, you worked and saved that you might successfully bring up a family.
Your purpose in Matrimony should be to bring God’s children into the world and rear them properly, to be one in body and spirit, and to make a happy home. You are to help one another and your children in every possible way, especially to get to Heaven, which is the final and eternal destiny for us all.
You and your spouse must be willing to work at marriage as the greatest job of your lives and not desert when problems arise. When you married, each of you took on a responsibility for some part of the work that goes into the making of a home.
Both assume the responsibility of encouraging and helping the other, insofar as is possible, in the specific tasks designed for each.
The training of children is the mutual responsibility of both husband and wife. Thus, marriage is very much a fifty-fifty proposition. Only when you are willing to bear your share of the burdens of married life can you hope to have real love and peace.
Marriage is normally a source of equilibrium for you, because cause it brings you legitimate and healthy pleasures. But equilibrium always consists of an effort to impose the guidance of reason upon all your activities.
Welcome without narrow-mindedness and weakness the joy marriage offers; use your reason in meeting the difficulties that marriage inevitably entails.
If your temperament is inherently unstable, if your life is weighed down with unfavorable conditions, you can recover the health of your emotional and spiritual life only if you seek above all what is right according to the sane reason that God has given you, providing, of course, that you make yourself do it.
Only this effort can bring you the joy that is worthy of you.
At any rate, she has by nature the power, the art, and the disposition to please, to soothe, to charm, and to captivate. It is a wonderful power; and we see daily women exerting it in a wonderful way. Why will not women who are truly good, or who sincerely strive to be so, not make it the chief study of their lives to find out and acquire the sovereign art of making their influence as healthful, as cheering, as blissful as the sunlight and the warmth are to their homes? – Rev Bernard O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 1894 http://amzn.to/2mPm81e (afflink)
Women historically have been denigrated as lower than men or viewed as privileged. Dr. Alice von Hildebrand characterizes the difference between such views as based on whether man’s vision is secularistic or steeped in the supernatural. She shows that feminism’s attempts to gain equality with men by imitation of men is unnatural, foolish, destructive, and self-defeating. The Blessed Mother’s role in the Incarnation points to the true privilege of being a woman. Both virginity and maternity meet in Mary who exhibits the feminine gifts of purity, receptivity to God’s word, and life-giving nurturance at their highest.
This remarkable book will show you how to start weaving love into the tapestry of your marriage today, as it leads you more deeply into the joys of love.
A wise priest told my husband before marriage that marriage is 100/100 not 50/50….it’s so true. Each year I see that more and more. We must give without limit and without measure. So hard but the only way to marital happiness! Xx
Yes, I heard the 100/100 too! Good reading, thank you. 🙂
Lovely post, thank you.
Do you have any comments or selections about what to do when the husband does NOT help with the children? Mine teaches the older boys and spends a lot of time with them, but doesn’t help with anything in the house, and pretty much ignores the girls and babies.