What It Means to Be a Mother

Nihil Obstat: VERY REV. MSGR. T. E. DILLON Censor Librorum

Imprimatur: ÷ JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D.D. Bishop of Fort Wayne

What It Means To Be A Mother ~ Mrs. Richard T. McSorley, 1952

Marriage is a vocation. Just as a young man, setting out to be a priest, must resolve to give his whole life to the job, so the boy who is being married must make up his mind to give his whole life to his family. Otherwise, he will be a failure as a husband and a father, because raising a family is really a full-time job. It is a career in itself.

And just as a young girl, setting out to be a nun, must resolve to serve God with her whole heart and soul, night and day, for the rest of her life—so the girl who is being married must realize that being a wife and mother is a life’s work. Twenty-four hours a day. Literally, twenty-four hours of every day.

Her husband, her children, her home—these are her world. There is hardly room for another private, glamorous career. She is the heart of the family, the heart of a new home. She cannot have her principal interests outside of the family, for if the heart is out of the body, the body dies.

It is a big job.. Quite a lot to ask of a young girl. It is a great vocation, and a hard one. In fact, it is so big and so difficult that the young bride could not even face it alone. She needs God’s help every day, through all the years. She must pray to Him, and trust Him.

I think that a young wife and a young nun are in exactly the same boat. When a girl fresh from high school leaves home to become a novice in a religious order—when she walks into the convent, all frightened, with her bags, and the great oaken doors go click behind her—she doesn’t know what she is facing! She only knows that she wants to be a nun.

Until she has lived for years in religion she cannot possibly realize what it means to get up at five o’clock each morning at the sound of a bell, year in and year out; to put on the same habit every day and file down to a set place in the chapel; to eat breakfast in a community room, in silence, while another nun reads; to wash the dishes and put them back in their proper place upside down on the table; to teach a brood of forty children morning and afternoon; to drill the altar boys in the evening and correct papers at night; to kneel alone in the dark chapel, watching the red flicker of the sanctuary lamp on the tabernacle door, and know you belong only to Him; to tumble into bed at ten when the bell rings and the lights go out—the new novice cannot possibly know what this is like until she has tried it.

Because it is not any one day; it is the succession of days; it is the long years. There are heights of happiness and depths of hardship in the life of a nun which no girl can realize until she has tasted them herself. I know this because I have three daughters who are Sisters. It is fair enough. That’s the way God wants it to be.

But it is the same way with a bride! On the eve of her wedding the girl is in love, but timid and afraid, frightened stiff, frightened almost to the point of turning back—because she is face to face with a whole new life that is unknown to her. She only knows one thing: how much she loves this boy. She only knows that she wants to be married.

She has not been trained in finance. She does not know what it is like to wake in the night, worrying about money, and not be able to get back to sleep again. She does not know how it feels to meet a strange collector at the door and say: “Not this week. Next week . . . maybe.”

She cannot possibly realize what it means to a woman to hold her first child in her arms, to live in the warmth and sweetness of a little baby, to nurse your own child when it is sick, to bury it when it is dead.

She does not know how it feels when your husband kisses you in the morning as he goes off to work, and you have been married for years; or how it sounds when your children come running home from school, crying: “Mom, Mom!”

Some night, sometime, she will sit alone when everyone else has gone to bed and realize that her husband and her children love her deeply, and that she loves them. Some day, when the baby is asleep on her shoulder, she will be filled with a sudden peace of soul beyond her most beautiful dream.

But on the eve of her wedding she cannot know what this will mean to her. There are heights of happiness and depths of hardship in marriage which no girl can fully realize until she has tasted them herself. That’s fair enough. It’s the way God meant it to be.

But because marriage is an adventure into a real unknown, because it is a romance, a risk—you can’t look for absolute security in it, at any stage along the way. It is good to look ahead ; it is good to plan as best you are able; but I think it is a real mistake to worry about tomorrow.

Work, and pray, and plan, but just for today. Tomorrow is in the hands of God. Tomorrow anything can happen; the Russian war, an earthquake, sickness, relatives moving in.

Our Lord said in the gospel: “See the lilies of the field, how they grow . . . and not Solomon in all his glory is clothed as one of these.” God will take better care of you than of the lilies.

But if you think that you are not clothed like Solomon in all his glory, and if it seems to you that God often leaves the lilies out in the rain—well, then, think of Job. He seemed to have lost everything, to be stripped right down to nothing. But God had not really deserted him. And He will not desert you.

I think that the finest bit of collateral any young couple can have is a deep faith and trust in God. That, so far as I know, is the secret of family finance: trust in God.

My son Frank, who is a priest, gave me a book on the art of happy marriage, in which the author suggests that a $500 bank balance is a necessary requisite for a successful marriage. I don’t think this is true, because I have known many successful marriages where the bride and groom did not have $500 between them; they don’t have that much even now; though I suppose, in my own case, we had the equivalent of $500.

We had my mother’s house. We moved in with her. At the time my husband was working in the City Solicitor’s office in Philadelphia, making $25 a week. When we got back from our honeymoon we had just enough money to get home to my house. My husband came in with me, hung his hat in the hallway, and stayed.

We were always grateful that it was a big house. Because our income was so small we tried hard to be economical. When he found out that our first child would soon be born, my husband got desperate and took a second job, teaching at night in a high school.

He said to me once, when he was eating supper between his two jobs: “Rita, how can we possibly pay for this baby when we can’t even support ourselves?”

At that time I think that both of us were trying to live on bread and jam. We were always one step ahead of the sheriff. We could never really plan for the future. Still, strangely enough, every time a child was born some special fee came in. We never had a bank balance, but we were never deeply in debt either.

My husband worked hard, and we saved what we could, but over and above our private planning God took care of us from day to day, from week to week, from bill to bill, from child to child.

When I was little I had music lessons and a pony. In all the memories of my childhood these two things stand out sharply, so when I was married I resolved that each of my children would also have music lessons and a pony. It never occurred to me, in the early days of my marriage, that there would be fifteen children.

As the family grew I still clung in a vague way to the dream of ponies and music lessons, though after a while I modified it a little: someday, perhaps, there would be ponies for all the boys and music lessons for all the girls. Eventually I abandoned the ponies. All of the children had a beginning in music; three of the girls went on to advanced training; none of them was a virtuoso.

I have been congratulated at times on my family, as though the children were a burden, a cross that I had to carry through the years. But they were not a burden or a cross.

Children are a gift from God, a real gift, and I was grateful for every one of them. A mother’s life seems to grow more rich, more colorful, when you have many children, because in a way you lead the life of every one of them. You love each newborn baby with all your heart; your love doesn’t divide itself among the family; it just multiplies as the family grows.

Even carrying the children was not hard. Great stress is laid these days on prenatal care, which is a good thing. But it seems to me that by far the best preparation for childbirth is a good disposition, a love of your own home, contentment with your role as wife and mother.

The best preparation for childbirth is peace of soul. If there is any labor in bearing children, it is certainly a labor of love. I was never afraid of childbirth, and I never had any trouble at all.

God was good to our family. Of all the children He gave us, He took only one back. When Rita, my sixth child, was nine months old, she took sick one summer night at bedtime. We worried, and thought of calling a doctor, but at last she went quietly to sleep and I put her in the little bassinet beside the bed. At dawn I woke and looked to see if she were still asleep, and she was dead. She was cold.

I lifted her out of the bassinet and sat there on the side of the bed, holding her in my arms. After a while my husband came and stood beside me. He said: “Rita, if the baby is dead, there is nothing we can do about it. That’s the way God wants it.” He thought about it being the will of God, even at a time like that. I knew it was the way God wanted it, but it was an agony all the same.

It is a strange thing: you love every child as if it were the only one.

Father Patrick Peyton’s motto for the Family Theater: “The family that prays together, stays together,” is good. As soon as our children made their first Communions they began to go to daily Mass and we said the rosary after dinner every evening; we still do—but I think it is true, too, that the family that plays together, stays together.

Frank was the eldest, and from the time he went to his first dance we encouraged the children to bring their friends home. Our meals were not extravagant, but there was always enough for company. We encouraged parties in our house too, and dancing, and singing around the piano. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I think it worked.

Only three of my children are married to date, but all three married Catholics. Dad wanted to send them all to college, and we never knew how we’d manage it. He says the Church was a good mother to us. She knew that we could never educate all fifteen ourselves, so she took half and trained them personally.

In the summer of 1932 the children began to go. They left as they had come, at intervals of one and two years. Dick and Pat to the Jesuits, Frank and Jim and Paul to the Oblates. Eleanor to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Therese to the Holy Child, Mary to the Sisters of Mercy.

Winifred, the most original of all the McSorleys, was married in 1940; she has three little girls now. Joe was married in 1946, John in 1947. Only three girls are still at home: Marguerite, Rosemary and Anne. The house is almost empty.

Of the fifteen children, twelve are gone. But how foolish it would have been if I had tried to stop them. No mother can determine the future of her children. She must love them, raise them, and let them go. They are not only her babies, they are new men and women; they are God’s priests and nuns, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers in their own right.

It is a great satisfaction to see your sons ordained, your daughters taking vows, your children being married at the altar. If there is sacrifice required of a mother, God certainly pays you back. It seems to me that not only religious receive a hundredfold.

It looks like a risk to raise a family; it looks like a dangerous thing to put your trust in God and live from day to day; but when it is over it is a real thrill to have taken the chance and won. It is a wonderful feeling to have trusted God and to know that He really did take care of you. It gives you a solid conviction that He will take care of you always, that He will guard your children when you are gone.

Marriage is a vocation. A wife has a calling, as much as a nun. And if there are hardships in being a mother, well—happiness is built on hardship. Happiness is built on suffering and sacrifice and pain. The only real difficulty with this vocation is that, being a wife and mother, you can be nothing else besides. Your husband, your children, your home—they are all you have. But they are enough for any woman.

If you would have children just and kind, well-mannered and truthful, be all these things yourself first. These virtues practiced by the parents, and insisted upon kindly and firmly from the children, are what go to make up that which truly deserves to be called “a good home.” – Fr. Lovasik, Painting by John Arthur Ensley

What happened to Veronica’s veil was simply an outward expression of what happened in Veronica’s soul. Are we “Veronica’s” in our everyday life? Do we seek to serve, to encourage, to listen….

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