The State of the Household: An Introduction

My name is not important. I am like many husbands and fathers, who are doing their best to raise their children and be faithful to my vows, to teach the Faith and pass it down through generations to come, to provide, and to live out my own vocation in my particular state of life. We have come a long way, and done many one-eighties to realign our lives with the life God wanted us to step into.

I had come into the Church at eighteen years old. For ten years, in my twenties, I thought I was going to be a monastic, "for it is better not to marry," as the Apostle writes. I was a late bloomer of sorts "in the world," because I had focused so much on leaving it behind once and for all. For as St. John says, "if the love of the world is in you, the love of the Father is not." (1 Jn 2:15). When I was rejected from a monastery after applying to be a postulant, and met my wife-to-be a year later, my vocation became clear. Prayers were answered in ways unexpected. The hand was put to the plow, and there was peace.

My salary working in social services (the only job I could find) was modest, but my wife had been doing well for years in the health profession. When she was promoted to the manager of a department at the hospital, she was making good money, though she paid for it in stress and busyness. At heart, she always wanted to be a wife and mother. We got working on the second part of that equation not long after we were married, having a son and a daughter in rapid succession. Our personal faith was strong, but we were far from orthodox in many aspects of the Faith. Contraception was a thorn in the side, because of my conscience (corrupted as it was by lousy catechesis and years of liberal Catholicism that I thought was normative), but I had no example of anyone not using it.


For dual income earners, two or three kids is usually the breaking point. Our daycare was costing us my salary, and "the hustle" of shuttling the infants to and from the center was, we figured, just what you did. I had shirked the idea of responsibility for most of my life, valuing freedom and autonomy above all things, and so the idea of a traditional model of my wife staying home and us living on my salary was not even on the radar. Of course she would work. Daycare (and later, a live in au pair) was budgeted for, and we figured was not forever, so we could manage it. But we had to put a cap on those kids. Originally we had planned to stay in the city and shell out for private Catholic schools, but figured it was a better financial move to relocate across state lines to a better school district and make use of the public schools. I had gone to public schools my whole life (my wife attended Catholic school for hers). It was just what you did. We bought a house we could afford in a "good" school district, and our son started kindergarten.


I wasn't quite a Mr. Mom, but I did try to do as much around the house as I could since my wife was in the more stressful position work wise. I cooked, I cleaned, I did laundry, I picked up the kids when she worked late. Something was not "as it should be," but we didn't know any different, the way a fish doesn't know it lives in water. When our kids were two and three, that was the hardest period. If we had another...well, let's just say we weren't sure we could handle it.

It's a long story I have told elsewhere, but when we found a Miraculous Medal in a pew on vacation, and my wife started wearing it, things started to change. The sacramental grace that was unleashed was like water wearing down a rock. My wife's mother died suddenly shortly after finding the medal. We had a miscarriage. Our sex life was white-knuckling trying to avoid pregnancy. It was all about control and "being responsible," which meant emulating the world that I had tried to spurn a decade ago.

Living a radical faith is easier when you see it done, so the Lord "sent us some brothers (and sisters) to show us the way and model for us what authentic Catholicism looks like. It started with a blog I stumbled on, as well as some lectures by Dr. Janet Smith ("Contraception, Why Not?") to prick our conscience. We began to give up control, make changes. We threw away the condoms. I was still adamant about sending the kids to "the good public schools," but then the transgender bathroom things started making the news, and something didn't seem right about that. My wife had a desire to homeschool, which was crazy considering it would be a waste of our high school tax privileges. I had just started a new job with a slightly higher salary and some good benefits. The Lord sent us some homeschooling families, and we saw the fruits with our own eyes. We had an au pair after our third (miracle) baby was born. But the whisper in our hearts was "trust Me." And so we began to. Our knuckles were not as white as they used to be.

When my wife made the decision to leave her full time high salary job a couple years ago, her heart was coming more in alignment with her favorite Psalm, "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart" (Ps 37:4). We were making it work financially, with some graces and blessings to aid the transition. The baby came with some bread under his arm, as the saying goes. Our son had had some behavioral issues in kindergarten (manifesting when he got home from school, probably from the stress of being in a classroom setting), which began to dissipate the more things progressed with homeschooling.


My wife continued to work a few shifts a month at the hospital bedside, and a funny thing happened with the $60k loss of income--I started to step up. I picked up extra jobs, tightened our budget, and hustled. I became more invested in my own job, and took more pride in being the main provider, though the initial thought scared the hell out of me. I had my own issues as a result of struggling to hold down employment in the past on account of a mental illness, but miraculously--and largely in part thanks to the newfound stability found in marriage, despite the stressors--the symptoms I had suffered under for so many years began to disappear. I was stable, our household became more stable, and our marriage strengthened. Our sex life was healthy and natural and frequent, which solidified the bond between us. My wife tends towards submissiveness by nature, but in bringing things into 'right order,' it was like a natural puzzle piece that just found it's way to it's rightful place. She learned to cook. She tried to keep the house clean. It wasn't quite Leave It To Beaver, but it was trending that way. And we had more peace. Something was working.

We were still attending Mass at a local parish, but were introduced by a friend to the Traditional Latin Mass, which we attended one Sunday. I wasn't taken with it at first, but what became a more pressing concern for me was the transmission of the Faith to our children. I didn't see this happening in Novus Ordo parishes for the most part (with some exceptions, of course). I also taught 5th grade CCD and saw the fruit of it, which was largely useless. The foundation we were building on did not seem solid. So despite my liturgical ignorance and not being drawn to traditionalism initially, we started attending Mass in the Extraordinary Form once a month. Eventually the schizophrenia of switching between what seemed to be two totally different churches and Masses became too difficult, and we decided to hold our nose and jump to the TLM exclusively. The community we found ourselves in (again, by grace) was very welcoming, not cliquey, and largely "normal." It took about a year to feel comfortable, but now we can't image going back after, again, seeing the fruits. Our son is learning to serve at the Mass (all boys), and is enthusiastic about it even. The feminized nature of the liturgy in the N.O. was always a source of embarrassment for me without realizing, because I never knew there was an alternative. But now we found, there was, one suited to male sensibilities, who in turn umbrella their wives and children and make them want to lead, to take responsibility for the spiritual trajectory of the household. I found other men as well--again, "God sent me some brothers"--to practice the faith with in word and deed, and most have a more traditional model of leading their households than what we had initially.


A highlight of Catholicism is a synthesis of the subjective experience of the moving of the Holy Ghost with the objective foundation of Truth and doctrine to guide it. It is hard, which appeals to a man's sensibilities and makes him his best self, much like a good wife, a good marriage does. Right authority, right order...right living. Everything is hard while still falling into place, which produces peace as the byproduct, not the objective. Love deepens in the submission of the wife when her husband take seriously his charge to head his household. Children emulate their father in the faith, and grow close to their mother when they are afforded the time with the family unit.


I started this blog for both men and women, for they are the two lungs--like faith and reason--that lay the foundation for our world: the family, the building block of society. You start from the ground up, and build with the mortar of faith and the bricks of tradition. We have the blueprints from the Magisterium. We have the energy to run the machines from grace. We have the model of what "what it looks like" in the Holy Family. And we have the goal, the skyward building, in the celestial home we hope to make it to: Heaven. Is there anything more important?


"For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior." (Eph 5:23)