These sparse words, found after Mary and Joseph retrieve the young Jesus from teaching in the Temple, encompass about 20 years of Jesus' life.  When I stop to ponder them, they are astounding. Jesus, God among us, was a “stay-at-home son” for most of his life. 

Being a “stay-at-home mom” is a relatively new thing for me.  I've only been home full time for about two years.  My former life involved spending twenty-plus years out of the home, receiving a formal education, much of which never mentioned what one does when one is “at home”, or, for that matter, that there is any value whatsoever in “home.”  I recall textbooks in elementary school that featured female scientists, inventors, and astronauts, and I know they were meant to inspire little girls to dream big and consider themselves just as capable as the boys to aspire to any career imaginable. Now that I am a mother who spends most of her time caring for children and house, I look back and wonder whether these textbook heroines were mothers, and how they figured out vacuuming and giving baths in the midst of their fascinating outside careers.   I do appreciate the openness of the time when I grew up—I was never told that certain educational paths were only for boys, or that girls could only take home economics while boys build bridges.  This is good.  However, I think the pendulum swung too far.  Home economics was long gone by the time I reached high school, and there seemed to be nothing but complete silence with regard to the home or its value. 

Despite the lack reference to “the home” in my educational path, I have been blessed by twenty-nine years of being a daughter to sacrificing parents whose choices and behavior continue to teach volumes about the value of a home and the relationships and skills cultivated there.  Over and over again it is this familial formation that comes into play now when I am tasked with forming a home of my own. 

I grew up in a home that was clean, tidy, and organized.  I am now realizing the work that went into making it this way, and I aspire to keep my home in such a way.  Yet I seem to have an instinctive aversion to that which is small, dull, or repetitive.  Our culture of success, productivity, and novelty (along with the basic tendencies of fallen human nature) has also had its hand, unfortunately, in forming me.  Sweeping beneath a table under which crumbs will certainly be strewn again, wiping up bathroom sinks that little hands will soon splash  again, is almost anathema to me.  How could this be what God wants me to be doing, after educational  preparation for so much “more” ?

Perhaps this is why Jesus entered the world through the family.  These very things, the small moments of family life, the relationships and tasks shared between mother, father and child, were what God saw fit to use as Jesus' formation for the most important mission anyone could ever have.  He didn't prepare for his mission as savior of the world in great Jewish schools or universities, nor did he hone his crowd-pleasing abilities by apprenticing to a public-relations guru in the Roman marketplace.  He simply stayed at home, with a holy woman and a saintly carpenter, who most likely spent the bulk of their time doing the tasks Jews had always done to keep the home and provide for each other.  They probably couldn't even read.  This “smallness” of family life made up the bulk of the life of Christ.  Then, when he left the protective womb of the home, his outside life wasn't exactly easy or fun.  He had a few followers and many critics whose scorn eventually won out over his friends' admiration. He was killed; defeated in the eyes of the world.  And his triumph? It was in his rising, to give us a way to return home, this time, for eternity.

Carla Galdo is a wife, a mother of two boys, and a recent graduate of the M.T.S. program at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.. She blogs occasionally at amotherssmile.blogspot.com.

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