Everyday Ignatian is a series written by guest contributors, chronicling their daily lives and experiences through the lens of Ignatian spirituality. This year, we’re excited to introduce a special theme for 2025: Virtues, or Gifts of the Spirit. Featuring writers Alli Bobzien, Catherine Sullivan and Jennifer Sawyer, along with select guest authors, Everyday Ignatian will highlight stories that explore the quarterly themes of prudence, patience, solidarity, and gratitude — and the impact they have on our lives today.
When I learned I was pregnant just a few months into a new job across the country from where I had lived for the last decade, far from family and establishing myself anew, the future felt bleak. The news was unexpected, and I lacked a vision for the shape motherhood, at this time and in this place, might take. I had just stepped into a role where I was the first lay woman in the position, and my work involved nights, weekends and international travel. I was panicking, uncertain, craving clarity. How could I possibly show up fully and freely in all facets of my vocation now?
Early during my undergraduate years at the University of Scranton, I was introduced to the “Patient Trust” prayer by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ. “Above all, trust in the slow work of God,” it begins. I carried the prayer close in the years since then, turning to it in new beginnings, introducing it to my own students in my work in campus ministry, encouraging them to live into the questions of their lives and ease themselves into their unfurling futures known only to God.
But I wasn’t interested in this slow work as I tried to imagine what working motherhood would look like. My own impatience, combined with the barrage of ephemeral opinions about motherhood and the mothers who mother, calcified the boundaries around my heart and narrowed my already impoverished imagination. As my belly ballooned, the walls closed in. I shared with family my plans for an international work trip soon after returning from maternity leave, and someone listening rolled their eyes, replying, “Once they place that baby in your arms, everything will change.”
Elsewhere, at work, someone remarked that it was “irresponsible” of me to get pregnant so soon into my tenure; someone else wrote an anonymous complaint letter to senior leadership at my workplace commenting on my taking an entire semester “off.” It felt like everywhere I turned I was met again and again with resistance as I tried to envision what this fuller inhabiting of my vocation might look like.
I’m writing this while my crawling, babbling infant snoozes through his first morning nap. We’re now months into this routine of daycare drop offs and airport departures and sometimes finding my son’s eyes in the crowd when I’m speaking on a panel or giving a presentation and sometimes wondering what he and the babysitter are getting up to. Last week, I met a colleague for coffee, our first encounter since my return to work, and he met me with a gentle affirmation as I rattled off what our recent weeks had looked like, and my hopes for the rest of the semester.
“You seem to be doing really well.”
I was reaching down toward the table for my latte when my eyes met my colleague’s, their observation catching my breath. I had been so caught up in the rollercoaster ride of recent months that I hadn’t paused to reflect on any of it. My colleague’s remark felt like God pulling the e-brake.
Those months of feeling myself “in suspense and incomplete,” as Teilhard writes, were fraught. Indeed, “only God knew what this new spirit gradually forming within me would be.” If my present-day self met the me of a year and a half ago who couldn’t possibly imagine what all of this, all at once — my son, my job, my new city, my new community — would look like, and tried to convey it to her, the words would fall short. I needed to live into this and through this to become the mother — the working mother, the professional mother, the leader and mother — I will now forever be becoming as I make the road of my vocation by walking.
Rainer Maria Rilke echoes Teilhard when in his “Letters to a Young Poet,” he advises that the point is “to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” I couldn’t have known what this would look like without living it. Any semblance of certainty could only be grounded in the patience that comes with experience, the confidence of having endured.
It feels naive to make any sort of claims about motherhood when this season of my life is so nascent. Patience steadies me there, too. Months ago, I thought the walls were closing in, but they were crumbling. I thought I wanted to skip the intermediate stages and know how it would all turn out, not knowing that this is the good part, this is the holy mystery where my fumbling meets God’s dreams for me, dreams that are more expansive than I could ever conceive of for myself.
I’ll continue to live into this vocation and its many facets, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I’m eager for time to slow down so I can savor my son and his infant awe: He is perfect, and I adore him, and my visceral connection to him transcends anything I’ve ever known. Yesterday I considered googling whether babies can experience any adverse effects from physical affection because my son spends so many of his waking hours with my lips pressed against his face, but then I decided that was dumb and blew him another raspberry.
Thank God for patience. Thank God I don’t know what I don’t know.
