What's In a Name?

     Last night I met a perfectly friendly and intelligent young couple, both graduates of my mater ferox, Catholics both, with a young daughter whom they intend to teach at home.  The wife told me cheerfully that she'd recently attended a small reunion of local Princetonians, and she was the only woman present who was a "stay-at-home mom."  That's the phrase that people use, and I wasn't going to quarrel with it then -- we were milling about after a graduation ceremony in honor of ten homeschooled seniors.  We had a few jests at the absurdity of believing that to spend most of one's time in the company of someone deeply beloved, free to read or play music, or to put the home in trim for one's own use or for hospitality or for the pleasure of someone else deeply beloved, or to go outside for what she called, putting emphasis on the unusual phrase, "fresh air," is somehow a great sacrifice, worthy to be acknowledged by solemn nods from those who are not making it.  Her friends, she said, mainly employed nannies, and as far as I can see, the name "nanny" is given to someone who will temporarily treat one's child with a certain amiable kindness, but who will move on in a year or two, and who will therefore not be a deeply felt part of the child's life.  In other words, the nanny is not really a nanny, but, to pick up the bitter phrase from Hemingway, isn't it pretty to think so?  It occurs to me that the friends are the ones making the sacrifice -- or are making their children make the sacrifice.

     It's too bad, besides, that we have that moniker, "stay-at-home mom."  It sounds rather like "stick in the mud," and is used with something of the same modest embarrassment as is the faintly insulting "homebody."  It seems to describe somebody who lacks the imagination to do anything other than stay at home.  I'll get to "mom" in a moment.  But the first thing to note is the assumption that everybody automatically has a "home" to stay at or not to stay at, that being the question.  Really?  I guess everybody has a house, but a home is a different thing.  When I was a graduate student I slept in a dormitory room, and then I shared a house with a couple of guys, and then I rented a house by myself, but in no case did I live in a home.  Home was where I went for a while when school was out.  The young woman does not, in fact, "stay" at a home that preexisted her decision not to leave it.  Her dwelling there has made it a home.  It's an old fashioned way to look at it, I know, but haven't we all been invited into plenty of houses that are as sterile and as un-homely as a hospital, or a faculty lounge, or a waiting room at a brokerage firm, with standard prints on the walls and silk flowers on the table?

     Then there's that word, stripped of reverence and of deep ontological significance, "mom".  It's affectionate, but for that very reason it shouldn't be used among strangers -- unless the point is that we don't take it seriously.  My children call me Daddy, but I don't go around calling myself a daddy, because I'm more than that, and so are the other men who have children and take care of them.  They are fathers.  Their wives are mothers.  We are commanded to honor our fathers and mothers.  We may do so within the family by calling them Daddy and Mommy, if the circumstances fit.  We cannot do so by calling ourselves daddies and mommies, unless we are talking baby-talk to toddlers. 

     The good woman I met, then, is not a stick-in-the-mud mommy, or a stay-at-home mom.  She is a mother who takes care of her child at home.  I'll add, too, that the term "stay-at-home mom" marks an interesting and no healthy shift from the older "housewife".  That is, the woman's role is defined in terms of what she does for her children, not what she does for her husband or for her husband and children together.  Her primary duties as a married woman are, in this pseudo-conservative vision, to her children.  But that doesn't accurately describe what she is in that home, or what her actual devotion to her husband is -- and the couple I met seemed very happily married.

     I'd been thinking about language for a couple of days; one of the best students I've ever had told me that the "hooking up" anti-culture was endemic on my campus, and we are far from a secular place, at Providence College.  If a Shakespeare or a Dante were revived for the sole purpose of coining a term that would well describe the boredom, the cynical hopelessness, the failure to rise to the height of fullblooded lust, the contemptuous familiarity with the opposite sex, the supine submission of the human act to the social machine, the easygoing willingness to use or be used as a spittoon -- the quizzical look with which you would regard the rare couple holding hands or walking arm in arm or, what was the word people used to use, ah yes, "flirting" -- he could not have come up with a better one than that.  You hook up, and hang up.