Harrison Butker and the Uncomfortable Truth
The feminist in me chafes at his words — and yet I have also lived them.
By now, everyone with an internet connection has seen the speech that Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker gave at the Benedictine College commencement ceremony. I certainly have, and I did so with my jaw hanging open.
His views on reproductive rights — the speech mentioned abortion, IVF, and surrogacy — disgusted me. His declaration that Catholics must be more outspoken about their faith feeds into the false, incendiary rhetoric that Christians are being discriminated against in this country. His view that becoming a homemaker should be a woman’s highest aspiration filled me with feminist indignation.
And then, it gave me pause.
I have a college degree. I spent years building a career in digital media. I am deeply pro-choice, cheered when gay marriage became legal, and believe in absolute separation of church and state. And yet, the idea of one day being a stay-at-home mom had long appealed to me.
Sure, my friends and I joked about marrying guys with the means to support us while we stayed home to raise babies and bake cookies. We reasoned that this path just had to be easier than the long working days to which we subjected ourselves (how naïve we were!) But a few years into my career, finally making the kind of money where returning to work after having a child made sense, the decision felt much weightier. I knew I could keep working after having my daughter. And yet, I couldn’t imagine dropping a baby off at daycare just to come to this office and do this job.
The decision would be made for me when I was laid off at six months pregnant. Driving away from my building for the last time, I called my husband. “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise,” he suggested, and I agreed. Much like Butker suggested I should be, I was excited at the prospect of devoting myself to keeping a home and raising children.
I was hit all at once with the reality of what that actually meant. I chose to breastfeed, meaning that only I was up all night long to feed her. Going to bed at night, I’d feel a crippling anxiety knowing that I’d just be up again in an hour or two. My nipples cracked and bled. The baby was a spitter, and my shirt was constantly wet. With my husband working long hours to support us, well in line with Butker’s ideology, I was solely responsible for all of the laundry, cooking, and dog-walking, even if I was running on fumes.
My second child was born when my first was just nineteen months old. I was easy to spot at library story time and play group, holding my toddler’s hand with an infant strapped to my chest. On a group outing to a local firehouse, I calculated that the weight of my baby in the carrier, my toddler in my arms, and my diaper bag on my shoulder was roughly equivalent to the full weight of a firefighter’s gear. Another mom in the group shook her head in wonder. “It’s hard enough having a baby,” she told me, “but you’ve got an older kid who’s not a baby, and yet still needs you so much.”
Butker’s critics are right to point out that slamming women for wanting to have both careers and families is backwards. They’re right to point out that women who fully commit to homemaking can be abandoned by their husbands, leaving them with no means of support. They’re right to point out that, in this economy, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to support a family on one income, a fact that Butker and his NFL salary may not fully understand.
But what I want men like Butker, and the women who marry them, to understand is this: Homemaking as a full-time job is not forever.
As my fellow mom so succinctly put it, the challenge of raising young children is just how much they need you. As the years have marched on, those children don’t need me the way they once did. And If what I’ve heard from moms of older kids is correct, time will not stop, and they will only need me less and less.
I got time back in my day when I no longer had to breastfeed or change diapers. I got more time back when my children learned to dress themselves, get their own breakfast, and buckle their own seatbelts. A whole new dimension opened up when they learned to pump their legs on the swings at the playground. Next year, they’ll both take a bus to school (no need for me to drive) where a cafeteria serves lunch every day (I’ll still pack their lunches some days, but it’s no longer a must-do). By the time they’re fully grown, they will have handed me more and more time back in small increments until my days are entirely my own again.
And if I had spent those years allowing my identity as a stay-at-home mom to supersede anything else I’d ever been, the emptiness of those days would be devastating.
I am deeply proud of the work that I’ve done these past seven years as a mother and a wife, just as Butker would argue that I should be. But when I first found myself with two children off to school for a full day, I could feel the newly opened chasms in my day yearning to be filled. Butker might argue that this is a sign for a woman to simply have more children, keeping them firmly mired in the trenches of childrearing. But in reality, families are producing fewer and fewer children. The years of being buried by the demands of babies and toddlers simply don’t last that long (even if they feel eternal).
And when I suddenly found myself with whole hours to fill, I knew I wouldn’t be doing so by having more children. I had worked various part-time and remote jobs over the years to at least keep a toe in the working world while raising my kids, and as I started this blog and slowly built a nascent freelance writing career, I was grateful not to be starting entirely from scratch. Staying home to raise my children has been a noble, worthy pursuit that I don’t regret for a second. But to continue to hold fast to my children, making them the center of my universe when they should be learning to stand on their own, would be a disservice to them and to me.
Just as babies are not meant to stay little forever, the grueling, round-the-clock work of raising them is similarly ephemeral. In the face of my children growing, changing, and moving forward, men like Harrison Butker say they want me to stand still. Yet he is only twenty-eight years old, with children younger than my own. He notes that his own wife has no regrets about giving up a career to raise her children, nor should she. Yet I hope for her that one day she finds a purpose outside of raising her children— for if she’s done her job, they will almost certainly grow to find a purpose outside of her.
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