Digging deep beneath the surface of motherhood

I purchased a copy of Soul Garden, A Catholic Mother’s Collective, when it was first published by Ignatius Press in November. Soon after, I couldn’t resist giving my copy away to a new mom. When it came time for this interview, I borrowed a copy, which was quickly requested back so its owner could give it to a friend as a birthday gift. Needless to say, when I located another borrowed copy, I penned my questions quickly before it too could be gifted away.

Edited by Hope Schneir and Sia Hoyt, and illustrated beautifully by Sia Hoyt and Mary Pemberton, Soul Garden is a hefty (almost 300 pages) collection of essays by dozens of women. Despite its length, it’s published in a sturdy softcover format that invites dipping in at any time, thumbing through and annotating.

Hope is first and foremost a mother—she and her husband, Justin, are expecting their tenth child. The Steubenville alums make their home in Lander, Wyoming. The couple is a musical duo as well, having crafted five albums with their eponymous folk band. They’re also the co-founders of “Humanality,” a non-profit devoted to digital minimalism. A gifted writer, Hope is co-editor of a paper publication, Soul Gardening Journal, to which she contributes as well.

I recently corresponded with Hope about the book, motherhood, Mary, creative endeavors, and more.

CWR: What inspired you to publish Soul Garden? And what makes this anthology unique?

Hope Schneir: Soul Garden the book was born from Soul Gardening Journal: a tri- or bi-annual, reader-funded, artsy, homespun, printed mother’s journal. SGJ publishes personal reflections, spiritual encouragement, art, poetry, book recommendations and recipes from (mostly) Catholic mothers and women across the country and abroad.

It continues to be a real vehicle of sharing, learning, and sisterhood that we women desperately desire. Over the years so many of the pieces we published seemed like such timeless treasures that we were motivated to enshrine some of our favorites into an anthology for mothers.

It’s such a compilation of voices and topics, we like to call Soul Garden a resource manual for a mother’s interior and exterior life. It contains nine chapters, NURTURE (on family relationships and raising children), DWELL (on the worthwhile endeavor of making a beautiful home, regardless of your income), JOURNEY (confronting change, birth, death, and the seasons of life), READ (inspiring book reviews of quality books both for ourselves and our children), WOMAN (explorations on the identity and role of women in the Church and the world), PRAY (spiritual insights through the lens of motherhood), FIAT (colorful tributes to the different titles of Mary), and TABLE (nourishing, tasty, and uncomplicated recipes for busy families).

With over sixty contributors and such diverse subject matter, truly there is something for every woman, or whatever sort of woman you happen to be today.

CWR: In a recent Ignatius Press podcast, you spoke of the importance of sisterhood. The book has a very sisterly feel—women sharing stories, insights, frustrations, recipes. Frequently, the essays prompt questions or meditations, instead of giving answers. It feels like sitting down with a group of sisters. Why is sisterhood challenged in our society today?

Hope Schneir: Back in high school, my favorite graphic t-shirt featured a bright crowd of multicultural women’s faces: some with headwraps, some with braids, some smiling, some more stern. At the bottom were the words many strong and beautiful women. I still think back on that t-shirt—in a funny way, it formed me. I saw the faces of these women as the ideal; to be numbered in that crowd seemed the ultimate goal of a life well lived.

I’ve learned a lot about sisterhood through my sisters, biological and spiritual, my co-author Sia being one of them. However, my first witness of sisterhood is actually from my mother, who my sister Brooke lovingly calls “the sisterless sister”. My mother had only brothers, yet was such an example to her daughters of building up women, supporting women, and being proud to be a woman. Never have we heard her speak ill of another woman. When she’d hear about a man having an affair, she’d say, “How could a woman do that to another woman? How could she do that to her sister?!”

Women have the opportunity to choose this type of attitude, or choose one that is competitive, envious, and base. Both are within us, and we have to fight the latter like a poisonous snake that’s trying to wrap itself around our feet. Whenever I feel a temptation toward jealousy, envy, or dislike, I have found great success in choosing to instead intentionally celebrate what God is doing in that woman’s life. Each and every time I do this, good things happen. A woman is grateful, opens up to me, shares her vulnerability, or celebrates me in return, and then all of a sudden we are friends, and I love her, and am grateful just to know her.

My co-author Sia has always felt the mystery of the Visitation to be a central spiritual anchor for the Soul Gardening Journal community, and this mystery highlights St. Elizabeth as a primary example of this kind of sisterhood. Instead of feeling envious that her younger cousin was chosen to serve a higher role than herself, St. Elizabeth is only grateful to be in her presence. Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me? To delight in one another, and what God is doing in each other’s lives, is at the center of authentic sisterhood.

It goes without saying that social media has made authentic sisterhood more challenging. We see a disembodied, filtered image of another’s life, and compare our reality against it. We see how many shares or likes another person’s post or story has, and often feel inferior when our posts or stories don’t gather the same attention.

One of the reasons I distanced myself from social media altogether was that I felt the “poisonous snake” of comparison coming at me more strongly through this medium—not all the time, but enough. I’d say to myself “Why do I feel envy and distaste toward this person? I love this person!” I knew if I visited this perfect-looking woman in her home, saw her messy laundry room, unmade bed, or heard her latest personal struggle, I would love her. And if she shared her success privately with me in the context of a relationship, I would share her joy with my whole heart. But something about sharing on the social stage attacked the value in authentic female relationships for me, and so I moved away from it.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a move every woman needs to make. Yet even when women engage highly on those platforms, we must make great effort to reclaim sisterhood both on and off the screen. A good prayer to pray before jumping on your Instagram or Facebook feed is “Lord help me to love. I am here only to give, and not to receive. Give me this grace.”

Women need each other now more than ever. Many of us can feel isolated by motherhood, while confronting societal pressures to be sexy, skinny, professional, holy, have the perfect home, stay up-to-date on current affairs, and be charitable models in our communities.

It’s a lot, and sometimes all we can do that day is rummage through a fridge of old vegetables and try to come up with something for dinner. Living a Catholic life demands carrying a daily cross, however heavy or light, and we women need to build each other up and help shoulder one another’s burdens—sometimes with merely a word of encouragement, a conversation, or a cup of tea. I’ve had many women love me in ways I don’t deserve, at points where I wanted to break, and it was my saving grace.

CWR: One of my favorite essays in the book talked about motherhood and the “golden ticket” to a life of intimacy with Jesus. What is that golden ticket, and how does this book relate to that?

Hope Schneir: Being a mother is so incredibly awesome, especially spiritually. Firstly, mothers have the unique privilege of physically co-creating with God—of bearing something we love that comes not from outside of ourselves, but from within ourselves. Temptations can arise in a mother to feel frustrated at a lack of prayer time, and feel far from God, but in fact the opposite is true.

I once heard an ill person share this piece of wisdom he discovered: My illness is not in the way, it is the way. I think the same thing applies to motherhood. God contains both motherhood and fatherhood within himself, and we mothers are given access into the very heart of God, the maternity of God (pardon the unconventional phrasing), which loves naturally, and without sense, compelling a self-gift that is both instinctual and beyond reason.

Any parent (especially mothers) understands that their unconditional love for their child is a window into God’s love for us. I feel sad for people who never get to experience this kind of love from the inside. You can tell yourself “God loves me”—and believe it’s true—but through physical motherhood you understand, in a limited way, just how much and in what capacity. Motherhood gives us a golden ticket, or key to God’s heart, where we can study from the inside who God is. Leaning into this reality is, I think, the secret to sanctity as a mother. It looks different from the life of a nun, and it should. But we have to be receptive. We have to ask. We have to listen.

Additionally, Jesus and Mary chose regular family life to take up the majority of their time on earth. This was, of course, filled with the same sorts of distractions, chores, accidents, household repairs, grumpy neighbors, and things we face every day. But if regular, domestic life was good enough for the King and Queen of heaven, regular domestic life should be good enough for us. I think the Lord loves to dwell in our homes, just as he dwells in tabernacles. He loves to play and to dance with your children, to be the invisible person at your table, to tidy up and separate the darks and whites with you, to strengthen you and your husband in your work, your children in their studies.

Emmanuel, God is with us… He is in your home! Many contemplatives have found God through the pots and pans, through the sweeping, through menial tasks of the hidden life. Sometimes we are called to great things, but most of the time we are called to regular things, and God, I think, prefers to dwell in the regular things even more strongly than in the spotlight.

Many essays and reflections in Soul Garden carry this theme, and help color in the gray-scale of the mundane with the quiet yet magical presence of God.

CWR: What’s your favorite essay in the book? Well, you’re a mom, so you cannot have favorites! But if you had to pick one.

Hope Schneir: Ahhh, there’s so many good ones! Can I mention three?

I love Sia’s The Land of the Living (JOURNEY). In it she shares her interior dialogue of choosing reality, self dignity, challenge and sacrifice, over indulgence, defeat, and distraction. She writes in such a poetic and personal way that hallmarks her style. In it, she chooses to “talk to my grandmothers above” instead of turning the radio on while she’s driving. She chooses to forgo the booze in the evening or the second cup of coffee in the morning and instead drink lemon water in a wine glass reverently, take her vitamins, and massage her wrinkles in the mirror with frankincense and coconut oil. She ends with these lines: I will let the light shine into my whole being. I will say yes to life in my soul…. say yes to life running through… to walking in the light. I choose to live in the land of the living.

I also love Mary Pemberton’s Rise Up, O Flame (PRAY). In it, she humorously and candidly depicts the struggles of her family to instill evening prayer time traditions, namely the rosary before bed. Mary is such a good writer and handles the subject with more honesty and humor than I’ve encountered on the subject.

But I think my all-time favorite piece is the poem Staying Home (DWELL), by Heather Kellis. I’ve never met Heather, but her poem is one that will stick with me always.

CWR: You’ve said that you thought creative endeavors would go by the wayside once you had kids, but somehow they were gifted back to you. You also said that putting this book together took years, around raising your growing family. How do you fit creative endeavors into your life?

Hope Schneir: I started writing songs when I was in middle school. I remember it wasn’t something I really decided to do; they just came out, and they still do from time to time. I think most creative gifts are like that, gifts, that of course we have to cultivate, but are more a part of us than a decision we make.

The cool thing about becoming a parent is that you take yourself with you. You don’t put on a mask or a costume, and become someone else (which maybe looking back I thought I would), but the passions, drive, creativity, and interests that you had before are still there, still waiting to be cultivated, but with a more surrendered and ordered spirit.

Recently, I was mentoring a young woman who was concerned about forgoing her strong intellectual gifts for marriage and family. I was able to share with her about my good friend Noelle, who is brilliantly gifted, yet shelved her MA track as a young woman in order to be a stay-at-home-mom. Once her youngest of six children was in school full time, she casually started writing articles, which were so well received that she was launched into a successful career as a writer and public speaker.

Some people work all their lives to chase the level of success that Noelle arrived at in just a few short years. We can grasp at and try to control things, but when we surrender, trust in God and try to do what God wants, he will often use our “shelved gifts” in his own time, but in better ways than we could have anticipated.

In my own experience with music, God acted in a similar way. The songs kept coming, and I expected only to strum them in my living room every now and then, but then some generous friends shoved us into a recording studio. We found out how much fun that was, and began to record more on our date nights and sneak it in when I could, the way we mothers sneak in a hair appointment or a phone call. God sent us incredible friends to play music with, and getting to collaborate on five albums with insanely talented musicians was something I never dreamed of doing.

Maybe if I didn’t have a boatload of children, I could have pursued songwriting even further, but at the end of the day God showed me that wasn’t what I wanted, anyway. It seems to me that the best creative endeavors provide a fun experience outside of our vocation, a chance to use gifts that we don’t always exercise, yet at the same time strengthen our spirits and point us back to our vocations as the way we truly can and want to serve him the most. The crafting of Soul Garden felt like that. It was a passion that took time, we had to sneak it in, and by God’s grace it came to completion, but at the same time reinforced our desire to give ourselves more fully to our families.

CWR: One theme in the book is what you call the “fascinating and dangerous” culture of the smartphone. When I put the book down and went to check out Soul Gardening journal online, I realized you mean what you say! The publication that birthed this book is not on the net—it’s a print publication only. You feel so strongly about this issue that your family funds a scholarship for Franciscan University of Steubenville students who give up their smartphones. Tell us a little about that and the fruits you’ve seen from distancing yourself from phones.

Hope Schneir: There is so much I could say on this topic! What started with a scholarship at Franciscan University turned into a non-profit called Humanality (Humans Engaging Reality) that now assists college clubs on various campuses, with students willingly forgoing their smartphones (or dumbing them down significantly) in the context of community.

So many college students and individuals want to distance themselves from their smartphones in search of freedom from pornography, gaming, or social media addictions, but don’t want to do it alone. The club model provides a “village” of people who journey together, taking on fun personal and community challenges like cooking competitions, star gazing nights, cold plunges, hiking, gardening, or community service. For those of us who aren’t on college campuses and still want help living more intentional lives in person and less on our devices, (Humanality’s executive director Andrew Laubacher recently launched a 30-day digital detox program through HALLOW, worth checking out.)

I find the conversations about healthy tech use both important and interesting, and in our family we’ve taken a more strict approach than others. A few articles in Soul Garden reflect this, and share my strong conviction that mothers (and fathers) need to be empowered to follow their guts/consciences, and instead of caving to social pressures, courageously instill a family tech policy that is supportive of human thriving and family connection and not opposed to it.

For us, this is limiting and strictly monitoring internet use, providing “dumbphones” at 16, and allowing smartphones only when kids are financially independent (for us that means post college).

At first, we had a lot of hard conversations with our teens on this, but now our college kids with LightPhones have really embraced it. They look around and see many of their peers suffering under the chains of tech-associated addictions, and regularly thank us.

As for me, I’ve both turned my phone to grayscale and removed its access to the internet (at Humanality we call this “human mode”). See our recommended modes on the Humanility site. This has been a healthy change for my mothering, and spiritual life, yet I still think about taking the next step and changing over to a LightPhone or WisePhone.

Soul Gardening Journal echos this same desire to live intentionally, more off-screen than on. The journal actually started as a blog in 2010, but we changed to a printed journal when our original group of writers realized we were contributing to something we didn’t like in ourselves or others: mom is staring at a screen again. Mothers must lead by example, and embody the culture we want to see in our homes through our own actions. The printed word in both the book and journal is not only better for our eyes, mental health, and dopamine levels, but it helps model the act of reading to the people around us. If you read on a screen, no one really knows what you’re doing. You might as well just be scrolling.

Of course we all have plenty of genuine reasons to be on screens each day, but I’m convinced that opting out wherever we can fosters brighter, happier, more free and more interesting people and families. A great precept to bear in mind (and is mentioned in the book) is that all digital and screen use should point to and serve incarnate reality, instead of acting as an escape from it. 

Finding the sweet spot of being master of these tools instead of slaves to them, is something we continue to explore, and work towards as a journal.

CWR: Many of the book’s essays start with a cry for help—“These past couple of years, I have acutely felt that knock-you-down desperation for grace: ‘O God, I can’t do this!’”—or admission that family life is messy and moms are human—“So often I have been ‘too busy for that’”… “Ten years into this parenting gig, I’m still a middling to poor housekeeper” … “Over the last few years, my house has been very messy” … “I used to be better at trusting God, or at least it feels that way.” The book is like an anti-Instagram. But each of those essays has a redemptive ending. Why is the juxtaposition central to Soul Garden?

Hope Schneir: I’m so glad you pointed this out! One of the unique things about Soul Garden, and its origins as a journal, is that many of the entries are so personal it can feel almost as if you are reading another woman’s private journal. Facing the gritty reality of mothering with honesty is something that has always been a distinguishing trait of the journal, and helped to make it a community of sisterhood and sharing. Soul Gardening gets past the shiny exterior we try to put forth (often for valid reasons) and gets beneath the surface, to the soul, the roots, the dirt, the bugs, the compost, the weeds.

Yet to your point, both the Catholic pilgrim and the gardener have this perennial in common: hope. We work and struggle with a knowledge that ultimately, all is in God’s hands. And God is good. He is a gardener himself, working on our hearts and habits and each day, training us and stretching us (which can hurt), yet covering our faults with his kindness and mercy, again and again.

When you wake up in the morning, and choose to believe in the mystery that “All things work toward the good for those who love him,” it changes what might be depressing circumstances into opportunities of blind faith—which despite being gritty, real, and hard, eventually teach us to anticipate the sweet fruits that come from them, however delayed they might be.

CWR: One essay in particular sent shivers up my spine—it was a very personal encounter with Our Lady, Undoer of Knots and with a departed soul, all the more riveting because I knew the woman described in the anecdote. The introduction to FIAT explains why the section wasn’t just a nice idea, it was something you felt you needed to do. Why was that?

Hope Schneir: I’m so glad you loved that article! I do too. It was written by my mother-in-law.

I think the primary thing that binds moms together in unspoken sisterhood is just how humbling and desperate mothering makes us, even if we only have one child. Tantrums in the grocery store, exasperated nights of infant fussiness, spit-up on our clothes, losing one’s temper with the people you love the most, feeling like you give it all but it’s never enough … more and more I’ve come to the conclusion that God actually likes us better this way, in a state of humility and desperation, because it brings us to our knees. When we have to face our imperfections and incapabilities, we realize we just can’t do it alone.

Enter Mary. A perfect woman. A perfect mother. But not just a perfect mother on Instagram, to marvel or rival at, she is a hidden mother. And she is our mother. Intimacy with Mary is something we need to pray for, and seek out, remembering that intimacy with her is intimacy with her spouse, the Holy Spirit.

Having teenagers has beautifully made me rely on Our Lady even more. Watching my teens fight their own purity battles, struggle through friendship issues, and wrestle with intense emotions that I can’t fix or might not even have full access to often puts me at a loss, and all I can do is entrust them in the hands of Our Lady. And at one point our kids face the reality that we parents aren’t the giants or heroes they thought we were, but humans ourselves who struggle, fail to understand them or love them perfectly, and need forgiveness. As this reality slowly comes into focus, how good that we can point to Mary as the mother they can rely on.

Exploring the different titles and apparitions of Our Lady in FIAT helps to keep her personhood fresh, and more than just a two-dimensional image on a holy card. Mary is interesting, creative, colorful, and even political! She has a personality, and she is fully who God intended her to be. This impulse to study her, to celebrate her, to honor her, to trust her, to fall at her feet and into her arms, is what gives so many of us the strength to keep going on this journey, letting her both lead us and follow behind us, lighting the way forward while fixing our mistakes and cleaning up the messes behind us (like any good mother of a young child does).

Where would we be without Mary? In a dark bleak world, truly she is our Morning Star as we are tossed about on the waves of life. This need for Mary has made itself clearer and clearer to us through the years of mothering, and through this project.

CWR: The book ends with a quote from Baroness Catherine Doherty, founder of Madonna House. I know from reading Soul Garden that her influence is strong in the book. Can you explain?

Hope Schneir: Sia and Mary (both founding artists and writers of SGJ) bonded in their teenage friendship over a love for Catherine Doherty and Madonna House. I was introduced to Catherine through them, and she has, from the beginning (along with Caryl Houselander) been a clear voice of the spirit of the journal.

Catherine was a Russian Baroness, born in the late 1800s, who migrated to Canada and founded Madonna House, a come-and-go or come-and-stay Catholic agrarian community that still exists today. Catherine felt a deep call to live a life of poverty and simplicity, and was in many ways the Canadian counterpart to Dorothy Day. She sought to blend Catholic Eastern spirituality with the Latin West and wrote profoundly on the subject.

Over the years, both Sia and I have separately discovered the beauty of the Catholic Byzantine rites, and our desire to spiritually hold a place for both Eastern and Western Catholic expressions within ourselves has grown. Catherine teaches us to find God in the “desert”, to be authentic, to give radically, and to be both feminine and bold. Our Lady of the Broom is one of the Marian essays in the book, where Sia shares a beautiful litany written by Catherine, containing this beloved title of Mary.

It’s good to have spiritual sisters on this earth, and spiritual big sisters in heaven … Catherine is very much one of ours. We hope to continue as her students, and [hope] that the Soul Garden can help introduce other women to her as well.