By Thea Jarvis

Motherhood, long the object of poets’ praise and children’s pleading, is still the vocation of choice for most women.

But ever-increasing demands on personal time and energy mean women themselves may need a more supportive embrace from their spiritual mother, the Church.

“It’s a never-ending struggle” to balance job, marriage and mothering, said Dee Huggins, a psychologist in private practice and an outreach therapist at St. John Neumann parish in Lilburn.

“Women wear a lot of different hats,” said Dr. Huggins, the mother of three. “It becomes confusing.”

By offering women a strong spiritual underpinning, the Church delivers a message that “someone is there to help us, cares about us, has plan for us,” she said.

The Church represents stability to harried women of the nineties sandwiching self between job and family, Dr. Huggins believes.

“It’s returning to what we had in our childhood – that same security,” she observed. Being nurtured by a church community is “so simplistic, so fundamental. It sounds too easy, but it is that easy.”

Dr. Huggins is grateful that her own flexible work schedule allows time for her children, now 14, 12 and seven. It wasn’t always so.

“I was pregnant at the time I was doing the written exam for my Ph.D.,” she remembers, and later, in a neat packaging of research and motherhood, used her two daughters as subjects for a doctoral thesis.

Today’s mothers, herself included, are beset with demands on their time, said Dr. Huggins, particularly in metropolitan areas where cultural, athletic, academic and artistic opportunities are widely available.

“Women are pulled in so many different directions,” she said. “We’ve got to decide what our priorities are.” A nurturing church “keeps things in reality,” helping women prioritize hectic work and family schedules.

In her practice, Dr. Huggins meets many women who have been physically and emotionally separated from relatives because of job relocation. The church can bring a sense of connectedness and community-feeling to their lives, she said, becoming an “extended family” that fills the void.

Peggy Saunders, with a baby of nine months and an active three-year-old, has found such a connection at St. Thomas More parish in Decatur, where a Young Mothers Support Group meets weekly.

The group of women “has been everything to us,” said Mrs. Saunders, who moved to metro Atlanta from California four years ago in classic transplant style.

“I got married became pregnant, moved and had a baby all within a year,” explained the former stage manager of San Jose Repertory Theater. “I didn’t have anybody here I knew.”

Mrs. Saunders and her husband, a Methodist, searched for a stable base for their new family and liked what they saw at Thomas More.

“The thing our church emphasizes so much is community. It’s such a major focus of the pastor,” Father Patrick Mulhern, she said.

The Young Mothers Group functions as a playtime for the children and is the “inner circle,” which helps her identify with the larger church, Mrs. Saunders said.

“It gives mothers the support they need when things get tough,” she said. “You call your friends because you can’t call your mother.”

Recently, on a soft spring weekday morning, Mrs. Saunders and some 15 other mothers gathered in St. Thomas More’s newly renovated nursery. While the moms relaxed, swapped stories and traded advice, an assortment of babies, toddlers and preschoolers played happily at their feet.

The Young Mothers Support Group “kept my sanity for the last four years,” said Betsy England, the mother of a one- and four-year-old who worked in mortgage banking before starting her family.

Maeve Eley, who founded the group with a handful of other mothers five years ago and has seen it grow to nearly 30 regular participants, agreed.

“I couldn’t have done it it if I didn’t have the group,” said Mrs. Eley, a nurse and mother of two pre-schoolers.

Many of the women have put careers on hold or have cut back to part-time work to stay home with their children. Some are making financial sacrifices to do so.

“Everybody has something they ‘used’ to do. We feel we made the right decision, but it’s really important to have support,” Mrs. Eley said, citing the isolation and loneliness that can dog stay-at-home moms.

The parish extends its blessing to these young mothers and their children in the person of pastoral associate Ann Dugan, who stays in close contact as advisor and friend.

“She’s got the woman’s viewpoint,” said Mrs. Saunders, gratefully describing Mrs. Dugan as a matriarchal, stabilizing element for the group.

Since they began their weekly meetings, the women have given back some of the support they have received from the parish. Over the years they have taught baptismal classes and brought meals to new mothers, sponsored Easter egg hunts and Mother’s Day teas. Most recently, their concerns have turned to working moms with young children.

“Working mothers don’t have the opportunity to meet with other mothers,” said Mrs. Saunders. Sometimes, “they feel like they’re on the fringe.”

The group now plans a monthly “ladies night” – time out for dinner and relaxed conversation – another parish-based show of support for both stay-at-home and working moms.

Elyse O’Kane, a teacher’s aide at St. John Neumann Regional School in Lilburn and a Corpus Christi parishioner with three children aged 10, 14 and 17, remembers when that kind of support was critical to herself and her family.

Mrs. O’Kane moved to Stone Mountain from Ohio 15 years ago at the beginning of a problem pregnancy. Her husband had started a new job and she was at home – confined to bed – with an active two-year-old roaming the house. They had no friends and few personal contacts.

“Doctors were not expecting me to carry the baby to term. I didn’t know what to do,” she said, recalling a frantic search of the Yellow Pages and a desperate call to Corpus Christi.

When she asked for help, “people came out of the woodwork,” she said. Parishioners cooked meals, cleaned the house and took charge of her busy toddler.

She and her husband, self-described “borderline Catholics,” were powerfully impacted by the unexpected concern. “It was evangelization,” she said of the process. “That’s what turned us around.”

When one woman prayed with her, Mrs. O’Kane related, “I received a healing.” Seven months into her pregnancy she got out of bed and was able to tend to her household. The baby was born on his due date, a normal delivery with no complications, “a miracle,” according to Mrs. O’Kane.

The support she received from the church had a “ripple effect,” Mrs. O’Kane said. “That’s what brought me back to the church, what got me involved.”

Her subsequent outreach to unwed mothers, to the deaf, to parents in baptismal classes and to Sunday congregations through her music flowed naturally from “the faith of other people reaching out to help us in the everyday,” she said.

“The church needs to be a factor in bringing people together, a resource, a support,” said Mrs. O’Kane. “It’s not a group of buildings.”

Lynette Batiste, a parishioner at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and Riverdale’s assistant city clerk, is likewise convinced that the church can be an effective resource for women coping with motherhood.

She is encouraged by plans for the Shrine’s new youth council, an organization that should give her son, a high school junior, and other parish teens an opportunity to share mutual interests and concerns.

As children grow older said Mrs. Bastiste, “There’s a distance that comes between you and your child. They become so private.” She is sure her teenager has things he’d like to talk about with his peers, issues that develop between confirmation class and adult education.

“There hasn’t been anything between,” she said, and the youth council promises to fill that gap. Offering young people a safe place to gather, with good role models and a connection to church, will give her “peace of mind” now and the assurance that her two other children, aged seven and 11, will have the same security in the future.

Mrs. Batiste made a conscious decision not to climb a career ladder in management, opting instead for Riverdale’s city hall, just five minutes from home and within easy reach of her children, who still “need a lot of me –even more so than when they were babies.”

She looks forward to the day when the church addresses the concerns of women from the pulpit.

Homilies are often “so generic,” she said. “I would really love it if we talked more about the responsibilities and duties of mothers, about what the Bible says we have to do to be a good mother, a good wife.”

Sunday liturgies are an important way to start the week, Mrs. Batiste said. “I need to be armed with what I need to go out into the world. Just talk to me and tell me if I’m doing it right.”