“I mean, I was already running out of time, but this feels like the final nail in the coffin. Who would want to marry me now?” I spoke in the dramatic clichés befitting a stage actor, as I sat with my pastor over rapidly cooling pizza in the safety of my best friend’s dining room. You experience a lot of grueling little deaths when you lose your eyesight at thirty-three, but this one was devastating in ways that surprised even me. The faintest hope I had held on to before my brain surgery seemed to be extinguished forever, and I had concluded that I would die childless and alone.

I grew up in an ordinary, faithful, evangelical, homeschooling family, rooted in church life and surrounded by families with similar values. This blessing provided me with a wholesome and beautiful picture of what the home should be. Broadly, this looked like a house teeming with children from early marriages, beautified and nourished by the wife’s labors while the husband worked hard – usually outside the home – to provide for their needs. Church on Sundays, children taught at home, and just enough extracurriculars to keep things interesting.

Much to my dismay and confusion, young marriage didn’t happen for me. So I followed my interests in the hope that the right man might come along. It turns out that you are very unlikely to find a Christian man interested in marriage while working in theater. Go figure.

When blindness seemed to shut the door on both marriage and the theater, I began to picture, and then to pursue, what a fulfilling life might look like without eyesight or a family. I figured a combination of adaptive technology and tenacity could bring me through graduate school and out the other side to land a job teaching at a college. But at the very start of this bootstrapping adventure, by way of blessedly meddlesome friends, the Lord dropped the man who would become my husband directly into my path and set us off together on an entirely unexpected adventure.

Though my husband’s upbringing was similar to mine, his work as an academic theologian has done its own share to shake up our commonly held image of home life. He cannot clock out of his brain the way our fathers could clock out of their work. Likewise, I cannot opt out of a disability that prevents me from accomplishing many of the tasks our sighted mothers would take for granted as part of their domain. We couldn’t be more thankful for the models our parents set before us, but it is also clear that we will have to do things a little differently.

We’ve discovered that the answer lies in focusing on the underlying reality at which our images of domestic tranquility have always been aiming. Thanks to humankind’s propensity to recognize and follow patterns, we are so quick to adopt the activities and rhythms of the household modeled for us by the previous generation that we often mistake the particulars for the principle. For some, this is the image of the 1950s housewife as depicted in period magazines: perfect hair and makeup, a beautiful apron over her A-line dress, vacuuming the house in high heels with a smile on her face. For me, it has been my own mother’s eye for the classically beautiful in a home and her energy to organize and accomplish all that needed doing in the household so she could also serve her community.

Don’t get me wrong: the “tried and true” of previous generations is always a good place to start, but even these are useful patterns abstracted from so many particulars. A woman’s daily tasks, for instance, might consist of things like cleaning, decorating, cooking, and changing diapers, but those are merely the stuff of being a wife, not its essence. A woman doesn’t stop being a wife – even a good one! – when she drops the ball once, twice, or a hundred times. It also means that I don’t have to fret about being an inadequate wife because the privation of sight slows down each of my tasks and often makes many household activities – from decorating the living room to simple home improvements – impossible, at least in the way I had pictured them.

As a wife I do the above tasks (and more!) not merely because tradition or some outside authority has declared them “woman’s work,” but because they are outward expressions of my womanliness. Scripture gives us clues in places like Paul’s letter to Titus, but even nature itself reveals that women’s souls, just as much as our bodies, are uniquely ordered toward the nurture of others. The essence of woman – what Aristotle would call the formal cause – is immaterial and so we cannot see it directly, but we can gather it by knowledge taken from our senses, worked on by our reason. Biology reveals that our bodies are geared toward the readying, welcoming, and nurturing of new life: from physiology to hormones to the very way our minds work. This womanliness works itself out in obvious ways in childbearing and rearing, but also as we shape our homes into lovely and welcoming places – places to which our husbands and children always want to return, to open arms, an active kitchen, and that most coveted seat on the couch!

A woman’s work in the home is her uniquely feminine contribution to the flourishing of a household. As a couple, husband and wife will contribute to this project in their inescapably gendered ways. This is a reality to be embraced, not a problem to be solved: men and women actually need one another. There are of course exceptions to the rule. But unlike the religious, who take vows of celibacy, or others whose calling is different, many of us will become men and women of virtue by means of the sanctifying grace of spouse and children.

If perfection in virtue as the goal of the family sounds stuffy and pretentious to us today, that may be because we have an anemic understanding of happiness. In his storied work on the subject, Aristotle rejects fortune, fame, pleasure, and even honor as sufficient understandings of happiness. When he finally gets to the root of it, he reveals that happiness can only really be found in “accomplishing one’s work with virtue.” By extension, a happy home is one that strengthens and encourages each member of the family in virtue. Far from merely being an unpaid chef-nanny-accountant-maid, a wife and mother is an instrument in the hand of God for the sake of her family, much as pastors and priests who administer the sacraments are for their congregations.

Great philosophers, pagan and Christian alike, have understood the natural virtues to be justice, temperance, fortitude, and practical wisdom.  But Holy Scripture reveals three more, which you may recognize from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: faith, hope, and love. These spiritual virtues, by God’s grace, become the second nature that better disposes us toward the four natural virtues. And “the greatest of these,” Paul reminds us, “is love.” We can have a house filled with children who act justly towards one another, husbands and wives who bear up well under difficulty and temper their desires with wisdom, but if none of this is done from a place of love, it is as a “clanging gong or crashing cymbal.” For an extended meditation on love, see the entirety of 1 Corinthians 13. But put Thomas Aquinas’s definition of love in your back pocket as well, for those days when you find natural affection just isn’t cutting it: “Love is willing the good of the other for the sake of the other.”

For emphasis, then, we can say that the happy Christian home is one that builds up its persons in virtue with love. This goal will bear different inflections, depending on the household. My husband and I, for instance, have added the elements of light and warmth to our version of what Tsh Oxenreider, in her “Organized Simplicity,” calls a “family purpose statement.” Having such a considered statement in mind has helped us to distinguish principles from particulars. I may not be able to do the grocery shopping on my own but, from love for my husband, I can build a menu plan and craft a grocery list in such a way as to make his “extra” task a breeze. My husband may not have the type of job that promises a predictable paycheck but, from love for me, he can apply fortitude to his labors and wisdom to our financial planning to build a cushion against unwelcome surprises. And together, from our love of God, we can build a lovely home, filled with light and warmth, spending our two mites well to build each other up in virtue and welcoming friends and strangers into the love of Christ.

Last year, as I was flitting about the kitchen at a party we threw for St. Lucy’s Day, one of our guests turned to my husband and said, “I can’t even imagine how fast she would be if she could see.” We laugh about this now because the sighted version of me would have probably driven my supremely calm and rational husband thoroughly insane. Losing my eyesight has slowed me down considerably, chafing against my native posture to prize speed and efficiency above all else. I regularly find myself confronting the fact that I simply cannot get as much done in a day as a woman who can see. This narrowing of scope has given me a greater calling, to follow Saint Thérèse of Lisieux  in doing each ordinary task with extraordinary love. It may not make the task any less ordinary, but it fills the home with supernatural graces. I like to think of the walls of our home soaking up these graces, ready to pour them out upon all who enter. And that to me is the greatest beauty any woman – blind or sighted – can hope to create in her home.