Life Outside the Box: An Interview with Dr. Dixie Dillon Lane
Academia, Identity, Joyful Mothering, and Being a Person
Welcome to the first installment of a new series here, Life Outside the Box, where we celebrate living as whole people and not just a one-dimensional job title.
The overwhelmingly positive response to my essay, Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All, suggested to me that there are a lot of women (and men) who are keen to set aside the societal pressure to hustle hard and put all their energies and decades of life exclusively into one single career box.
This series offers interviews with those who have chosen a life outside the box, in a variety of ways. It’s my hope that in getting to peek into the lives of others, we’ll all be inspired to step outside the pressure chambers we may feel stuck in - even if our lives are very different in practice from those shared here.
Encouragement, permission, examples - I hope whatever it is you need to step outside the box, you’ll find it here.
I am so very delighted to kick off this series with Dr. Dixie Dillon Lane, mother, teacher, writer, historian, and - I think you’ll agree after reading her interview - font of wisdom for those who want to live with more freedom and joy.
Grab a cup of coffee and settle in for this insightful peek into her life.
(1) What does your life outside the box currently look like? Tell us about a day/ week in your life.
My life outside the box? Well, let's talk first about boxes. There are some boxes in which I appear to squarely sit: wife, mother, homeschooling parent, homemaker, etc.
But I am not a box, and I am not a word on a label stuck on a box. I am a person, a beloved child of God. That's my identity. Not the title on my nametag.
Years ago, however, when I first moved to my current town in Virginia, I got really confused about some of these boxes. My husband and I had moved very suddenly from Indiana, where we were both in the dissertation stage of our Ph.D.'s in history at the University of Notre Dame, only a month or so after he was offered a one-year position at Christendom College, a small Catholic liberal arts school in the Shenandoah Valley. We had one little baby at the time, an eleven-month-old who was just starting to walk and was the cutest, baldest little cherub I ever did see, if I do say so myself.
This transition was an enormous one, in part because I was still supposed to be working on my dissertation full-time, and now most decidedly was not even working on in part-time. In fact, since our daughter's birth I had already quietly slowed my academic work down considerably; but now, with Chris working 60+ hours a week while trying to turn this one-year position into a permanent one (which he did, God bless him and Christendom College!), I had exactly zero hours per day to work on my dissertation, and I had even less than zero energy.
So there I was, in an unusually conservative and faithful parish in a sweet little small town, and wondering to myself whether most of the women at my new parish wore skirts to Mass because this was some sort of social requirement here, or whether they just liked to do so and nobody cared if I wore slacks. Was it okay for me to nurse my baby in the pew there? And what exactly was I now -- a full-time graduate student, or a stay-at-home mom? And what did that mean? Where there certain things that I was now just supposed to do? And would I ever meet any friends? What would my friends be like -- what would they expect of me?
Over time, I learned a lot about these boxes: the Academic Box, the SAHM Box, and others. And what I learned was that some people will try to box you in with these words, and in fact, if you are like me, you may even try to box yourself up for a while! The internal pressure to "get it right" is just as real as the external kind. But in fact, when rightly-ordered, in my opinion, these titles, these labels, are states of being that are actually designed to be freeing, not limiting. They are not boxes at all, but open pages on which you can write the story of your life.
My actual day-in-the-life is always changing. For a while, last year, I did this, but I'm being more relaxed about the homeschooling this year. Lots of days are just laundry, writing, and maybe taking a cookie ramble. And we get sick, and we get cranky, and I have days when my anxiety is very high or I am not feeling well. Stuff gets dirty, and we have to clean it. Nothing is perfect. But perfection is not the goal.
(2) How did you get there? What intentional choices did you make?
Well, here is what happened to me. For a long time, I felt very pinned in. I was a SAHM, right? Then why was I playing at being a graduate student? Was I lying to everyone, including myself? Or was I, once I got a babysitter twice a week so that I could work on my dissertation, actually a heroic scholar, fighting against expectations to write in spite of having a baby and a highly stressful life? Or was I just fooling myself, being a pathetic graduate student and also not a very good mom because I dared to step away from my baby for 5 measly hours a week?
As you may observe from the tone of these questions, this whole situation was pretty emotionally fraught. Two questions plagued me, in particular: was I who I wanted to be, who I felt I could be on the inside -- or was I who I appeared to be, instead?
Over time, I found myself observing the way that different aspects of my life and character were interpreted by the people I met. After I finished my dissertation, was I a disappointment to my mentors because I only taught part-time afterwards? Or was I, instead, a traitor to homemaking for teaching part-time? In teaching part-time, did I somehow imply to others that a mother of (by then several) young children was inherently doing something wrong if she worked full-time?
It was exhausting, giving so much unnecessary meaning to my choices, when I could have in fact just accepted that I was me -- a person. Just me.
At some point, though, I grew stronger in this area. The biggest change happened to me only three or four years ago, after a very difficult pregnancy and postpartum with my fourth child. I realized when at my personal rock bottom (in terms, mostly, of my physical health), that I had to take responsibility for taking care of myself. My husband loved me and would do all he could to support me -- and he always, always has -- but I had to do my part and stop behaving as if I had no power over my own well-being.
And as I focused in on that -- on homeschooling more joyfully, on feeding myself better, and on making prudential choices based on preference rather than guilt -- I was able to detach myself gradually from appearances and begin to think about what I wanted and what suited me and my family best. I stopped teaching part-time because it didn't fit well into my life; and, in the hours that opened up thereafter, I gradually noticed a keen urge to write. I responded to that urge with a passion that surprised me, and now am able to do part-time work as a writer and editor, work that gives me immense pleasure and exercises my mind in new ways without preventing me from being the mother and homeschooling teacher that I want to be. This work has also given me wonderful new colleagues with which to share my writerly life, which has been a huge blessing. It's not perfect, and I am still tweaking it, but it is work that is working, and that is bringing greater health and joy and excitement and discernment to my entire life and the life of my family.
I'm hopeful that my book, tentatively entitled The Homeschool Boom: Finding the Roots of Modern Homeschooling in the American Past, will be coming out late next year, which will be another adventure. You can hear more about both my research and my life as a homeschooling mom in this recent podcast, if you'd like.
(3) What are you intentionally choosing to say “yes” and (maybe more importantly!) “no” to in this season of your life?
No to boxes. Yes to honesty. No to despair. Yes to service. No to fear. Yes to prudence. No to hiding pain. Yes to sharing it.
So many aspects of a homeschooling mother's day are focused in on serving her family. Parents have a duty to educate their children, to form their characters, and to provide for them physically and emotionally. This is non-negotiable. Duty is not a dirty word.
This is a tremendous task, however, and it is made all the greater when a parent does not have a school to depend on for help. Homeschooling four children is confusing, demanding, and exhausting.
And yet, the homeschooling mother is free. She decides how and what to teach, how to organize the day, and what to prioritize for herself and for each child. She is free to adjust the pattern of each day according to her intuition, experience, and God-given smarts. She can actually act upon what she believes to be true, but maybe once was afraid to actually put into practice -- that the hours tramping in the bracken on a cold winter day a hugely educational, that her children need to see her exuding joy, and that being with her children is an incredible gift.
It is all such a gift. It is a gift from God, and it is a gift from my husband, who works just as hard as I do in his work outside of our home and in his hands-on, self-sacrificing work within our family context, too. Life is not a box; it's a gift given to us to open.
And it is always, always a work in progress.
(4) When you were a child/ younger, what vision did you have for your life? Did you always want to live outside the box, or did it come later? Was it a surprise to you?
As a kid, I was hugely imaginative and full of spunk and determination. There have been times in my adulthood when I have felt these characteristics starting to wane under the weight of hardship, illness, or exhaustion. But they have always resurfaced. I am grateful to my parents for nurturing these things within me and giving me opportunities to learn resilience and practice self-confidence.
When I was a kid, I first planned to be a dentist. Later, I adjusted to teacher, and then, right after college, to professor. One of the reasons I thought being a professor was such a good idea was that I thought I would be able to arrange my classes so that I could still be at home with my kids most of the day, and I had visions of myself popping a baby on my back to take along with me to do my archival research or teach a class.
Ha. That is NOT how it worked out.
In some ways, I really did have to let go of my professional ambitions for a decade or so. I did so freely, knowing that what I truly believed, deep down, was that my children needed me with them and that I needed to be with my children. But it was not until I really let go of it -- stopping even trying to teach on the side -- that the door opened to what I think will actually be my longer-term and deeper professional work of writing and editing. I was tremendously surprised to feel this bubbling out of me once I finally decided to not try to do anything professional. Perhaps God was, over time, in fact leading me to this professional path that works in sync with my homemaking, homeschooling, and mothering, rather than in addition to it.
(5) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills do you feel like held you back from stepping outside the box sooner, if you wish you had?
I don't think it could have happened sooner. I think my babies needed me just as I gave myself to them, and I don't think I had the energy to write in my first ten years of parenting (except for finishing my dissertation, I guess, which was about as hard as it sounds -- very hard). But what I did get to do during those years, in terms of the blend of professional and personal life that I eventually came to, was think. I thought all the time, and talked with my children, my husband, and my friends. And that helped the ideas to be ready for later.
One thing I do wish I had done differently in those years was to allow myself to be happy not fitting exactly into the SAHM mold. Being a homemaker creates opportunities; it does not hem you in according to a certain set of rules established by goodness-knows-whom. I made many outside-the-box decisions as a young homemaker, such as unschooling for certain seasons, refusing to travel in spite of family expectations, and other things; but I wish I had done it with more joy and confidence in my heart.
(6) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills helped you cultivate the life you have now?
I have grown in acceptance of my freedom and my joy. I have, as I'm sure my friends and family can attest, a considerable backbone. If I make up my mind morally about something, I will not back down (unless I find I am wrong, of course!). And nothing galvanizes me like encountering a bully. But for the longest time, I made hard choices and defended myself and others against bullies with sadness, anxiety, and pain in my heart, always worried that I was doing the wrong thing, and even trying to get the bullies to like me.
Now, as I approach my fortieth birthday, I find that I am no longer trying to be friends with people who aren't good for me or to engage in practices that are not good for anyone. I try to reach out, to be honest and friendly and encouraging, but I am now better at investing my energies in people and things who are good for me.
And I make a greater effort than I used to to pray for those who would box me up. But I no longer hand them the packaging tape!
(7) Where can people find you online?
Come visit me at my free substack newsletter, TheHollow, and also at Hearth & Field (where I am an associate editor) and at the Arena blog at Current, where I am a frequent contributor.
Didn’t I tell you this was a great interview? I’d love to hear: what struck you most? Leave a comment below.
And if you’re discerning your own move outside the box, Cultivating Clarity might be just the thing for you. Join us in a paid subscription for a weekly mix of essays on discernment, (prayer) journaling prompts, practical exercises to help in decision-making, and quarterly “office hours” for Q&A on all things discernment and decisions.
“And nothing galvanizes me like encountering a bully.” I couldn’t help but smile. I felt like I read a description of myself in that line. Thank you for sharing pieces of your journey with us! I’m always edified by your perspective.
"But what I did get to do during those years, in terms of the blend of professional and personal life that I eventually came to, was think. I thought all the time, and talked with my children, my husband, and my friends. And that helped the ideas to be ready for later."
This statement I think describes where most of my writerly/professional work happens these days. I am only 8 years into parenting my three sons. I don't have the capacity yet to do meaningful work/have output on the side. But I AM doing a lot of thinking and engaging with my husband and kids every day. I trust God will use that storehouse to do something meaningful outside the home someday too.