Delta Wedding

Learning to celebrate the monotony of motherhood

I discovered Eudora Welty this past year thanks to listening to the podcast by

Close Reads HQ

. I adored The Optimist’s Daughter, and eagerly sought out additional works by Eudora Welty at a couple of used book sales. One of these was Delta Wedding.

As with the other Eudora Welty books I’ve read so far, I found that the simplicity of the novel’s summary belies its complexity. As the title would suggest, Delta Wedding is, *gasp* a story about one (very large and very loud) family’s preparation for a wedding. The bride is southern belle Dabney Fairchild. The groom is the Fairchild’s overseer Troy Flavin. The family’s bewildered reaction to this socially unequal match is one of the main narrative threads running throughout the novel. But it’s just one of many. Because this novel is also about the grief of motherless cousin Laura McRaven (visiting for the wedding), the marital strife of “golden boy” Uncle George and former shop girl Robbie Reid, and the fallout from a train almost running over the orphaned and mentally disabled Cousin Maureen, and…well, you, get the picture.

The multitude of narrative threads in this novel is further complicated by the narration style: multiple narrators, time jumps, paragraph-long sentences, a large cast of characters (I had to make a family tree/character list for constant reference) and a vocabulary steeped in a very specific cultural context.

In his book, How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom suggests that “the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.” Eudora Welty may not be part of the “traditional” canon (though I have no doubt she deserves a place in it) but reading Delta Wedding was most definitely a “difficult pleasure.” It’s been a long time since I’ve had to go back and reread passages for simple comprehension as much as I did with Delta Wedding, and a long time since I’ve finished a book with such a powerful sensation of only having barely scratched its surface.

Yet, reading this book was a pleasure indeed, and one of the greatest pleasures was getting to know the character of Ellen Fairchild, from whose perspective today’s commonplace quote comes. A Fairchild by marriage, she is the family’s current matriarch and retains a unique perspective as an outsider, who was eventually accepted as “one of us” by the rest of the family. Her abiding love for all members of the family and her desire to create harmony out of the dissonances of family life are beautifully portrayed. At the very end of the novel, after the wedding, the Fairchild family is preparing to go on a picnic. On the journey to their picnic spot, Ellen reflects on the landscape around her and its connection to her existence as wife, mother, and woman.

The repeating fields, the repeating cycles of season and her own life-there was something in the monotony itself that was beautiful, rewarding-perhaps to what was womanly in her. No, she never had time-much time at all, to contemplate…but she knew. Well, one moment told you the greatest things, one moment was enough for you to know the greatest things.”

I was floored when I read this passage because in it, Ellen rejoices precisely in an aspect of motherhood I find to be a difficulty: its “monotony.” It is a struggle that comes from living in a world where what is new and novel is celebrated, while what is traditional and repetitive is often derided. Escaping from “monotony” is the main solution sold to those who struggle with the day-to-day slog of living; because surely a different phone, a different home, a different job, a different spouse will make it all better. Until the new becomes old and everyday and mundane. And then we’re back to square one.

Ellen offers a different approach to this problem, an approach that sounds simple, but is oh so difficult in practice. It is to see the monotony itself as “beautiful, rewarding,” something to embrace rather than escape. To see beauty in changing countless diapers, in preparing innumerable variations of the same meals, in answering endless requests to play and pay attention, and in completing infinite cycles of cleaning up and putting away the same toys, day after day, is a superhuman feat. A feat that, for me at least, can only be accomplished by an infusion of God’s grace.

Through an infusion of grace, Ellen gains insight into the fact that the “greatest things” lie hidden behind the monotonous, boring, and every day things. Like any mom (and indeed any parent), she “never ha[s] much time at all to contemplate.” She can’t spend hours ruminating on those difficult questions that creep up on me as I fall asleep at the end of another long day: “What is the point of all this? Am I always going to feel this overwhelmed and frustrated? Am I doing this whole mom thing right, or am I just permanently scarring my kids? Am I really doing enough to serve God stuck at home all day?” No, Ellen, mothering many children and running a multi-generational household can only do, and in doing, she begins to “know.”

In a flash of insight, she realizes that “one moment” is “enough.” One moment, in which God shines through the mask of ordinariness and monotony behind which He hides, and we “know the greatest things.” We know the great thing that is self-sacrificing love, sung in soothing lullabies, felt in arms aching from rocking a fussy baby, awake in night nursings. We know the great thing that is humility; rejoicing (rather than envying) when friends and acquaintances receive recognition from the world for their accomplishments, while our deeds remain unseen in the monastery of the home. We know the great thing that is perseverance; beginning another day that looks exactly like the one before when getting out of bed seems like a Herculean task. We know the great thing that is Christ’s “hidden life,” the thirty or so years He lived in a home, in a family, carrying the cross of monotony before He carried the cross of Calvary, and transforming that cross into an path leading to the “greatest thing” of all: God Himself.