Mother-Like Love

A common part of my morning offering is a plea to survive the day. I refrain from making it too dramatically, for it really has several practical applications of grace: help me to focus on my children, enable me to show joy in my daily tasks, keep me from disciplining in anger and – let’s be real – keep me from losing it multiple times today!

Being a mother is hard. I once joked to my future husband that I knew God wasn’t calling me to the religious life, because it would be too easy for me. I wasn’t implying, either, that a religious calling was the easy choice or that it was a vocation without daily struggles and annoyances similar to others but having lived within a community for a year, I somehow grasped the intuition that I would not be stretched there as much as I would be in another vocation.

And stretching is a big part of journeying to heaven. Think: the rack.

Now, four kids in – I know why all those saintly married people retired to the monastery or chose a celibate life of prayer after raising children. (They always used to bug me as a kid…a kid with no clue…) It was either that, or the insane asylum. Which I think probably bears a marked resemblance to my current living situation.

Hence, the morning plea. I think I shall re-phrase it that….there always seems to be precious little left of me to offer, mentally or physically!

Then, one day a subtle distinction slipped into my heart that re-oriented my prayer. I have always seen my vocation as a mother as wrapped up in my commitment to the mission. I need to suck it up and carry my crosses. These are my souls. This messy, toy-littered carpet is my mission field. Die to self. Get over your tiredness and give anyways. Stop looking for validation and know you are reaping treasure in heaven.

But that motif actually stops motivating me by the time I’m cleaning up breakfast.

There’s no Braveheart or Chariots of Fire music playing in the background as I scrape up another poopy mess.

If anything, I sense a funeral dirge as I find myself falling and yelling at the four year old again, wondering why on earth he can’t grasp any thread of reason. (Maybe because he’s an obsessive, uber-sensory stimulated four year old?  – Wait to whisper that to me until I’ve calmed.)

Maybe this is my version of the beginning of disassociated personality disorder. Or maybe I simply feel this dichotomy because I grew up with over-achiever brothers who scale mountain peaks in runner-fashion on their off-days (incidentally, during their on-days they’re saying Mass and hearing confessions…).

I can’t muster the “offering” alongside the active caring and managing and life-preserving actions that fill my minutes. I do all that is required to keep these little people alive even when tired or sick but many times, more often than not, I resent having to fulfill these obligations without the sense of achievement I reap from my imaginary hobbies and work.

The soldierly speeches I deliver via mental messenger convoy keep me focused but they don’t encourage me; if anything, they usually feed my frustration.

Then I wonder why I fail. With befuddlement, I read Scripture passages that paint metaphors like “as a weaned child on his mother’s lap”. Weaned child? As in the children grabbing the book back and forth over my lap? Contending over my legs and arms to such an extent that I yell “Stop fighting over my body!” Yes, I think I’ve used that line more than once – good thing our walls are thick enough that the neighbors can’t make out actual words. How do I sit in contentment beneath the cross when the very image I’m called to imitate erects images of insurrection and warfare rather than surrender and contemplation?

I can make that offering, though, if I daily renew the realization that love is not just in the drive to perform faithfully but in the knowing.

One of my favorite gospel passages is that of the woman at the well. Jesus just knows her so completely. He plans his travel route to encounter her; he plants himself in a spot for a heart-to-heart; he waits, despite being so thirsty, so he can share the cup of water with her. And she? She transforms from being completely clueless to acting skeptically guarded, to returning home joyfully open.

We all want to be known so well, don’t we? To be loved by one who knows our every groove’s flaw and yet still loves us unreservedly?

That’s why we all feel a need to be mothered now and then. Someone to bring us a cup of tea when we’re sick. To know exactly the tumult we’re feeling though we put it into words so poorly. Someone who just “gets us.” With them, we can be safely vulnerable, because their arms are always surrounding us. This, really, is the love that only God can give us but that we can experience most concretely through our mothers.

Here, then, is the new direction of my prayer:

Help to know my children more deeply today.

I am certain that I will feel that I am failing, that I am insufficient, and that they are overly energetic and ungrateful at times. I will likely lose my patience and be driven to desperate prayers and complaints. But, if in the midst of that, I can look into my little boy’s eyes and pause long enough to wonder what is going through his mind during this explosive moment; if I can take a solitary minute to marvel at the wonder my daughter is allowing to flourish as she asks yet one more question; if I can kiss that unruly Einstein mop of my toddler’s hair just one time among the many I want to pull back, having been touched too much by little hands – if I can let my children feel more known this day, that is enough to carry my fiat forward. Perhaps they will miss the experience of having a saintly mother form their minds and direct their behaviors (and let’s be honest, what were the chances of me being the second sinless mother?); but they will have received the gift of being known and still loved, and that sliver of our Savior’s reflection will can hold their hearts within his for a lifetime.

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