Mom, the change agent

If you’d ask the happiest moments I had as a mother, I’d include those weekly trips to the public library with two preschoolers. Each was allowed to check out ten Mom-approved books (meaning no witches). We’d spend hours reading together, scrunched together under an afghan in their Dad’s recliner. Among other fuzzy-warm memories (which, I admit, are getting fuzzy as I age): “Aggression Cookies” (kids mixing dough with their hands), “Tent City" (living room creativity with blankets and chairs), and bath time with a bucket of water toys.

 

I’m grateful I got in on motherhood.  I was 34 when I married and 35 when the first baby came along. This summer, after my 66^th birthday, I’m looking forward to holding my first grandchild. But maturity (read that: getting old) tends to make you philosophical about parenting and reproducing God’s image on earth.  What parent doesn’t want that child to succeed and honor God?

In her book The Resolution for Women (BPH, 2011, p. 207), Patricia Shirer addresses those sobering parenting fundamentals. There’s nothing wrong with playing on the floor, making homemade waffles, and snapping first-haircut photos, she says. But “we must remember that our principal charge and mission as parents is to send our boys and girls into the world as young people who bear God’s Spirit, who are purposeful about His mission for their lives, and who are intent on being His agent for change on the planet.”

It doesn’t happen on its own, she adds, as children naturally lean toward “the flesh” of selfishness, rebellion, and disrespect and disregard for others. Left to themselves, they’ll “invariably succumb to the subtle (and not so subtle) thrusts of the latest TV shows and cultural trends.”   Enter Christian mothers. “You are in position to intervene,” she adds. “You…have been placed specifically in your children’s lives to make them rebel against a culture that’s telling them to rebel against you.”

Even as I type her words, I pause and choke back some tears. I pray for several mothers whose children have rebelled in some way. For these women, there is no “Happy Mother’s Day.”

I have no pat answers for those sorrows. But as Corrie ten Boom often said, there is no sorrow so deep that our God is not deeper. When I embrace in prayer a difficult parenting issue for myself or someone else, if often goes into that wordless yielding that the Bible describes as this: “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).

Other times there are words, simple ones, but faithfully lifted up. For years my prayers for my children, besides including specific needs, have included seven big areas of life, divided over the seven days of the week:

            Sunday: a growing faith and place of ministry.

            Monday: delight in God’s word.
            Tuesday: purity.
            Wednesday: health, safety.
            Thursday: careers, value system.
            Friday: positive attitude, gratitude.
            Saturday: true, godly friends.

            Any woman can bear a child. But to “mother” that child for God keeps us on our knees.

Mothers and Aunties

Taken in the late 1930s, this photo
is believed to be my aunts Vera
and Agnes (L-R) with three of
what would be six brothers.

“I’m putting Mom on the phone,” said the caller from the other end of the nation. “She can’t hear you, but she wants to talk to you. So just listen.”

At that, my cousin handed the receiver to my Aunt Agnes, deaf from complications of kidney failure. I began crying as I listened to her tired, whispery voice tell how much she appreciated my newsy family letters.
After a few minutes, her daughter got back on the line and said her mother was done talking. As I hung up, I realized how even a little thing—writing about my family and sending photos—meant a lot to this aunt who loved her big sister, my mother, so much. Mom had died at age 59 of cancer, and my dad of a heart attack six months later. I was orphaned at 31, still single. My mother was the second child of a family of nine (two sisters, six brothers) to die.

I think about my mother and her siblings each year as Mother's Day comes. I feel the commercialized hype of gifting mothers that day limits the picture of those in nurturing roles. I do feel blessed to be a mother, having waited for marriage until age 34 and then having children at 35 and 37. Now grown and on their own, those children have honored me by making godly choices. And while I missed my own mother, feeling the pang of her not knowing these grandchildren, I had a dear, servant-hearted mother-in-law. Living next door to us the last 20 years of her life, she had full participation in their lives.

As for my aunts, my letters to them in a small way helped carry on the legacy of my mother, who so faithfully knit her large family of origin together with an investment in postage. All had struggled from their impoverished beginnings (their father was a Norwegian immigrant farmer, the mother disabled with a short leg as a result of polio). The father died young of a heart attack, with the youngest boys still at home to raise.

Because they lived so far away, I didn't spent much personal time with my aunts. One lived a long time in Panama, then in Florida—completely the opposite end of the nation from me. The other lived in Sweden, Malawi, and finally Oregon. Yet both aunts cared about me as part of the family tree. When I had my first baby, Agnes sent a baby blanket richly embroidered with nursery rhyme characters. I’m sure it was her labor of love, as she was a skilled needle worker. My mother’s other sister, Vera, sent my second child, a girl, a couple toddler sundresses she’d sewn. I kept in regular touch with both until their deaths.

When Mother's Day comes with a sorrow of missing our own mothers, we don't have to stay there.  If we're grieving a mother who still lives, but was emotionally unavailable during a vulnerable time, it's important to move beyond resentment and love her despite her failures. And recognizing other adult women (related by blood or just friends) as important to us shows character and maturity. For me, the fruit of caring came on an ordinary day, like the one I answered the phone and just listened to a faraway auntie share her appreciation for the simple gift of letters. Through staying connected with her, more than I realized, I had also honored her sister, my mom.