That’s me with my first baby who was a week old. I didn’t know anything about mothering then, except the love part.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers out there and to all of you who had a mama. I’ll wager that gets you all. Except maybe for Wes in my Hollyhill books. If you read those books, Scent of Lilacs, Orchard of Hope, Summer of Joy, you might remember how he always claimed to be from Jupiter and loved telling his Jupiter stories. He’d probably say Jupiterians come from magic beans that old Mr. Jupiter throws on the ground and out pops a Jupiterian, each in various states of maturity. That’s so things wouldn’t get boring. Wes liked to come up with crazy Jupiterian scenarios for Jocie.
Back to earth, I hope you had a good mama who loved you without boundaries. Who loved you so much she made you act right and wash behind your ears and pick up your stuff and weed the garden or mow the lawn. I’m sure you can think of at least one thing you hated to do but that your mama made you do anyway. Now you might even realize it was because she loved you and wanted you to grow up to be a responsible, strong adult able to do the things you should. That’s why we have mamas. (And dads too, of course, but their day is in June.)
It’s not always easy to be one of those mamas. I ran across one of those internet pass-along posts that was supposed to be what second graders answered to questions about why God made Moms.
One of the questions was “What are Mamas made of?” A kid supposedly answered, “Clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.”
One dab of mean. Moms sometimes need that dab of mean. At least when some loving discipline is needed. I hope you had a mom with the right balance of all the things that make a great mom and I hope you are managing the same balancing act if you’re a mom down in the child-rearing trenches right now. One thing sure, a mom never retires from loving her children. And then sometimes grandkids come along and your love keeps growing and spreading.
“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.” — Toni Morrison
At times you might run out of energy. I do that plenty. But that doesn’t happen with love. The more you dip into your well of love, the deeper that well gets.
That makes me think of a story in the Old Testament where the widow has no money to pay her creditors who threaten to take her children as slaves in payment of the debt. When she goes to the prophet Elisha for help, he asks her what she has. She tells him all she has is one small bottle of oil.
The prophet tells her to collect pots and pitchers and every type of container she can find or borrow from her neighbors. Then she’s to go inside her house, shut the doors and windows and pour the oil from her bottle into those containers. She does as he says and the oil keeps pouring and filling every pot she has. It only stops pouring out when there are no more containers to fill. She goes back to the prophet to tell him what happened, and he tells her to sell the oil to pay her debts. The woman is rewarded in direct proportion to how many containers she gathered in faith.
I’ve never heard a preacher use that Bible story for a Mother’s Day sermon, but I think it would be a good one. A mother’s love combined with faith and trust in the Lord’s providence can be powerful.
So if you’re a mom, go ahead and brag about your kids. It’s your day and you’ve got a right to be proud. I hope if you’re lucky enough to still have your mom with you that you got to see or talk with her today. If she’s gone on to be with the Lord the way my mother has, try remembering some of the best times and the everyday times and the “I know I was loved” times and savor those memories.
“God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.”— Jewish proverb
Do you have a favorite Mom time?