Mother's Day

Below is a short piece I wrote for our local homeschool group's newsletter a looonnngg time ago. I found it recently when cleaning out my files.

I reprint it here with the following disclaimer - my children are MUCH older now, but the work of parenting has not gotten easier. Their problems have gotten bigger and harder for me to solve. Losing a parent barely into adulthood has not made things any easier for them.

May we all as mothers continue to fight the good fight for our children. May we set good examples and be there to pick our children up up when they fall and scrape their knees. May we swipe off the dirt, set them to their feet, and ease them back along their way.

As a mother, I find the scene in the "Passion of the Christ" where Christ is being scourged to be particularly difficult to watch. At the beginning, after they have attached Christ to the pillar, He looks as if He is about to falter in His resolve to go through with the Father's plan for redemption. He looks sideways and his eyes rest on his Mother. Mary looks into her Son's eyes, slowly nods her head as if to say silently, "I know you can do this. I will be here with you." Christ immediately lifts his head in resolution and determines to carry through with God's plan. Whether or not it happened, it's a profound statement about the magnetic bond that's capable of being cultivated between mothers and their children.

It's hard to be a mother when your children are going through a difficult time. It's hard to look your child in the eyes across a crowded room while they're giving a speech and forgetting the words, or faltering through a difficult piano piece in front of an audience, or crouched over an injury on the ball field and say, with your eyes, "You can do it. I know you can finish what you started. I'll be there for you. Just hang in there."

We so want, like Mary, to take away the burdens and heartaches from our children. But, like Christ, our children have their own destiny and it is apart from ours. Our job is to prepare them for their future by helping them learn the lessons of life that are necessary to making good, Christian choices - perseverance, selflessness, faith, charity, and diligence, to name a few.

I recently went through a dispiriting few days at the house. I was sharing with my boys my discouragement and frustration with situations that seemed out of my control. One of my precious boys looked at me for a long time. Then, he put his hand on my arm and said, "It's okay, Mom. Something will turn up. We'll be there to help. Just hang in there."

I embraced him in a giant bear hug so he wouldn’t see me blinking the tears from my eyes. For just a moment the tables were turned, and he was the one encouraging me.

How much better can motherhood get than that?

Have a Blessed Mother's Day!

Donna