Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Since children don’t ask to be born, it seems a little entitled to me, though we moms didn’t really think of it. Kids don’t owe their mothers anything. The parent is made for the child, not vice versa. However, the other side of that coin is that we all need to notice excellence. That brings me to the subject of excellence in mothering.
Any succinct statement about mothering can be turned to meet the need of either the saintly or the slacker. Take “Don’t do anything for a child that they can do for themselves” for instance. One mom sees that as letting the eight-year old make their own lunch. Another sees it as sleeping past time to go to school and letting the kid go off without encouragement or a hug or even consideration that they are alive. Children naturally revolve around themselves. Mothers are supposed to have grown past that. And the excellent mother is learning to revolve around God.
So, what does mothering look like if we’re revolving around God? Truth and grace, praise of the excellent, letting God’s love run through us to our children like a flow-through tea bag. These are a few scenes of how mothering should look. The camera that took a picture of this might see a mom sit a child down, away from his playmates, to explain why his friends don’t appreciate never getting to play what they want to play – and then encouraging him to go give them the choice. Praise of the excellent might look like a mom who sees the “misses” on the floor or the shelf where the youngster has “done her chores” and responds with, “Wow! Look what you can do!” instead of pointing out the errors, Letting God love a kid through her may look like a mom who explains the rules and then enforces them so that the child learns boundaries, instead of playing at being a friend.
So, Happy Mother’s Day, Moms. I hope you are delighted with your day. I also hope you give the whole thing to God, because He created mothers, and He knows how to do this right.
