Motherhood, or
Who’s Afraid of the Perfect Mother
I had trouble getting into this topic. I
guess I would just rather be taking a bath and reading gardening books to
celebrate Mother’s Day than writing talks about it. It’s not as though I
haven’t gotten into the role of motherhood. Aside from being a stay-at-home
mother to my three children, I have been the daycare provider for my sister’s
children for almost three years, 18 months ago I added her nephew, and last
month my younger brother’s two kids joined my after-school herd, making 8 kids
at my house on most school-day afternoons. So the need for mothers seems so
overwhelmingly obvious to me that I can’t quite see why we need to talk about
it at all. It’s like saying that we need to breathe air. Duh.
I decided to approach this talk as an essay
and for research sent email to various friends and relatives to ask them what
their thoughts were on Mother’s Day, and found that for a wide variety of
women, Mother’s day is an uncomfortable experience. For the woman who became an
adoptive mother in her forties, it is understandable that Mother’s day used to
be the worst day of the year, but the mother of 12 disliked it as well, finding
that it made her feel “conspicuous and insufficient.” The mother of eight said that
her children are the source of her both her greatest joys and her greatest
sorrows. The full-time student did not mind that her children were in daycare
because she had chosen the facility carefully, and used to be a daycare
provider herself. But the working mother home on maternity leave struggled to
feel that the contribution she was making to her family by cooking, cleaning,
and nurturing were sufficient compensation for the loss of income. The divorced
mother with great personal struggle gave custody of her children to her
ex-husband because their needs would be better met in the school district where
he lived. And the mother of several very young children didn’t write back, I
suspect she is just trying to get enough sleep to be able to drive straight. My mother sent humor, I’ll read some of it
later.
Mothers are so obviously necessary to the
human race, so varied in the demands placed on them, in the resources they
bring to the task, in the problems they face and the approaches that they take
to address them that they defy tidy description or standardized praise. There
are as many different kinds of good mothers as there are good women who try out
for the job. And it matters a lot less whether you feed your children homemade
wheat bread or store-bought Wonderbread than it does that you are making a
sincere effort to do what is best for those children. This is a story related
in an article by Ardeth G. Kapp, formerly
Young Women General President in The Church
“To suppose that nurturing, tutoring, and
mothering should be the same for all children is folly. A fable tells of the
animals, who organized a school at which, to make it easier to administer the
curriculum and evaluate progress, every animal was to take the same subjects. According
to the fable, "the rabbit started at the top of the class in running but
had a nervous breakdown because of makeup work in swimming. The eagle was a
problem child and was disciplined severely. In the climbing class, he beat
others to the top of the tree, but he insisted on using his own way to get
there. The prairie dog stayed out of school because the administration would
not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum." The very skills and
gifts that made each one great individually were being overlooked through a curriculum
designed for blanket applications to everyone.”
If
it is folly to assume that all children should be mothered in the same way,
then surely it is also folly to assume that all mothers should be the same.
Because there is such variety involved, Motherhood
is not well-defined, and I have often thought that this contributes to not
being well-appreciated. There is no “cardiac surgeon’s day” that I know of; the
value of that profession is recognized and rewarded. Maybe we need a
professional organization, or a Professional Code of Conduct for Mothers: “First,
seek the best interests of your child. Second, recognize that this will be a
complex, challenging task that will require most (sometimes all) of your
mental, physical, and financial resources. Third, don’t be a martyr about it.
You can’t fulfill their needs if your own needs are chronically unmet.” That’s
as far as I have gotten so far, but it could go on along those lines.
Every new mother knows that there ought to be training for motherhood, including
a crash-course in triage, first aid, and diagnosis of about a hundred common
pediatric problems. Pediatricians are all well and good, but they are not in
the room with you and your infant at 3:00 a.m. after who knows how many hours
of crying- and that’s not counting what’s coming from the baby. Also helpful
would be home-economics, child development, law enforcement, recreation
management, physical therapy, speech therapy, psychology, and maybe dermatology.
Other courses could be offered depending upon the needs of the particular
children a woman was going to have. But of course no mother knows that ahead of
time, and anyway to the best of my knowledge no one is offering such a curriculum.
We jump into motherhood when we can, or must, with whatever resources we have
acquired by that time.
Mothers
draw on the experiences of other women around them, at least if we’re smart we
do. The church can be a valuable resource in this respect, a place where we
find women who share, if not parenting styles or even reproductive status, then
at least common eternal goals. And from time to time it is necessary for
mothers to realize that no matter how hard they try, they be all things to
their children. We must eventually rely upon those around us to help us fulfill
our children’s needs. So keep good people around you. Many a woman, with or
without children of her own, has been invaluable in helping raise other women’s
children to productive adulthood.
But to get back to that bizarre sense of
guilt or insufficiency that so many mothers seem to feel. We know that there
was only one perfect individual who ever walked the earth, and whatever current
popular literature may imply about his paternity status, Jesus was not a mother. Sariah, though the wife
and mother of a prophet, was a real woman. She complained against Lehi, and her
anxious outburst managed to get recorded in scripture, something which I rather
hope does not happen to anything I might say, should I ever have as much reasonable
cause for agitation as she had at the time. I don’t judge her for haranguing
her husband. You try living in the desert middle-aged and pregnant, giving
birth without running water and sanitary supplies, possibly without even a
capable midwife; or think about nursing children for years on end without a
good supportive bra and see how cranky you get. Sand in places you don’t want
to think about. Ick. Lehi himself seemed to understand his wife fairly well. He
did not rebuke Sariah. He acknowledged the truth of some of her statements, reminded
her of what he had been promised, and generally tried to comfort her. I wonder,
when Nephi says she was comforted when her sons actually did return, if maybe
Lehi would have had more success making her feel better if he had stressed that
she was promised the same things he was. Or maybe she was just pregnant.
I don’t think most mothers want a big fancy
“Mother’s Day.” Don’t take that to mean we don’t want the flowers and candy or
whatever or that you can skip the lunch today. If mama is expecting it, you
better give it. But in general, little tokens given quietly and regularly mean
a great deal more than annual ostentation.
Mothers want hugs when their arms are empty, a hand when their hands are
full, an arm around their shoulders on bad days, a pat on the back on good
days, and an encouraging word any time they can get it.
I will close with just a few funnies from my
mother’s email, which she says was from questions about mothers answered by
7-year-olds.
Why God made Moms -- BRILLIANT Answers given by 2nd grade school
children to the following questions!!
Why did God make mothers?
1. She's the only one who knows where the scotch tape is.
2. Mostly to clean the house.
3. To help us out of there when we were getting born.
How did God make mothers?
1. He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.
2. Magic plus super powers and a lot of stirring
What ingredients are mothers made of?
1. God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.
2. They had to get their start from men's bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.
Why did God give you Your mother & not some other mom?
1. We're related
2. God knew she likes me a lot more than other people's moms like me.
