Mother Love
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
May 9, 2010
Reading
Meg Barnhouse, “Kite Mother,” in Waking Up the Karma Fairy: Life Lessons and Other Holy Adventures, Boston: Skinner House, 2003, 23-25.
In my garage there was a tired kite leaning against a wall. More than tired — it looked depressed. It was blue with a white dove in the foreground flying over a rainbow. In the 1970s it served as a wall hanging....
I had a vague picture of flying it one day with my children. The picture was lit with gold, and it had blurry edges. It was a greeting card view of motherhood, in which you have small children but you're not tired or irritable and you have energy for educational and stimulating activities. The sun shines on these motherly activities but it's not hot, and there are no bugs — unless you and the children are on a bug catching expedition. Then there are colorful, friendly bugs waiting to be caught and examined with calm delight.
Now, years later, I have actual children. We have a neighbor we called the kite doctor. He can make a kite out of a red bandana, a shopping bag, a bed sheet, or a Styrofoam plate.... My boys cornered the kite doctor at our house one day and asked him to fix the kite in the garage.
He spent the next forty minutes, cheerfully and with good grace, sewing, stringing, and testing the kite. During the test runs he would call out to my six-year-old son, "Run now! Let it go! Stop. Run now ...” The kite looped wildly, ignorant of how to fly.
Finally, the kite doctor decided to attach a longer tail. He unhooked some six-foot rainbow streamers that were fluttering from our front porch and attached them to the kite. When my son ran with the kite wearing its new tail, it took to the sky. My spirits rose with it. My children were having a perfect day, a day like the ones I had pictured when being a mother was still an abstract idea....
I keep hoping that tomorrow I will wake up and be the mother from the greeting card picture who has sweetness and creativity and sits for hours with her children making models of Indian villages and building a real canoe that we take down the Amazon together as we save the rain forest. I will wake up and want to bake fresh bread and serve fresh vegetables at every meal and fly kites with my children.
Some days I reach that ideal. We go on great hikes sometimes, and I like to draw with them. Maybe tomorrow we can draw a picture of the kite doctor and his [kites].... In the picture it will be perfect weather, and there might be a large colorful bug sitting on one of the [kites].... You know what, though? Into that lovely perfect picture my six-year-old son will probably draw flaming bombs dropping from the lady's tiny kite. I will laugh and clap for him. He and his brother are not blurry and golden. They are sharp and tangy and real. That's the kind of mother I want to be. Yeah, that'll fly.
Sermon
It’s easy to become overly sentimental on Mother’s Day. It is, after all, a Hallmark Holy Day of Obligation. Pity the child or spouse who fails to honor the day with suitable gifts or at least cards. Of course, unlike birthdays and anniversaries, it’s virtually impossible to forget Mother’s Day. Reminders are all around you any time you walk into a store. (If you have managed by some super-human effort managed to avoid thinking about until now, I urge you to visit the Arts & Crafts Show after the service; you can make up for a multitude of sins there – and also just have a good time.)
The book of Proverbs ends in an elevated if exaggerated portrait of the perfect wife and mother:
[KJV Proverbs 31:10] Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. [TNK Proverbs 31:11] Her husband puts his confidence in her, And lacks no good thing. 12 She is good to him, never bad, All the days of her life. 13 She looks for wool and flax, And sets her hand to them with a will. 14 She is like a merchant fleet, Bringing her food from afar. 15 She rises while it is still night, And supplies provisions for her household, The daily fare of her maids. 16 She sets her mind on an estate and acquires it; She plants a vineyard by her own labors. 17 She girds herself with strength, And performs her tasks with vigor.... 23 Her husband is prominent in the gates, As he sits among the elders of the land.... 25 She is clothed with strength and splendor; She looks to the future cheerfully. 26 Her mouth is full of wisdom, Her tongue with kindly teaching. 27 She oversees the activities of her household And never eats the bread of idleness. 28 Her children declare her happy; Her husband praises her, 29 "Many women have done well, But you surpass them all." 30
I rather like that first line from the King James Version, with which many of you will be familiar: “Who can find a virtuous woman?” Most of us think that “virtuous” means something like the sense it acquired during Victorian times – well-mannered, of good repute, never argumentative and so on. At the time that translation was made, however, “virtue” actually referred to strength of character and strength of hand. Its root is from the Latin “vir,” meaning man. So we might say that this is praise for a woman who has in addition to her own skills the strengths of a man. And with her so busy keeping the household going in all its many forms, it’s only natural that her husband would be able to sit at the gates of the city, presumably filling some noble if less strenuous role.
Mothers get a lot of credit for doing wonderful things for their children, and well they should. They are the ones who suffer the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth; many of them provide most of the nurturing and care for infants, and we now know that the amount mothers – and fathers – talk to their children determines their children’s facility with language for life. Mothers often supply the tenderness and forgiveness that helps children to grow and learn in safety. I’m deeply grateful to my mother for her special support of my growing love of learning, for her help in making me love to read by reading to me every night and by helping me to get books of my own. I have her to thank that I’m not a farmer – not that there’s anything wrong with that!
On the other hand, mothers also get a lot of blame. Very distinguished (male) scientists have concluded beyond the shadow of a doubt that mothers are the principle cause of schizophrenia, homosexuality, and a host of other phobias and anxieties. Fortunately, further scientific studies have show that those earlier theories were in fact based on less evidence than might have been expected; that they were, in fact, false. Then, of course, there are the opportunities to retell the history of our lives if we get into therapy; not infrequently, this becomes an opportunity to re-arrange the memories of our childhood in a way distinctly unfavorable to our mothers. This was my experience some years ago. To my regret, I decided to cut off all relations with my parents for a time after realizing how much better they could have been as parents. To my mother’s credit, she never took me quite seriously, and never stopped sending me letters and a cake on my birthday to share with my students at Collegiate School in New York, where I taught for ten years.
In fact, of course, mothers do their very best to protect their children from every danger, to raise them up to be respectful and respectable, and to believe in themselves. Mothers can become so protective that their children don’t have the opportunity to try things on their own. In their zeal to protect them from any conceivable danger, mothers can end up stifling opportunities for exploration and mastery. Free play is no longer as common as it was when we were children. I recently read about mothers beginning to let their children walk to school on their own when they get to be ten or so. One mother was turned in to the police for neglect when she stopped driving her son the half mile to school and let him walk on his own. When I was about seven, I started riding my bike to our one-room school a mile away – except when the Wisconsin weather got too harsh, of course. When my wife Deedee and I moved from New York city to Ridgewood, a desirable suburb in New Jersey, part of our motivation was to be able to let our sons run free, walk to school on their own, and play independently. When we allowed them to play down by the creek in the woods nearby, though, mothers in the neighborhood were scandalized. What if they encountered a bear in the woods – or worse, a flasher? What if they got dirty? What if they ate dirt? They seemed to survive the trauma without permanent damage.
Then come the terrible teens, and our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren begin to assert their independence from us – and especially from their mothers – in what can often be distressing ways. They feel the need to distinguish themselves as separate and self-sufficient almost-adults, and this can be a painful process, especially for mothers, especially when the process involves deliberately provoking parents by doing precisely what especially pushes our buttons – think Mohawks, tattoos, bizarre hair and clothes, drug use, slackening dedication to good grades, bizarre notions of what “being on time” means. I remember when I was about sixteen telling my mother to butt out of my affairs; she didn’t get it, and I remember finding her crying in her bedroom later – the only time I ever saw her cry. I tried to assert my independence more subtly after that. Of course, that’s not the only time in our children’s lives we suffer from their disobedience; the “terrible twos” give mothers the opportunity to study up on how to deal with stubbornness as a kind of training for the even more terrible teens.
A little later, kids begin to feel that they really are independent and able to stand on their own and they begin to understand that their parents – especially their mothers – did the best they could under the circumstances, and also to realize that “the circumstances” determine their own actions as well. Mark Twain says this about that growing realization – about his father, but it would apply even more to his mother: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”[i]
Sometimes it takes becoming a parent to really grasp what our parents went through. During a visit to my parents, our six-year-old was throwing a temper tantrum over something or other, and my father turned to me and said, “Now you see what it was like to raise you when you were a kid.” Embarrassing, but it gave me a flash of insight.
For all the trauma and worries about raising up our kids, most of them turn out fine in the end – though it often turns out that arriving at “the end” takes much longer than we think we can stand or should have to. It’s best to avoid excessive anxiety; not everything good will be perfect, and not everything bad will be catastrophic. Sometimes there’s nothing we can do to “fix” our children, and we have to rely on grace and growth to bring them to their senses. Sometimes nothing is the right thing to do, and sometimes forceful intervention is required. Motherly wisdom is all about knowing when to stand back and when to apply tough love. We need to model and teach them to be generous in giving to charity and to understand that others may not be as fortunate as they are. We need to model and teach them to save rather than giving in to instant gratification. One of the most important things we can do is to help our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren resist the siren song of commercialism to which they will be exposed at every turn, to teach them that being a teenager is not all about needing to buy the latest fad of teenage-hood, and to tell them what wisdom we have stored up by surviving the same part of our own lives – even though they may not hear us the first or the tenth time until our warnings and suggestions begin to make sense as their brains mature.
The Tao Te Ching advises mothers to let go some of the time and to rely on the inherent good sense of our children:
Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted; a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.[ii]
May our children grow to wisdom; may they fulfill our fondest dreams by finding and following they own destiny. May we forgive our parents and may our children forgive us. May our children and grandchildren, mothers and fathers and all of those we love be safe from harm; and may we learn to love better.
May it be so, and Amen.