To celebrate Mother’s Day this year, I’ve dyed over my grey hairs, found a dress to smooth away my stretch marks and will carefully apply makeup to cover my wrinkles and “yell lines” (they are the opposite of smile lines). The real demands of motherhood aren’t pretty, and I don’t always handle them with grace. The mothers we see at church are just as dyed, smoothed and covered as we are. No one is a perfect mother.
But the point of this day is to celebrate that we are even willing to try to do this hard job–even if our execution is clumsy or spastic. Part of me thinks that Mothers Day is really more of “Grandmother’s Day”. When we are in their shoes, we can really understand our own mothers. “You had twice as many kids as I do! How did you survive?”. For the firs time in our lives, we can speak with knowledge from experience and thank them for an excellent job and apologize for being such rotten kids. Because it’s true that no one is a perfect mother–but none of our children are perfect either. That volatile mix of personalities, good and evil, selfishness and selflessness–it simmers together in the family to create the culture and environment that we will forever know as HOME. And it will be the one place in the world where my children can feel completely safe and satisfied. At least, that’s how I feel when I visit my own parents’ home.
Happy Mother’s Day! And thank you, Mom, for the home you built for me. My roots will always be at 3231.
In Defense of Women 