Mother's Day

Another Mother’s Day is past, thankfully.  While I enjoyed celebrating my mother-in-law and spending the day together, I’m just not a fan of that particular holiday.  It stirs up a lot inside that I’d rather ignore.  It’s better than it was in my youth, but reading all the schmaltzy posts on Facebook about how great mothers are gets tiring.

Author Anne Lamott wrote a piece for Salon in 2010 on Mother’s Day which really nailed it for me.  (You can read the entire piece at:  http://www.salon.com/2010/05/08/hate_mothers_day_anne_lamott/)  She wrote: “But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.”

If you’ve read much of my blog, you know my mother did not parent well.  That’s just the way it is.  She wasn’t even a “good enough” parent.  She just couldn’t do it.  In a rare moment of honesty she told me that she thought that since Grandma had been such a good mother, she’d naturally be one, too, and was surprised at how those maternal instincts never kicked in.

But lest the reader thinks my mother was the personification of evil, I should set the record straight.  Mom was damaged by her own home life and her marriage, and just couldn’t recover.  I was collateral damage, but it wasn’t intentional.  She did her best to provide for me by working full time at Sears in the bookkeeping department and she was also very aware of the potential of sexual child abuse.  Paranoid about it, actually.  I only met one man she dated when I was in my teens.  The rest she kept away.  The one I met was a peach, but I think he knew that mom was not marriage material and moved on.  I remember him fondly.

Our relationship broke down so much that for over ten years mom didn’t even speak to me.  Our story is not dissimilar to the story Jesus told about the prodigal son, except she’s the one who left and I’m the one who forgave and welcomed her back.  It took Alzheimer’s to get her to the place to ask for forgiveness.  Not a small thing for her to do. 

While I try to be absolutely honest in my recollections about my life, here’s something I don’t want you to miss.  While my mother was a deeply flawed person, she did ask for forgiveness and I did forgive her.  Through forgiveness, I learned much more about faith, life and love.  I’m still on a journey of healing, but caring for mom through Alzheimer’s took me much further down that road than if I had hardened myself to her and refused to let her back into my life. 

If there is someone in your life who has failed you in a major way, do not hang on to unforgiveness.  It only hurts yourself.  Jesus pointed out when He was teaching the disciples to pray that we are in God’s debt and need to forgive as freely as He did.  We like to skip over the part of the disciple’s prayer (aka the Lord’s Prayer) that says “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”  We love being forgiven…it’s just letting other people off the hook that’s so hard. 

But remember...it’s a biblical principle that we will be treated as we treat others. 

Note: If you have been abandoned by a parent, you may want to pick up Leslie Leyland Fields’ book Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers.  It’s about finding freedom from hurt and hate and written with Dr. Jill Hubbard.

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