Why I disliked Mother’s Day

 

I don’t know why, but this holiday for some reason was especially difficult for me this year.  I had been particularly engaged in self-reflection over the preceding months.   Perhaps it was that I am at a crossroads in my life and can see that empty nest stage fast approaching.  Most of my peers have navigated this stage well, but having a child at age 41 and again at 46 postponed it for me.  We still have three single daughters.  One is completing her degree next month, another just left on her LDS mission and the youngest will be a freshman in high school.  My sweet mother and mother-in-law have both passed away.  So, it should be a day of little pressure.  But, I felt pressure!

 

But, back to why this year was particularly difficult.   I dislike having loved ones feeling compelled to give me a gift for either Mother’s Day or my birthday.  I hate how commercial holidays are.  They use guilt to increase their profits.  However, if a child fails to fall prey to this commercialism, I feel kind of sad.  That puts my family members into a truly no-win situation.  And I even feel sad when I can't keep those beautiful fresh cut flowers alive.  I don’t know why, even when I feed and trim them regularly, they just don’t last more than a couple of days.    

 

Mother's Day is a to consider if I have been a good mother and how does one really measure that???   Good mothers have produced all types of children and good children have come from all types of mothers.    So we can’t really measure a mother’s worth by how her children turn out.   I believe that producing a child doesn’t necessarily make you a mother any more than building a house, makes it a home.

 

To me, these are, however, things that make a woman a good mother. . .

 

1.  A good mother is a woman who consistently seeks to know her creator and acquire truth.   A woman cannot teach her children to have faith, hope and charity if she doesn’t have those attributes. 

 

2.  A good mother gives her children the key to the well.  I love the anonymous quote: 
“There is a difference between the learned man who will pump you full of knowledge and the one who will give you the key to the well.”  Though my mother wasn’t religiously inclined and seldom went to Church.  She did believe in saying prayers.  She taught me to pray.  Those prayers led me to Him and He led me to church activity and affiliation. 

 

3.  A good mother seeks to teach correct principles while still preserving a child’s agency in a climate of order and safety.  Now if that isn’t a tricky job description, I don’t know what is.   We want to prepare them for adulthood because we want them to make it in a society that has laws, regulations, rules and consequences.  

 

 

4.  A good mother is a happy person.  She needs to take care of herself while not being selfish and neglecting her children.    For example, she needs to exercise without taking huge chunks of time pursuing the perfect body.  Paul, who saw our day, wisely warned against taking physical fitness to an extreme:  “For bodily exercise profiteth little:  but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.  I know mothers who don’t deviate from a prescribed daily exercise routine, but seldom have time to read their scriptures or read to their children.    These same principles apply to a host of other activities.  But, we do need to get that haircut, a new outfit, as well as groom and have growing experiences.  We want our children to see that raising children is joyful.   We want them to look forward to being parents.  I was sad when I heard a young woman say, “I don’t ever want kids.  My mom is the unhappiest person I know”. 
 

My oldest daughter Jeanette, with her daughter, loves being a mother

 

 

5.  A good mother loves and respects their children’s father.   Studies have shown that if a child can witness a truly intimate relationship, they have a greater capacity to form an intimate relationship with a future spouse.  This doesn’t mean their witnessing physical sexual intimacy.  This kind of intimacy can be observed by a child whose parents  have mutual respect and care deeply for each other.  We can’t truly have or even seek to have this kind of relationship with our children.  They will never care for us, the way we care for them.  But they will know how much we love them, when they have children of their own.  Now this is a particularly difficult task when there has been a divorce.   But, it is a Christian command to love others, ALL OTHERS.  That ability and capacity will come from our relationship with God. 
 

 

 

 

6.  In seeking to establish a house of happiness and safety, we need to be sure that our goal is not to make our child’s life ideal and stress free.   A child who is waited on hand and foot and has a “Disneyland” childhood often grows up to be self-absorbed and “entitled”.   They need to learn to work, serve and wait for some things.  They need role models who occasionally mess up and admit it.  They need to see repentance modeled.  A “ Disneyland” childhood could produce a child ill-prepared for life. 

 

7.  I am really going to go out on a limb with the last one.  A child needs a mother who is there, who puts career and time consuming hobbies on the back burner, until a later time.  A child needs supervision.  The cost of a child coming home from school to an empty house is often a cost that is far too great.  Society and divorce makes this ideal almost impossible.   If this means a smaller home, fewer extracurricular activities or whatever sacrifice it takes, you won’t be sorry.

Whatever you can do to provide that supervision and accountability will pay great dividends.   

So why was I sad this Mother’s Day?  It is to know, I come up short by my own standards!   I am not the perfect mother I want to be.   But the next day, I was fine and happy again.  My children’s imperfect mother was well celebrated, but I was ever so grateful for the atonement and another day to seek to improve.  There is a place for Holidays and traditions, a place for retrospection and honor.  Like everything else, we need to involve the Lord to help us get the right balance in the observation of these traditions.  We need Him to help us establish that right balance in everything we do.  Finally,

we simply cannot give up on ourselves or anyone within our realm of influence.  That is the perhaps the best definition of a good mother.