Mother's Day 2016

Mother’s Day 2016

It’s Mother’s Day weekend, which has never been a huge celebration in my family.  We have church, my kids give me some homemade crafts and we go out to eat (instead of eating Taco Bell).  That’s it.  And it’s good. Mother’s Day seems odd to me anyway.  I think, like other holidays, it was invented by the greeting card company.  It just seems artificial and obligatory.  Our family still celebrates a little bit; you can bet your farm and all its chickens I’d be mad if my kids didn’t acknowledge it.  But overall it’s just another day in motherhood.

I am blessed by motherhood.  I am blessed by the complexity and painful nature of it.  Nothing, other than marriage, has shaped me so much as being a mom.  It has emptied me, ripped me apart, humbled me, stretched me, broken me.  Such is the nature of love.

Ephesians 5:1-2

Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.

Giving yourself up for another is love. Giving yourself up for a dirty-faced boy with sticky fingers and grass stained clothes is motherhood.

Giving yourself to a child who is sick and may not make it, who may not live the life you dreamed for her;

Giving yourself to a teenager who doesn’t appreciate you, sometimes hates you and never thanks you but still needs you;

Giving yourself to carpools and soccer games and boy scouts and baseball;

Giving yourself to a baby with colic who just doesn’t respond to your attempts to comfort her;

Giving yourself to tantrums and tempers and fevers and nightmares and tears;

Giving yourself to math homework and science projects and picky eaters and dirty laundry and heartbreak and first love;

Giving yourself to your kids when they do stupid things and get themselves into all kinds of trouble but you still see them as the freckle-faced, cherub-cheeked angel of yesterday;

Giving yourself when your adult child leaves the nest and you have to pretend to be happy because you know it is good for them, but you are really heartbroken;

This is motherhood.  This is sacrifice.  It’s how we are shaped into better and more holy people; more broken and more full.  This is love. 

Mother’s Day will pass this weekend and I hope you get a macaroni necklace or a clean house or a card.  Because you are important and you should be celebrated.  But we know as mothers that no gift or sentiment could match the beautiful pain of motherhood.  And if I had to pick a Mother’s Day gift or a child with a bloody knee and dirty tears running down his face, I’d pick the child every time.