To Be Their Mom

I scroll down through my Facebook feed, and I see so many mothers.
Sporty mothers cheering on young athletes.
Baking mothers who make my mouth water.
The ones who stay home
long after other mothers have taken up the soccer and ballet rounds
because they have one with special needs.
Moms with the beginning of a clan,
and some with just one little chick.
I see moms
who traveled to China and Guatemala and Ethiopia
to gather up their babies.
I know two who had children they weren't looking for handed to them.
I see my friends with empty arms, whose babies are not with them.
They had to lay them down to rest long before they wanted to.

There are busy ones, who race from one activity to the next.
Bookworm moms, who inhabit the couches with their kids and a good book.
Tatooed and pierced,
in overalls,
or dressed like tea party ladies,
we all have this in common:
We've opened our lives to our children.

Becoming a mother is to become vulnerable.
We don't know what we will end up with.
Whether it's carrying a burden for many long years,
as we work to lift children who can't carry themselves;
or bearing the grief of a loss too strong for words.
Will it be joy?
Yes, it will. Some joy.
Will it be struggle?
Yes, it will. And with the same child who brought the joy.
There will be years of chaos,
even if it's only Cheerios scattered over the entire house.
There will be messy faces and messy bodies.
There will be tears, and not just from the children.
Their pain is going to hurt you.

The kids are going to fail.
And you are going to fail your kids.
And if you do it right, there will be apologies and forgivenesses.
And they'll learn that love means hope for future good.
That love covers a multitude of sin,
and grace allows us to begin again.

And you don't have to be a cookie-cutter mom to be their Mom.
Each one of us is uniquely made,
and uniquely challenged with this sanctified relationship.
Our children don't match.
Our lives don't match.
But we are one in Christ,
and the goal is to hear, "Well, done, you good and faithful servant."
I can't help but think about Jesus's conversation with Peter
where Peter asked about John, "What about him?"
And Jesus replied to him, "What is it to you...? You follow Me."

Never mind the other mamas.
Each of us has our own race to run.
But follow Him where He leads you.
It's your own Master you have to answer to.
And He is able to make you stand.

Where Did You Come From?

I knew this day was coming, and it still sideswiped me.
My firstborn is a teenager today.
He's still shorter than me,
but I expect next year that won't be the case.
We are giving him piano lessons as his birthday gift.

I remember how his dad looked out at a baseball field
on our drive home from the hospital with him.
His dad loves baseball.
But this son is not the baseball type.
His mind is not his dad's, and it isn't mine.
His dad made the phone call to arrange the lessons,
because he loves who this particular man/child is.

He picks up instruments and works things out on them.
He draws with an eye that sees things three-dimensionally,
and can spin them in his mind.
He delights in geeky books about relativity and chemicals.
He sat in public crocheting an angel a few weeks ago.
I do not crochet, but this boy,
when he was shown how to make a simple crocheted chain
at the age of six or seven,
hid under his covers with a flashlight and crocheted a functional mitten.
The other day, we were discussing lie detectors, and he casually said,
"I made one from my snap circuits a few years ago."
From what he said, it worked in some form or another.

Sometimes I look at my children, and think,  
"Where did you come from?" 
Because they came from us, but they are not us.
They are eternal beings,
but they have not always existed.
God still speaks life into existence,
and sends it into the world through the doorway of other lives.
It stuns me to have been the doorway to these living beings.

Happy Birthday, son.

I Needed You

I needed you.
I needed you to wreck my world.
To yell into my quiet life,
and smear your sticky fingers on my windows,
to highlight how dirty they are anyway.
It was easy to be the perfect mother when there was no one talking back to me.
When my theoretical children showed off my parenting theories.

I needed you.
I needed you to struggle through sounding out r-a-t,
so the impatience could rise up in my chest,
and I would know I need my Father to be patient with me, too.
Because sometimes, the simple things in His Word
are the ones I'm stuck on, too.
Love-one-another.

I needed you.
I  needed you to come late into my life,
later than we wanted you,
after we knew we were failures.
A little gift of grace we couldn't earn.
A gifted miracle.

I needed you.
I needed you to stare up at the sky and shriek that you saw an airplane,
because I was too old to look up
and wonder at the impressiveness of flight until you reminded me.

I needed you.
I needed you to hold me while you sucked your fingers
and laid your head against my chest,
and sighed and fell asleep and drooled on me:
to watch your belly rise and fall with your sweet baby breaths.

I needed you.
I needed to learn to give,
and to pray,
and to hope the best for you when your spelling was atrocious,
and your writing was behind.
I see you in your future -- perfected in the things you practice doing now,
and I never saw anyone like that before you.
Love believes all things.

I needed you.
I needed your trust to teach me about trust;
your fears to help me to lay mine down;
your bickering so I would value peace.
In correcting you, I correct myself.

I needed you.
I needed to hear you laugh until you couldn't breathe;
I was serious, and you were carefree.
You taught me to laugh at myself.
To see the person with the sparkly eyes
behind the milk mustache, and the dirty clothes.

I needed you.
I needed you to forgive me for blaming you for taking what I lost myself.
To throw your short arms around my neck and kiss me
even though I got it wrong and made you cry.
You've borne with me, and taught me grace;
how families have to choose over and over again to love and to forgive,
because in being family, we have much to forgive each other for,
and we aren't always so lovable.
But we always need it, don't we?
And sometimes the one with the loudest voice needs the most gentle handling.

The Making of a Mother

I am not a natural mother.
I am pregnant with my fifth child, and I don't bake cookies.
At least not often.
I do not delight in meal planning.
I usually don't have a plan.
Thankfully, I grew up in a home where basic kitchen competence was instilled.
But I have never delighted in cooking.
Dishes were torment to me for many years.

Our first child was a miracle.
(What child is not a miracle, really?)
We went to a doctor to get some results --
to explain why three and one half years into our marriage,
we hadn't conceived.
"You're going to have a very hard time getting pregnant," they told us.
"Maybe ten years down the road," I thought. 
"Maybe never."
We cried ourselves to sleep for days.
We had hoped for a year of childlessness after we married.
We didn't want forever.

It was one week to the day after our bad news
that I took a pregnancy test in the middle of the night.
I shook my husband awake and showed him.
I had been pregnant when we had the tests done.
It was like the whole thing was orchestrated
so we knew it was a gift, and a miracle,
and not an accomplishment.

His birth took a long time.
Sixty-five hours from the first contraction.
Twenty-six of them were hard labor.
Three hours of pushing,
an hour and a half of that with a vacuum.
No pain meds.

Breastfeeding was not the instinctive harmony that it should have been.
I did it, and I did not quit.
But I wanted to.
When he was six weeks old, I had emergency surgery.
His short frenulum had done irreversible damage,
and after the surgery, I had a visiting nurse.
The wound packing went on until he was four months and one week old.
The nurse did one every morning,
and my husband did one every evening.
This was in addition to having a newborn who did not sleep.
We also did not sleep.
I am surprised I healed at all.

When he was nine months old,
(and still not sleeping -- although he was running),
I got pregnant again.
We did not know we could, and we were exhausted,
and we had moved twice already since his birth,
and my husband did not have a job yet in a new city.
I did not feel overjoyed.
I felt tired.

It took a long time into that pregnancy before I was reconciled to it.
I wanted more children,
but I was still not recovered from my first.
Labor began with my membranes rupturing.
I hardly felt like it was labor until I was eight and a half centimeters dilated.
She also required three hours of pushing, and a vacuum.
Like her brother, she came out face up --
with her cord wrapped around her neck, under her shoulder,
and tied in a knot.
Another miracle.

She was the nicest baby I ever met.
Her brother still woke up every night, hungry.
But she slept six hours, then eight,
and by three months old slept twelve hours.
It did not hurt to nurse her.
She was satisfied after every feeding.
And she wanted to be put down
so she could watch her brother run from the corner of the room.
She did vomit on everything -- constantly -- but  was otherwise a dream baby.
Her cry was soft and reluctant.
She was inclined toward contentment.

Somewhere in their early years, I accepted that I am a mother.
Not a woman who has had children,
and will someday have her real life --
when they are out of the way.
But a mother.
It's who I am, and it's what I do.
Maybe that sounds stupid, but it was a revelation to me.
My entire being was designed for this.
I had a womb while I was in the womb.
It is the most important work of my life --
and the dirtiest,
and the most intimately painful,
and it has permanently scarred me.
These living beings came through me,
and fed from me,
and left their DNA behind in me.

And I can't help but think of my Redeemer,
who came to do His Father's will.
He came perfect.
Unblemished.
Fulfilling His life's work left Him pierced through,
and striped,
and bruised,
and marred beyond recognition as a man.
He is still known as a Lamb, having been slain.
His work is permanently wedded to Himself.
He came to be wounded,
and to give life through Himself.
He stooped low, lower than any of us.
And His name is exalted above all other names.

Mama Envy

One day Isaiah said to me, "Mom, I wish I was a woman."

Thinking it was an odd wish to express, I asked why.

"Because I wish I could have a baby and push it out."

"Well, Isaiah, it is a pretty amazing thing. But it does hurt very much, and most men are glad they don't have to push babies out."

"Well, I just wish I could."

"There are also advantages to being a man, though."

As strange a desire as that is for a little boy, I'm glad to know that in spite of having had difficult deliveries, the attitude he's gotten from me about having babies is that it's awesome.