Losing our Maternal Bristles {bonus}
The golden law of our time is that whatever a woman is doing, she is Always Only Ever choosing the very best thing. Her holiness is indisputable. Her instincts are infallible. According to a poster on a wall near you, Women are Perfect. The trouble is, when we are struggling to know how to deal with a persistently contrary child, or we don’t know how to fill the hours with a toddler, or we are enslaved to our own volatile temper, we know the truth. We are not Always Only Ever choosing the very best thing. No wonder we want to flee motherhood, it keeps exposing the lie. It exposes us.
Whether we are intuitive mothers or feel like motherland is foreign territory, we all have things we need to learn. All of us are in constant need of forgiveness and repentance. All of us are dependent on the grace and provisions of our Heavenly Father. All of us need to grow in discerning and wanting and doing what is good. We are all a mixed bag of strength and weakness, wisdom and folly, seeing and blindspots, the admirable and the ridiculous. The sooner we get past our shock at not being infallible, the better we’ll be at humbly learning from others. We’ll stop bristling in self-defence. We’ll be able to notice when another mother is doing something well and we’ll have the guts to ask her about it. Chances are, she is more acutely aware of the thing she needs help with than the thing she is good at.
Good motherhood is not a destination we stop at, but an ecosystem of grace we grow in. We all need daily renewal, edging forward into a more joyful doing of the good Jesus has saved us into. Jesus is the only one who did his work once and for all. Only Jesus’ work is perfectly executed and above correction; ours is not. As we depend on his complete work for us, good mothering means we are often undoing and redoing. We need to learn to live with the tension of regular repentance, the tension of needing to learn new things. It’s not something to feel threatened by. We miss out on the best joys when we try to avoid it. We need to know what to do with our shame and then we need help.
But we often sabotage our own access to help. Different mothering choices set lives into different orbits, increasing the distance between us. The further apart mothering choices take us, the harder it is to see different ways of doing things. We don’t rub shoulders enough to talk and listen and see the minutiae which add up to a different picture. We caricature, make assumptions, judge and polarise. It’s not unusual to like people who struggle the same way we do and to avoid people whose strengths we envy. We gravitate to mothers whose choices (and often consequent difficulties) mirror our own. Someone who doesn’t reflect the same image can be disquieting. If we see a strength in another mother, we often feel threatened. Avoiding our own sense of shame, we withdraw from mothers we could learn something from.
When we only stick with the mums who are currently struggling the same way we are, we aren’t mixing in the company that can help us mature through our difficulties. By staying comfortable with people whose mothering reflects our own, we end up with a distorted view of what’s good and what’s possible. The protective strategies we develop to minimise our sense of incompetence end up keeping us stuck in it. When we’re struggling with something in motherhood, we need to seek out mothers who seem to have learned to do the thing we’re finding hard. You can see the wisdom of Titus 2, older women teaching younger women how to love their husband and children and be busy at home. We need women outside our tribe to help us learn to be godly and skilful in our home sphere. We need to learn from women who have persevered further through the work than we have, or who have chosen to do some things differently from what we currently do.
Like I said in article #39, more often than not, we can’t imagine things being different. Most of us haven’t grown up watching examples of engaged, deliberate, competent and joyful Christian motherhood. It’s hard to know what it looks like. Talking and listening to Christian mums outside our usual orbit can help us see new ways of being. Within our own churches there will most likely be mums who you avoid, whom you could learn something from. Maybe they are mothers who are further down the track, or who have made some different lifestyle choices. Start watching them.
If you’re not confident in cultivating a lively home, then keep your eyes out for women who do. Ask them why they put effort into their home life. Get their back story and you might be surprised by it.
If you don’t enjoy being with your young children, find a mum who seems to like being with her kids and ask her about it. What does she like about being with children? What does she do to persevere when she isn’t feeling the joy? How does she fill and organise the long days? It is likely she has had to work hard to learn to, or she has a different idea about what she is doing, which helps her see something which you haven’t figured out yet.
If you notice that a mum has children who obey her without fussing, then ask her about how that happened. Ask how they set norms and expectations from the earliest years. Ask how they deal with disobedience.
If you notice a family who seem to get on well with each other, ask how they’ve cultivated healthy relationships. Ask how they deal with conflict between siblings. Did they need to work at it? Which things threaten family fellowship?
If you notice a family that always gets to places on time, ask the mum how she does it.
If another family seem to have a habit of worship in their home, then ask them what they do, and how it has changed over time.
If you find it hard to feed your family, then find someone who delights in it and apprentice yourself to them. Have a look at their systems and processes and skills and attitudes. Ask for suggestions.
These things are not a fluke, they are the product of a whole lot of micro-patterns built over time. When we notice strengths in other mothers and ask questions, we get to see inside other family cultures. This helps us notice new strengths and weaknesses in our own, and helps us mature in areas of difficulty. Instead of envious, self-defensive rivalry, we need to be students of each other’s strengths, copying and borrowing each other’s good ideas. Noticing and appropriating God’s grace in its varied forms in various homes. As we lose our maternal bristles, we grow into new creatures, softer, fuller and brighter. We’re new creatures, learning to make a different kind of home.
