Unseen Motherhood {bonus}
Most of the good things a mother does will not be seen. When an orchid blooms in the wilderness, behind a rock where no human walks, is it less beautiful? God has made the universe in a way where people only notice a very small part of the glory. There are magnificent ecosystems which most of us know nothing about. God litters the earth with beauty, much of which no one but himself ever sees. A human audience doesn’t make a thing more real, more beautiful or more important. There is an extravagant beauty in the hiddenness and a heavenly Father who enjoys it very much.
In Matthew 6, Jesus said to go out of our way to do some things out of sight, even of ourselves. Go inside and shut the door to pray. Give to others so discreetly that your right hand doesn’t even know what your left hand is doing. When you’re fasting, put more effort into looking presentable so that people won’t know. Jesus rebuked the religious leaders for doing their ‘good works’ only to be seen by men, to gain esteem for themselves. They had no sense of the real value of the good things. Prayer, giving and fasting didn’t stop being good, but hypocrites only care about being seen to be doing the thing, rather than the thing itself. Jesus tells us to beware living for the audience.
Our era offers unprecedented visibility. Never has it been easier to be seen and to control which bits of ourselves are seen. With this opportunity comes lavish temptations to hypocrisy. The desire to be seen has been fattened on a diet of self documentation and sharing. Not every mum struggles with this (some can think of nothing worse than sharing their life on social media!). Some will acknowledge the risk of hypocrisy and then overshare, driven by the virtue of authenticity (which is much more trendy than the virtues of discretion and self-control). Whatever our privacy settings, regardless of how broad our preferred audience is, this drive to be seen can undermine good motherhood.
There is a difference between wanting to be seen as a good mum and being a good mum. When ‘good’ motherhood constantly has us looking at our own reflection (in the face and responses of others), then we tend to adjust our idea of good motherhood to suit our audience. It’s a good motherhood which is about us, not God and the people we are serving. The more preoccupied we are with being noticed, the less we are attending to the good itself. When we’re audience driven, we won’t be so invested in understanding how God defines goodness. We’ll miss the hidden wonder.
It’s not just an how-I-look-on-instagram problem. We can be scared of the judgement of our children’s future selves. One of my great fears in early motherhood (and sometimes still) was that my kids would grow up to despise me. That they would be embittered by how I raised them. I wanted them to become adults who would think I had been a good mum. Maybe I even wanted them to think of me as a good mum more than I wanted to do them good. This meant being governed by my imagined grown children, leading to insecure, miserable mothering now. Good mothering is built on the solid ground of God’s truth, not other people’s feedback (real or imagined). Convictions strengthen us, fear (of anyone less than God himself) does the opposite.
We can’t grow into doing what Jesus tells us to, and joy in doing it, if we keep valuing only what others can see. Or if we are preoccupied with our need to be affirmed. We’ll chase, not what’s good, but what makes us feel good. Reading biographies (of all kinds of people in many fields of work), it becomes clear that the people in this world who have gotten the hardest work done, who have had great effect for good, didn’t stop to think about who was noticing and appreciating them. Many of them would be shocked to think that biographies would be written about them. They were too busy doing the hidden work, deeply invested in out-of-the-way places. Something else was filling their tank; a supply which did not come from audience feedback. Mothering and motherhood gets better—and easier to enjoy—when we start delighting in the hiddenness and get our sustenance from something other than being seen.
When we get a glimpse of the magnitude of the hidden work God is doing, one millimeter at a time, in each mustard seed of our joyful submission to Jesus, we won’t be so easily buffeted. When we get to know better what God’s Bible makes plain: about Himself, his world, ourselves, the work he’s done and the work he’s given us to do, we’ll be more steady mums.
Once we’re content to sow deep into the hidden earth God has given us, there will be some things which God does put on display. There will be shoots which sprout out of hiding and flower into blessing in full view. But it’s God who gets to choose which things see daylight and when. There will be times when others see, so that they might praise God for it. The gospel will be adorned and made attractive to people who have no taste for it as Christians do good. And other times, like Jesus, what we do will be misunderstood or rejected (2 Peter 2, especially verse 12). Most of the good work of mothering will be out of sight now, but in the age to come, there will be nothing left hidden. Then, the true beauty and meaning of it will be seen.
