Sins of The Mother

You may recall a post a couple of months ago in which I wallowed in the lunacy of parenting - to what end do we toil, I wondered.  Actually, I think I couldn't get past "what's the point", but I was distracted by the pain of the task and thus, eloquence suffered.

My sweet mum sent me what is probably the loveliest email a mother could send a daughter being a mother.  It is lovely in too many ways - full of love and encouragement for me; full of faith and rest in the same God I love; full of Certain Doubt, my favourite way of talking and thinking; and of course, full of the beauty of writing by a fellow Writer.

At our mum's group this week we explored a question asked by a previous guest who wondered what parts of our childhood we planned to include in our children's childhoods, and what parts we thought were best left behind.  And as you'll soon read, the question brought me back to that email from mum.

My own answer is unformed in most ways.  I was unusually well-parented by thoughtful, mindful parents who worked hard at the process.  But as mum says, children know there are edges to their parents' faithfulness, and most of us are some combination of sad, angry and resentful that those edges exist.  Because of course, our hearts are built for heaven's edgeless love and anything less is just a loss, a reminder that this earth is not at all as it is in heaven.

But knowing now my own edged self, and knowing how hopeless I feel knowing my own small people will wonder why I couldn't just Try A Little Bit Harder to love better, I find myself looking at my own mum and dad's edges and finally feeling willing to forgive them their humanity and revel more intensely in the wide fields that remain their devoted Love and Faithfulness to me and my siblings.  I do so knowing how deeply I'll crave my own daughter's forgiveness but also knowing that it must be done if I want to forgive myself for not being the mother I had planned to be.

In my family, there are no deep wounds to fester or linger: there are only the petty demands of an eternally four-year-old daughter who wants More! More! More! So perhaps these words are too glib and not fair to those who's parents' edeges made for a very small patch of Love and Faitfulness in which to grow up.  But such is not my lot, and so I speak only for my own self and wonder if perhaps some of this is true for another.

Now follows that email, only edited to keep some of my mother's more enthusiastic encouragement of this heart for my own self.  May those who read find some rest in this as I did.

Dear A,

I can't bring myself to post my comments on your blog site because it's too public, but I had to put words on a couple of inner responses to your words from the perspective of the other end of this parenting thing, wondering as I type if it would have made any difference to me had I heard them from my mother...?  She of course was culturally unable to articulate her experience of parenting -- that was a luxury she would have loved if she'd been equipped to think that way, but her generation was in a whole other place.  So I never once heard her thoughts on any of this.

My thoughts in no particular order: 

My mother and father were raised by parents who according to Mum and Dad, were over-strict, over-controlling and mean-spirited.  With the possible exception for Mum's father, who was apparently perfect and did no wrong...  Fortunately for him, he died young.  But I would believe that they all, God love them, did their very best (I really do believe this) with what they had available inside themselves at the time, and tried to raise kids that would have a better life than they did, be better people than they were.

Then my parents raised Joan and I, doing their best with us too, a 'best' which I happened to think as I got older, sucked a lot of the time, and was pathetic and inadequate and deeply flawed way too often.   At some points in my life, I thought their style of non-tolerance and rigidity bordered on negligent and cruel, and that I would be scarred by it forever.   Nonetheless, I eventually recognized that they gave the best they could give, given their personal place in history, culture, in their particular families,  and with their own limitations.   It has become clearer and clearer over the years however, that they did indeed love us well and thoroughly and were always faithful to us.

Then Dad and I raised you three, determined to correct the direction and misdirection of our childhoods, and raise children who would know they were always loved and even adored and respected, who would be listened to and raised to think for themselves (not brick wall children or jellyfish children) and who would be able to resist peer pressure and be respectful and relational and in touch with their feelings, etc. etc.  They would be raised with real Christian faith available to them always, and not the rote religion that we remembered.  As parents, we would be knowable and not aloof, and our children would be safe within the bounds of our family at least.  It was a great plan.  And God bless us, we did the best we could too, within the restrictions, limits and incompetencies of our own dear and earnest selves.  We always knew there were likely to be a few small failings, but we would trust those to God, who would no doubt work them out for you all so they would do no great harm...  Somehow all would be well.  I think your sainted father was always surer of this than I was...

So now here you are, with your own set of goals and longings for your children and yourselves, for parenting well and loving well and somehow trying to live in faith and with good humour, and each day paying willingly for the cost of that terrible tension.  You too are doing the best you can as a mother, knowing that some days that includes not wanting to have to do anything whatsoever with your children and frankly not giving a rip, which is included in 'doing the best you can' on any given bad day.  Scott is doing the same -- he can't help himself.  He is doing the best he can, given all the stories and family realities he carries and lives within the limits of.

And here and there, now and then, you find yourself wondering what the point of it all is -- what a fine and right question to keep coming back to, in my estimation.  Is it to produce a certain kind of grown-up person out of these little people??  Is it to be more real and authentic and faithful family/mother than you find easy to actually pull off consistently??  Is it to live happily and freely together, knowing God's ways are deeply mysterious and therefore knowing you must not be carrying weights you shouldn't be carrying and in fact cannot carry??  What is the point??

The previous generations sure as heck didn't get any of those things right -- barely any of it.  They occasionally might have brushed against some part of some of it -- my parents provided me with enormous and unshakable security in some areas, and it's killed me ever since not to have that anymore -- I always miss it.  But they fell short so substantially in so many other areas...

So apparently,  each generation must begin again, from scratch, determined to love well and pay the prices involved in that loving, and do better than they remember was done for them.  And surprisingly, each generation does.  It improves richly and deeply and uniquely the way their children are loved, and carried, and let go of.  And I believe this is true.  It truly is an improvement, a movement toward the Better.  The part that is so undermining and flummoxing, is that each generation fails in new ways too.  Parents surprise themselves -- shock themselves -- when they realize (or not...) that they completely were unable to do X the way it needed to be done.  They really were victorious in areas B, F, and M.  But X...  oh, and apparently not so good on Q....  Rats.  Forgot to worry about that -- thought we had that one under control... Damn.

So you're on to something important, in my estimation.  The faithfulness word that your friend spoke was directly from that wiley Jesus, at least in terms of my understanding of how the whole Immanuel business sometimes works.  Just as you suspected.  The hard part to swallow for me is the difference between God's faithfulness and ours.  His is unfailing faithfulness, full of understanding and knowledge and wisdom and justice and is really, really funny at times.  He never stops being faithful to us, as we are this very moment, in love.  Which is a bit of trick, being as we cannot quite comprehend how he could or why he would be 'faithful' to such a group of undesirable, pathetic losers.  But somehow, our faith tells us, our stories tell us, he is.  He knows the true extent of our unfaithfulnesses and un-love, and nonetheless, never wavers or withdraws or recoils or rolls his eyes.  (Well, maybe that last one...)

Our faithfulness to our children and to each other however, has its limits.  It has edges.  We do not intend it to be, and hardly recognize when it has wavered or wobbled, but it does.  Our children notice this.  They remember it.  It is only human faithfulness after all, which Jesus seemingly doesn't mind.  Or change.  These limits and edges very effectively reveal how desperately poor we are, how 'not quite' we are, and that is the mysterious good thing -- that is the main thing, in my theology at least.  That at the end of each day, and of each life, of each encounter or bad conversation, we would realize both our poverty and our richness, and see more accurately where each one lies.  We don't overcome most of our well-intentioned but  poor faithlessness, and neither does Heaven overcome it for us.  It just lets it be, and then the Spirit and Creator of all Life reveals it to us, a little bit at a time.  Not to depress and discourage us (which it usually does...) but simply to reveal the Truth, and then to swoop in with the Good News, that the Sisters are here!  Grace and Mercy are at hand, right in the middle of this latest darkness.  Oh, blessed relief.

We still keep trying to be faithful, to ourselves and each and to God, but I think we should never for one moment believe that we are there.  We are as close to there as we can get at this very moment, and likely our parents and their parents were as close to it as they could get.  Here we all are however, starting each day from scratch, learning the extent of our need and our own deep longing to love well and live well, and our deep need to be loved in ways that no-one seems to be able or willing to provide.  No wonder we get tired.

But the Presence provides at least some of us with occasional perspective and more tolerable still, a sense of the absurd.  Our own absurdity and funniness and the relief that follows that clarity, and those are the moments in which we most easily learn to recognize the presence of Jesus, who has been likely laughing a tiny touch longer than the rest of us... Or groaning.  Or rocking, with his head in his hands, in shared agony, the dog bowl of gin close at hand...

So in closing, if God Is With Us, remember that that means also that God Has Been With You All Along, and ergo, that God Will Never Fail To Be With You, No Matter What.  To me that's the good news about God's mysterious faithfulness -- it has always been present with me, it is in this very moment, and it always will be.  And that is what I believe deeply for you and Scott and T. and Nate, and Katie and Jared, and Andrew, and for Dad -- as we all are, in this very place, Immanuel.  Fancy that.

God always does speak in Good News -- feel free to remind me of that, and I will remind you too.  If it ain't Good News, take a second look at the source -- may not be Heaven.

I love you.  I love what you write.  Forgive the length of this but I couldn't help myself.
M.

Forgiven.