Mother's Day. The day when women who aren't mothers but wish they were feel the burden a bit more; the day when guilty husbands serve breakfast in bed and make a bigger mess than it's worth; the day when mothers reflect again on the whole business and decide it's worth it after all.

Motherhood in a Mess

But motherhood has gotten bad press for the last couple of decades. We have been through some strange phases; perhaps not as neatly packaged chronologically as I will present them. We went through the time of embarrassed silence in society, when a woman, asked what she does, replied, "Oh, J stay at home and raise the kids. I'm a mother."

Then came the syndrome of the failed mother; the mother is responsible for all kinds of insecurities and failures in the child. Who hasn't read some novel about the overbearing, domineering, perfectionist mother who irrevocably scarred her child's psyche for life? Was that Norman's problem in Hitchcock's Psycho? -- you remember, the guy who ran the hotel and had the hobby of stabbing folks in the shower. Perhaps that was the problem of whoever it is that's always back in those terrible Friday the 13th movies. Anyway, we went through a phase of saying that if you can't cope, you can always blame it on mother.

Then came the women's liberation movement, with some women not only rejecting motherhood, but womanhood, too; and trying to be like men. And from the mixed wisdom and foolishness of various women's emphasis groups has come a time when many women are appreciating the fact that they are different from men, and they are celebrating the fact that they are specially created for the bearing of children. So that now we are seeing a fad, featuring your favorite movie star, in which she decides she wants a child -- not marriage, perhaps not a husband -- just a child. She wants the uniquely female experience of bearing a child, cuddling it, nursing it, possessing it.

That is an odd, foolish, sad, and tragic trend. It is, among other things, using a child as a thing for the woman's gratification. It is disregard for God's intention for motherhood and society and His blueprint for the home. But this phenomenon of the deliberately incomplete family, this twisted view of motherhood, is instructive for our society -- it says motherhood is accepted again, it emphasizes a sickness in our culture, and it can set us to thinking about motherhood as God intended. For there is motherhood; and there is motherhood.

Motherhood and Lordship

Let us think about motherhood as God intended, under the Lordship of Jesus. We have made it tough -- we Christians -- for the women in our homes, our churches, and our society to be effective mothers. Aside from blaming them for all the emotional quirks of their offspring, we have often set up an impossible emotional picture of the role of mothers, a mold into which we pour each woman. Yet no woman is perfect, no mother is perfect, any more than any man or any father is perfect. That which makes a woman a successful mother is not how comfortable she is with the Mother's Day card image, but rather her own sense of personhood, of personal worth, of being loved, of being in God's will in the matter of motherhood as in all other areas of life. The only way any woman can be the kind of fulfilled, fulfilling mother that God intends, is to let Jesus be Lord in her life.