When I was in my 30s, I remember reading The New York Times writer and novelist Anna Quindlen and being immensely comforted by her humorous and seemingly self-aware commonsensical take on motherhood. I can remember resonating with an observation that she made about the mythology of the perfect mother—the saintly ever patient mom who never gets angry and whose equanimity holds steady through the sleepless nights with a colicky baby right through the fretful ones with a teenager out past curfew. A young mother might not even be aware of the subliminal messaging she is receiving from a gauzy television commercial featuring a wise mother cleaning up a spill with the correct product in hand. Or perhaps her eyes will drift to a poster in the pediatrician’s office that says, “Moms are like glue—they hold everything together!” Of course, our own Christian tradition puts the original mother on such a perch that we have a hard time finding her humanity.
D.W. Winnicott was a pediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work spans the middle decades of the last century. For those who study how children develop, Winnicott’s theories on developmental psychology are as well known as Piaget’s and Erikson’s. Some of his best-known theories revolve around the “transitional object”, the “true and false self” and, of course, the “good enough mother”. The idea is that a new mother is attuned to her baby’s needs, but over time, she allows her baby not to have his every need met immediately. He realizes he is not omnipotent which allows for healthier cognitive development. Whether or not one buys into the psychology of the theory, I knew that when I first heard the phrase, I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. It was okay to be good enough.
In a piece that Quindlen wrote for Newsweek back in 2000, she writes about her sense of what a “good enough mother” might be. She observes, “Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can only be managed with a stern voice and a time-out. One boy is toilet trained at three, his brother at two.” Indeed. Having raised two sets of twins myself, I can say that this has been my experience. Each child seems to push a slightly different button. Quindlen observes that those “Remember when Mom Did” hall of fame moments that kids love to laugh about in later years, are actually bonding and humanizing. However, she also notices something else—that in all the busyness of mothering and trying to be perfect—to get it all done—she may have missed just being present. She writes, “I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.”
On this Mother’s Day, whether you are a mother of your own child or an adopted mother of someone else’s; whether you are a mother to a classroom of kids or a mother to the neighbor’s kids—you are absolutely a good enough mother who has had a mother of her own. I urge you to take a moment to be really present with those that you love and not to worry about “getting it all done”.
O God of love, it is such a joy to bless our moms—those who have carried us in their bodies, and in their hearts, and in their minds, and all those who have mothered us in some form or fashion.
We thank them and honor them all, those we can hug today, and those who are now gone or distant from us.
We ask Your blessing too on those for whom mothering is complicated, difficult, heartbreaking, or incomplete.
Bless and heal and restore and rebuild all generations, forwards and backwards in time.
God, with all the genius of Your creative power, rain down Your blessing upon the mothering we give, and that which we have received.
Be to us the nurturing embrace we need to lead us to eternal life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen.
A Mother’s Day Blessing by Kate Bowler
