MOTHERING GOD’S WAY
By You I have been upheld from birth; You are He who took me out of my mother’s womb. My praise shall be continually of You. Psalms 71:6
God grants some women the unique honour and blessing of becoming mothers. When you have children, hold them, love them, care for them, empower them. *But understand that you are only temporary stewards. Your children belong to God.* They will grow up and leave. They were not meant to be grasped or clung to-as if you really could freeze a moment. No, moment cannot be frozen, but you will be allowed to hold memories. If you are good at mothering, you will hold the memories and release the child. If you cannot do that, you will destroy the memories by corrupting the relationship between you and the little chick whose development has outgrown the shelf of your parenting.
Many women come close to losing their relationship with their children. They feel betrayed by the growth of the children they trained. They have trained the children to be productive and then have failed to prepare themselves for that growth -not just the growth of the body but the growth of that person, the development of personalities and preferences.* They feel that their children are belligerent when in truth many of the children are just independent. Of course, there are children who grow to be calloused. I pray that you will be spared the disappointment of that experience. But even if your parenting goes well, there will still be moments when you see your children slipping through your fingers like grains of sand. For many mothers who once struggled to wean the child from tender breast, it is later a struggle to wean the mother from the child!
Letting go is especially painful when you allow your relationship with your child to become cluttered like an attic stuffed with things that belong somewhere else. Often there are misplaced passions dumped on the child to compensate for loneliness in other areas. Because there was no place to put them, they were shoved into the attic. *Often it is love that should have been invested in a spouse, but there was no spouse or no capacity in the spouse to be loved. So the love was dumped on a child. This is not a healthy love; it is obsessive.
Every good mother, sooner or later, must understand she is denied ownership, she is merely granted stewardship. This is so important. This is the understanding you need to mother God’s children God’s way. And that is if you truly believe children are indeed God’s Own heritage!