A Mother’s Love 5/10/2020

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

The heady fragrance of privet hedge bloom is to me the quintessential May aroma.  It is the intoxicatingly floral sweetness that is just flowery enough without being oppressive.  A hedge dripping with lacy blossoms and filling all of the outside air with the perfect measure of perfume is probably one of my favorite things that spring has to offer.  And when my brain equates the glory of privet hedge with May it immediately transports to the other thing about May that is so dear and so sweet. This is the month we celebrate our mothers.

How many men and women of letters have attempted to wax poetic about the women who gave them life?  It seems like any attempt, including my own that you shall be hereby witnessing, falls woefully and abysmally short.  It feels almost as if you are attempting to describe the sun as “rather warm” or the ocean as “damp and sizeable”.  I don’t think words in the English language, and possibly any other language for that matter, can lend much to the topic and do it any justice.

And of course, there is the matter that I am now a mother myself, so any praise and affirmation I spew will feel a bit like tooting my own horn in some sort of way which is about as far from what I want or need to do as the seventeenth galaxy from the Milky Way is from your front door. I hope that analogy translated because it certainly wasn’t strong enough.

To speak from my end of the matter, motherhood is the most draining task all the while being the most filling.  One moment you are weary, worn to your very soul because a piece of your heart is wandering around outside your body and, try as you might, you cannot forever guard it from the pains nor shelter it from the storms.  The next moment those clear, searchingly pure eyes will stare into your spirit and the whole of  your being feels as if it will crack and shining contentment will spill out of you leaving you in a wash of fulfillment in levels you had no clue were fathomable. 

The divergence of having every ounce of worry and concern infuse with joy, delight and a deep, almost disconcerting love makes for quite the internal storm.  I suppose there are always tumultuous clouds in a mother’s heart.  She bears the weight of molding a life, of shaping a person to leave this world better than they found it. I can speak from experience that this can be a terrifyingly daunting task to be placed upon the shoulders. But the love, oh the love! You only thought it was you that gave them life, but oh how wrong you were!  They are giving you the life you never knew you didn’t have.

Luckily, to avoid making what you’re reading being me singing a hymn of praise about myself, I am infinitely blessed enough to have the greatest mother in the history of motherhood.  I gather that some of my readers may dispute this declaration and that’s alright. I assure you, I do understand your reasoning. I don’t agree with you, but I understand you. (Insert knowing smile here.)

I have been a mother myself for only a few short years but it has been long enough for me to realize the level of pure amazing that is my mother. I wish every one of you reading this could meet her.  I won’t even say God broke the mold when He made her. I don’t think He felt using a mold would be compelling enough for the being He was going to create so He designed her straight from His head and built her from scratch. That is the only way to explain her.  I could not have had a better example. I could not have been loved harder or prayed for more fiercely than she did for me.  I say that in the past tense but really by no means have either of those two factors ceased.  I daresay when she is no longer on this earth, in the exceedingly distant but undeniable for us all future, that even then in realms of unspeakable glory she will still have conversations next to the throne about me. God will smile and nod. He expected as much.

I actually saw something the other day that made me think of her. I could look up and the huge fluffy clouds positioned themselves just so.  I could see the luminous white ball that is our nearest star and take it in fully as its blinding light was diffused just enough for my eyes.  It became something you could comfortably look at; the sun’s normally staggering beam was no longer as such. It was beautiful and simplified.  That’s my mother. If you took all the gloriously warm attributes of God Himself, and veiled them enough that they won’t blind you, there she is.  Maybe, in an ideal world (where every mom is as near to perfect as mine) that is exactly what a mother should be?  All the warmth, loving care and nurturing provision of Heaven is encapsulated into a woman who will be the first love of a brand new person.

In thinking about it, I suppose the parallels have always been there.  We are so unbelievably fortunate to have these compassionate and softhearted individuals in our lives to protect and guide us and, like God, they too have to face the fact that we all grow and go our own way which very often is so very awry from what would be best.  But those truly wonderful mothers just continue to love, and often pray until they are very nearly prayed out.  We cannot possibly thank them for all they are to us. We try today but no matter the card or the flowers, no matter the gift whether it be construction paper or diamonds, we will fall short.  We will have told them they are a “rather warm” sun or a “sizable and damp” ocean. And despite it they will love us with their whole heart. He showed them how.