It seems natural to reflect on motherhood today. A decade of motherhood seems to have taught me more than the almost three decades before motherhood. There is a new found grace I have for myself, for my own mother and for all mothers, that seems to grow with each passing day.
Ann Voskamp shared these words on her blog this week. They resonated so deeply with me.
“And maybe that’s what it really was — maybe the days were pretty and ugly. Pretty…Ugly. The ugly beautiful of reality and love and humanity and what it means to become real. That was what was happening: the stacks of dishes and everests of laundry and the tantrums of toddlers and teenagers and tired mamas and all the scuffed up walls down the hall and through the heart, they were all wearing down the plastic of pride, wearing us down to the real wood of grace and the Cross. It really is okay.
To lose it and be found, to be rubbed the wrong way to become the rightest way, to let all the hard times rub you down to real.
That’s just the pretty ugly of us — we’re not the Hallmark mother, just the Velveteen Mothers. The Velveteen Mothers who know when there’s a volley of words and weary silences afterward and everything looks impossibly wrecked —
The angular, hard edges of perfection are being sanded down by all our scrapes and falls, till we’re round and soft and can get close enough to each other to just hold each other. Only when you’re broken are you tender enough to wrap yourself around anyone.
Only the broken people can really embrace. That’s us — could we just really hold onto each other?”
Today, may we each hold onto one another! Some are missing their own mothers. Some are waiting and praying to become mothers. Some are single mothers, doing it all on their own. Each of us are broken and we all need that embrace. Motherhood is not about perfection. God never called us to be perfect. He only calls us to love.
I am so grateful that God called me to be your mother. I am thankful for the person He continues to mold me into through serving and love you.