The Unlived Life of the Mother Indeed

Jesus listening to you complain about how you didn’t get to “live your life.”

There is a curious maxim flying around the internet, propagated by Glennon Doyle Melton in her new book, that posits that the unlived life of the parent is the greatest burden a child can bear. This idea is attributed to Carl Jung, who I hadn’t imagined to be so foolish, but I don’t know much about him, so perhaps this is just the sort of thing he would say. How he came about this curious insight, I have no idea. Perhaps he was irritated by his own mother. Maybe she was a wet sop and lay about all day, feeling poorly, and he, with his tiny psychological mind, stood over her and judged her, the way all children in every age in every place are in the habit of doing.

It’s a clever idea, of course, especially if you want to throw over that rich mystery—the inscrutable instinct of a woman, when first cuddling her own offspring, to lay down her life for another. Women who give birth* get to have a bittersweet sip out of the cup of death and resurrection. They die to themselves in pain and suffering, they labor through the valley of the shadow of death, and then, on the other side, they are (most of the time) handed a kind of life that pulls them forever out of themselves, that saves them from the raging selfishness that drags us each down into Sheol, one by one. I know a man can experience this in sundry kinds of ways, but for a woman, it comes out of her own body, and it must be with a certain wistfulness that Paul contemplated childbirth and saw there a certain tenor of salvation that would always be beyond his grasp.

It’s grotesque, really, to subvert that idea and thrust the person so rooted up out of herself, who goes on for her whole life being lured along towards her child, and say that, no, rather, the egocentric longings of the mother must go first, else the child will be unhappy. If only mama had really gotten that degree after all, if only she had left daddy and run away with that man she was so in love with, if only she had gone back to work instead of staying miserably at home, if only she had become a famous writer, if only she had lived into her “potential.” I can’t be happy because she isn’t “happy,” whatever that even means.

In the first place, that idea is untrue. To take a flighty, temporal experience of happiness and insist that it be the measure of all things is tyrannical and cruel, more so when you sweep up the children and drag them along for the ride. Second of all, there need not be some insurmountable wall built up between the “lived” life of the parent and that of the child, as if the two must always be opposed, as if you can only have one and you must choose. Sometimes they conflict, of course, and for the sake of the life of the other, the mother chooses her child over and over, bending her will toward the good of that little one. It is called “agape,” it is a self-giving love, the kind that binds the Godhead into a kind of unity that we cannot even imagine. The best thing about it is that it happens “naturally,” without having to think much about it. A mother is so attuned biologically to her child that her soul doesn’t have time to stop and wonder until she wakes up however many years later from that exhausting but usually rather golden dream.

Of course, she does eventually wake up. Children do sleep through the night, they go away to school, they begin to try to sort out their own lives, they don’t require her as a reference point for all their thoughts and dreams. They gain gravity and weight of their own, so that, rather than a continual orbiting around her, the mother and child (grown by now) circle around each other, each necessary for the other’s happiness. When the mother finally dies, the child careens off course for a while, if not forever. “You don’t get over it when your mother is gone,” my mother told me this week. Which is why the resurrection part of the gospel is so essential. We all of us lose our mothers and are lost to our children. We must be raised up out of the grave, else all our labor and our love are in vain.

Still, I have found the “waking up” part hard. I know how to deal with babies and little children. I don’t really know how to orient myself in a world where I am fixed between my nearly grown daughter, and my own mother who continues to be the center of my world. But, just like I didn’t have to completely sort it out in the haze of early motherhood, I don’t need to understand it now. I can just do what’s in front of me and figure it out as I go along.

Moreover, I have plenty of time “for myself.” I always did. If you order your life and the lives of your children with a certain amount of structure and discipline, if you work hard on gaining wisdom, on searching out and understanding the mysterious mind if the child, on depending on God, on putting your own husband first, even over your child, so that you are not alone (if that is possible), so that life sweeps you along without worrying too too much, eventually you discover that you have gained spiritual muscle, that you are stronger than you thought—and much weaker—that you have time and do not have time, that you have interests but also you know they don’t matter as much as you thought they did. You have, and this is the key, become “unselfish.” You have lost yourself in the best possible way, which is not self-annihilation, as Melton-Doyle claims, but self-forgetfulness.

Anyway, it’s mother’s day, and for the first time in ages, my own mother is here, without whom, I would not be me, and whose sacrifices for the gospel, and for my life, and for my children are what make the whole world go round. Happy Mother’s Day!

*By no means am I saying, as some do, that motherhood is the only, or indeed the highest, calling for a woman. I’m just describing something. If all women had to be mothers to be saved, all men would have to turn into mothers. Seriously, Jesus had a mother but wasn’t a mother. This shouldn’t be that hard!