From: Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise)
"I’m out here for you! You don’t
know what it’s like to be me out
here for you. It is an up-at-dawn
pride-swallowing siege that I will
never fully tell you about!"
He may have been talking there about the pitfalls of being a sports agent, but I tell you, it hits home – for me, maybe not you – for being a mother ( and wife too in some ways)!
There are days like this where I question what I do and where my Me-hood in Parenthood is under all the pressures,chores,and responsibilities. I think alot of times this runs through people's mind 'You mean that's all you do? That's all?(which is quite funny to me for many reasons)
As a mother, Your life is given to fight for the ones you love and to take ESPECIALLY to take care of people, small ones to begin with, whose wants never seem to ever, ever end. Sometimes when your days seem to be solely taken up with wiping things, dishes and sinks, floors, lysoling (-which is my favorite thing to do..lol) little runny noses and big, slow tears, and in ALL THIS you wonder about what fulfillment is supposed to mean for you. You wonder about being, besides the perfect wife and mother the hostess with the mostest, creative, intellectually productive, beautiful, and slowly your dreams seem to evaporate. You've been listening to what they're telling us nowadays about how important it is to find yourself, express yourself and assert yourself which is great to do but have to remember what is desired of us. Maybe you're thinking that you're nothing more than somebody's wife and somebody else's mother, and what kind of a life is that and you start doubting not only yourself but everyting in your life? Well, It makes me think of this tribe I read about in the southern Sudan called Nuers where a woman's name is changed not when she becomes a wife, but when she becomes a mother. She is manpuka, mother of puka. Among the Nuers, being someone's mother is what makes a woman's life meaningful. THEN you think about
2,000 years ago there was another young woman of the Jewish tribe of Judah who understood that truth. The world has never forgotten her,MARY the MOTHER of Jesus, because she was willing to be known as simply someone's mother.
Motherhood is a calling. It's a womanly calling. And let's not be cowed by those who extinguish the light and joy of sexuality by trying to persuade us to forget words like manly and womanly. At the beginning of time when God made the first man and the first woman in His image, He put both under the divine command to be fruitful.
The woman's obedience to that command meant self-giving. First, she gave herself to her husband. He initiated. She responded. Then she gave herself for the life of her child. A woman knows in the deepest regions of her being that it's this very self-giving for which she was made, single or married. Her level of maturity is measured by how much she gives to others. If she's married, she gives herself to her husband and she receives. If she's a mother, she loses her life in her child and mysteriously she finds it. A woman knows that no one can really say where the giving ends and the receiving starts.
It's no wonder we're confused when urged to look for some better or higher vocation in which to prove our personhood. No wonder we're distressed to be subjected to male standards or told that the notion of femininity and masculinity are obsolete. Old-fashioned notions they are indeed, but they weren't ours to begin wit!!!. They were God's. He planned the whole system, and it's God Himself who calls. He calls some to be single, some married people to be childless, but He calls most women to be M O T H E R S. There are, the Bible tells us, differences of gifts and they're all given according to God's grace. If our calling is to be mothers, let's be mothers with all our hearts-gladly, simply, and humbly, like that little peasant girl Mary, who spoke for all women for all time when she said,
'Behold, the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy word.'"
