I Felt Like A Hypocrite On Mother’s Day

Three or four years ago, I was in the middle of planning a marvelous Mother’s Day for my mom—a visit to a local design house, an elegant brunch, and a lavish gift, which I don’t even remember now. At the same time, I had a gnawing feeling that something was wrong. This exercise in doing all that was expected of me as a daughter wasn’t making the relationship any richer, and sure wasn’t melting away the feeling that I was disappointed in my mother.

Over many years, I had concluded that there was nothing I could do to please my mom. She felt I wasn’t living up to my potential, and that I could have a better life, that I could make better choices. There were other factors, but the conviction that I couldn’t please her was the triggering one. No matter how wonderful a day I was planning for my mother, it wasn’t doing anything to cut through the deep hurt that I felt.

Having a toddler of my own, I found myself wondering, “Am I giving my daughter a good example of the kind of mother-daughter relationship I want to enjoy with her in years to come?” This was a hard question. And if I was honest with myself, I had to say “No.” What could I do to change things?

I’m accustomed to praying as a first resort. I’ve counseled and prayed for others in similar situations with success. Yet I was still tempted to look for “causes,” to review our family history, to speculate on whether we were competing with one another or trying to find our identity in one another. This psychological analysis of mother-daughter hang-ups—staying at the level of the problems and reinforcing them—wasn’t going to bring a solution. It may have justified the distress I was feeling, but it couldn’t help me achieve the real, peaceful, and pure relationship with my mom that I yearned for.

What I finally intuited was that I needed to get a God-centered view of what motherhood really is. Somehow, I had let my mother become almost equal to God.  I had let society’s perception of Mother’s Day confuse my understanding of my source. I needed to let go of society’s imposition of Mother’s Day and the particular icon of motherhood it presents—and to instead get hold of God as Mother.

Someone had once told me that no matter how much one loves one’s human mother, one has to accept God as Mother. At the time, I would have said, “This is nothing new, I address God as Mother all the time.” But thinking about it now, I realized it was actually a wakeup call. I wasn’t doing as good a job as I thought I was, and I was allowing myself to be bothered by a relationship that just didn’t seem to be going anywhere good. And I wasn’t using prayer to fix it.

So the prayer that I began with that day several years ago was a deep heartfelt “Mother-Father God, show me how to see my mom. Show me how to understand her.” And the answer came first as a passage from the Bible: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”¹

As I heard those words, I realized my problem wasn’t an egotistical, childish need for my mother to understand me, but rather the demand for me to understand who she was in God’s eyes. God was asking me to love her with a new love. Instead of loving her with a childish love and childish expectations, I needed to grow up and love my mom with a nurturing, mothering love myself. I had to allow her to work out her life without my standing in judgment on her.

This was a prayer that came with tears. I couldn’t do it often, but I would revisit it from time to time. This verse from a poem by Mary Baker Eddy encouraged me not to give in to the anguish:

The change in me took a couple of years. But gradually I was able to put aside the childish expectations, and pray from the meek position that my mother and I were both God’s children. I began to see her this way, and not just as my human mom. As biological ties and cultural impositions on the “mother-daughter relationship” began to melt away, I felt free to really appreciate my mom. My previous disappointment in her was replaced by genuine gratitude for her nurturing, her marvelous care-taking, and her countless expressions of mothering qualities over the years.

This change in thought has really helped me. When I was preparing for last year’s Mother’s Day festivities, everything felt so different. I was so at ease. I felt joy and gratitude for the wonderful mothering qualities I had begun to see expressed everywhere, not only in my mother, but in myself and my daughter, even in the men in my life: my stepfather, my husband, and my brother. That Mother’s Day was a precious celebration of God’s unconfined mothering.

I feel sure this has improved my relationship with my daughter and safeguarded it. We are less likely to live out social and cultural stereotypes as a result. As for who I hope to be in her eyes years from now, my prayer is that she, too, turns to her (our) Mother-Father God for the true view of everything, in her own time, in her own way, and finds she doesn’t have to carry the false burden of a biological view of motherhood—or anyone. And I hope that turning to her true Mother, God, becomes her first instinct.

I’m really looking forward to taking Mom out Mother’s Day this year. I know just where we’re going to go. She’ll enjoy it so much—and so will I!