Motherhood, Part 2

It is never-ending, so we must be open to ever new, life-enhancing, life-enriching revelations.  Speaking of revelation, the scriptures have some wonder-full passages offered for our nourishment and encouragement.  Our Father/Mother God, in Isaiah 49:15 "Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?  Even should she forget, I will never forget you."  So we are forever present in the minds of God, and to a lesser extent to our mothers.  There are times when we will be absent from the conscious thought of our mothers, after all, they do have their own lives.  In the mind of God, we are always present to Him, as we journey with Him, and to Him.  Our Father/Mother God is our origin and our destiny.  "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" Psalm 110:3, "from the womb before the day star, I have begotten you."  Our place of origin then is the womb of God, Who is infinite love.  We leave that place of infinite love, comfort and security and journey into the uncertainty that is this life.  No wonder we have something to cry about when we arrive.  Welcomed with a slap on the butt!!!  We have temporarily left the Womb of Infinite  Love, but we are destined to return to that place of safety.  Before that return God never abandons us.  This is one of the impossibilities of life. He has prepared  for us a life-presence .  A life-presence designed remind us of Who it is we came from, and The Love which is our origin. 

The loving gaze of mothers is the loving gaze of God,  enfleshed for us, less we forget. This is this physical living loving presence we can feel, hear, and above all be touched by. This soothes the pain of the seeming loss of our First Love.  Part of the vocation of mothers is to mirror the First Love and to be a living sacrament of that Love !!!!! WOW ???   The best of plans do not always work out, not even God"s "plan A."  Wherever there is light there is also the opposite darkness.  This hard reality has to be faced again and again.  We are forever encountering and becoming reconciled with the shadow in our lives.  We cannot run away from it.  I saw a little kid on the web trying to get away, even run away from his shadow.  No matter he did the shadow was ever present.  There is the shadow side, which is the side of every mothers and motherhood.  The ideal, being the sacrament of God"s love, in so many cases is never actualized.  The result is many innocent children do not live life but subsist  in a "living hell."  Because of abuse, some women's essential inner wholeness has been broken, and in some cases destroyed by the toxic shame that has permeated their lives.  These women were denied a healthy living environment to mature within. They were not blessed with healthy mothers, so were not exposed to healthy ways of mothering.  One cannot give what one does not have.  These mothers are not at fault, but they do  have the responsibility to work long and hard to become healthy.  This demands that toxic shame be faced, processed.  This is a process that extends over many months and years. Family secrets are so very difficult not only to face but actually own by sharing.  There are those brave pioneers gifted with the courage to say "this sickness ends with me,"  and went in search of a solution. There are so many books written that tell the story of "Daughters without Mothers" and the steps taken to develop the skills necessary to be a healthy mother. There are many sons without mothers as, well.  Thank God for the courage of those authors who tell their stories and offer hope to those who have to face this reality in their lives.