It hit me all at once. I finally understood why it's hard to find a peaceful confidence that I’m loving my children well enough.
I was talking to someone who grew up with an abusive and distant mother. She was moved to tears after reading something I had written about what I would give up to let my little boy who died live more of his life. I would live homeless, jobless, and in poverty. I would give my own life if it meant I could give my son more of his. After reading this she said, “It is such a powerful testament to what a mother’s love is supposed to be like.”
She ugly-cried over the statement that felt to me like a normal thing that mothers would do. It was ordinary to me, but a profound testament of unconditional love to her.
As she was expressing this movement of her heart and what it was like for her to witness that kind of love, I was thinking, “I do love them with every ounce of my being, but I’m still not sure that I’m very good at loving them.”
I get short-tempered when they don’t cooperate (even when I know it’s in developmentally appropriate ways.)
When they come to me just wanting my attention, shouting “Mom!” from across the room 150 times, rather than turning to them with gentleness and love, I scowl and scold. “Be patient! I’m in the middle of something! You are being rude.”
I say things like, "Stop eating like a creature! For the millionth time--USE YOUR SILVERWARE!" or "You're being annoying. Go somewhere else."
I never feel like I’m giving each of them enough individual attention to really know their hearts, their worries, their inspirations, and their fears.
They want me to help them with a project and too often I’m “busy.”
I want to be better. I want to do it perfectly. I want to love each of them in a way that gives them exactly what they need. And I hate the idea that my wounds and inadequacies as a mother might create wounds for them.
When I was being told that I give a profound witness of a mother's love while internally feeling all of my shortcomings, it put me in a position to reflect on why I feel this gap.
All at once, I knew the answer.
The death of my son taught me profoundly and deeply about the eternal nature of love. Even death cannot stamp out my love for my child. A mother’s love echoes the love of God. It is infinite.
The gap is present because I am longing to express an infinite love through a finite body. I live in a body that is confined to one time and one place. I can only attend to one thing at a time, and I have a body that needs to sleep, and eat, and shower... and it gets moody if those things aren't happening. I have a brain and a spirit that needs its own nourishing as I care for the little people around me.
All of this means that while I walk this earth there will be limits to how I can express my limitless love. That gap is meant to be there. If we recognize this and surrender to the fact that, for now, it’s supposed to be that way, we can see that God uses this space to call us to what is eternal.
C.S. Lewis describes this phenomenon like this: If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.
If you love your people with everything you have but are never truly satisfied with how well your finite body is expressing that infinite love, don’t despise that feeling. It’s an earthly blessing, a reminder that we are meant for more, and it’s a calling to turn our eyes to our true country where at last, we can love without limits.
Want more about what our loss teaches us about love?
Check out the book A Thousand Pounds.
Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3zF9tW2