Benediction: On Being a Mother

I grew up going to a small Presbyterian church with a red carpet that went down the middle of the sanctuary, old wooden benches with puke yellow cushions, and beautiful navy blue hardback hymnals. My family started attending church when I was two years old because a neighbor lady invited my mom to a Friday morning Bible study. She resisted for a time, but finally agreed to go with the neighbor and encountered the very people she’d been searching for her entire life, along with the God she never knew she’d always wanted. We’ve all gone to church ever since.

On Sunday mornings at the very end of each service, after the final hymn, the pastor would raise up his hand and give a benediction: the blessing. The Lord bless you… the Lord keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you… Now to him who is able to keep you falling falling, and present you before his glorious presence ….

My mom, a petite lovely woman, overcome with this newfound love and brand new faith, would gather me and my sisters up into her arms right as the pastor would lift his hand for the benediction. She insisted on holding us tight as he raised his voice over the congregation and blessed us. I can still feel her soft cool hands on me, the brush of her cheek as she rested her face against my hair, the clearing of her throat, and the tender manner she held us to her breast as the strong, life-giving words fell over us … May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.  

I’ve been a mother now for twelve years and often reflect on those Sunday mornings, on how she insisted on drawing us near, on holding us while the pastor blessed us, as if she, in a stubborn, you-will-be-blessed, sort of way, was securing God’s favor over our lives. She wanted us to hear that God blessed us. She wanted us to know that God’s face shined on us, and she wanted us to hear it tucked up in her arms. 

I think by that point in her life, my mom had already learned how little control we actually have in this world, how much of a struggle it is to find our way, to know where we fit, to wrangle through this earth with some modicum of composure, and how easy it is to get lost and lose our way. And so on Sunday mornings, when there was someone with some kind of spiritual authority ready to pronounce a blessing, she made damn sure her girls were tucked up close to hear it, and receive it. 

Maybe that is the essence of motherhood.

I watch my children grow stronger, bigger, more sturdy day in and day out. I’ve kissed them goodnight, washed their sores, brushed the hair off their face, cried with them in my arms more times than I could ever begin to count and it’s been the greatest joy of my life. Becoming a mother changed me inside and out. Becoming a mom gave me a kind of purpose that I’d never known.

As they grow and we send them into the world, I’d give about anything to secure their safety, their prosperity, to give them the assurance that it will go well with them … But I can’t. I am only a woman, after all. We do a lot, but we do not hold tomorrow in our hands.

And so, with a dogged and stubborn faith, we gather them into our arms, and we lift up their heads to the One who does hold tomorrow in his hands … and we stubbornly stand there and demand that He bless our children, that He take care of them, that He love them with the same steadfast love we have for them … and we believe that maybe, just maybe, though it could hardly be possible, He might even love them more than we do.

We choose to believe that if anyone is trustworthy to tend to them in this great big wilderness of life, it’s God.