Yesterday I drug my family to the Silverton Hospital Fun Run. Forcing them to walk three miles with me is an annual Mother’s Day present to myself. This year it was especially hard to coax them out of bed because not only was it raining, it was dumping.
We are so often running in different directions. Venturing out together as a unit from time to time is a necessity that feeds me. I seek a special unified moment regardless of the shape or form it might come in. I experienced that moment…
We had to stop at the grocery store to get an enormous amount of food for the celebration of Mothers of all forms at our house today, the official Mother’s Day. We had so much stuff in the car we had to pile it on top of the kids in the back seat. Maddi was completely buried in our new outdoor seat cushions and Wyatt was hidden behind a giant bouquet of pink and orange and white gerbera daisies.
Their crazed giggles from the back seat, our wet hair and clothes filled me as full as our car. I looked at my husband Ben and said, “We did that – we made them.”
But truly my children made me. Without them I would not be “Mother.” I’m thankful for them every single day. For the insight and hope for the future. For helping me see purpose and experience selflessness.
I’m also thankful every day for my Mother who made sacrifices that I never fully understood until I became a Mother. And to my Grandmothers before her – to my Mother-in-law for bringing me my Ben… to women everywhere who bravely enter the unknown of caring for a new life.
The most profound and defining words I’ve ever found on children are from Kahlil Gibran. This passage taught me an intensely important perspective about my role as Mother…
On Children
Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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