My Tribute to Moms

Colonial woman dipping candles.

"They had waxed strong in the knowledge of the truth."
Mosiah 17:2

Into the hot wax; out of the hot wax. Into the hot wax; out of the hot wax. I watched as the woman dipped her candles. She held a dowel with ten pieces of string looped over it, and repeatedly lowered it into a vat of melted wax.

Wicks

The first time it looked like nothing stuck to the strings at all. Another dip, and they still looked clean. Patiently, the woman dunked them again, and again, and eventually I could see a film of wax building. Time after time the thin layers adhered to each other, and slowly the strings began to look like candles.

After countless dips.

I've watched other women engaged in an old-fashioned art that also involves patience and repetition. It is mothering. Time after time they dip their kids in character building experiences---say "Please," "Thank you," "I'm sorry;" share your toys; pick up your coat; mind your dad; love your brother; don't whine; feed the dog; say your prayers---over and over again the same admonitions. At first it seems nothing is sticking. The kids are still the same. But eventually they begin to wax strong.

A work of art!

Each experience a child has in character building is like one more dip of the candle.
It is repetitious, it can become wearisome.
But it's worth it.

Art by William Adolphe Bouguereau

"Be not weary in well doing,
for ye are laying the foundation of a great work.
For out of small things proceedeth that which is great."
—D&C 64:33

Matryoshka

This is what I wanted to be:

Matriarch of a big, happy family,
colorful, kerchiefed, round and rosy-cheeked—
who could represent me better?

I started collecting nesting dolls a long time ago. Made in Russia, their real name is Matryoshka, from a word that means Mother. They are sometimes called Babushka dolls, which I like, too, because it means Grandmother.

There are lots of different themes and designs, and I love seeing how the artists from various villages paint them so meticulously. My grandkids love taking the dolls apart to reveal smaller dolls fitting inside one another.

When my granddaughters turn eight, I give them one to keep. The big doll represents her, her mom is next, and I am after that, with generations of grandmothers and great-grandmothers, back and back and back, who all want her to be happy.

A letter is part of the gift, listing all the names and something unique about each one: Lucy loves gymnastics, Heidi loves to bake, Marty loves to write, June loved to sew, Adelila loved to cook, Emily loved her garden. I tell my eight-year-old that they were loved by these women long before they were even born. If they could, all the grandmothers would share the lessons they learned about life with their posterity. "But you have traits of each of them carried right inside your mind and heart," I say. "It's called heredity!"

Art by Kathryn Brown

I hope my little girls can someday realize the blessing of being Matryoshka and Babushka. It has become more challenging to make this choice.

Bryce Christensen said:

"Too many women have succumbed to a dangerously narrow view of womanhood, repudiating homemaking itself as an outmoded and dispensable artifact of a misguided culture."

In his article Homeless America, he states that women's traditional skills have lost their value.

"By rejecting a role differentiation between fathers and mothers, some women have lost sight of the home as an independent moral realm, building relationships and values that are different from those of the commercial realm."

(This is a great article I've referred to often on my blog. It's long, but interesting.)

Some attitudes in our society are absolutely wrong. I hope my little granddaughters will recognize the great lies listed here:

1. Men are smarter, have all the power and are more important, so if we want to have influence in the world we should be more like them.
2. Marriage and family are confining.
3. Motherhood is menial and a waste of any talented woman's time.
4. Women are perpetually frazzled and failing.
5. A woman's value is based on her size, shape, and what she accomplishes outside the home.

--from a talk by Sheri Dew

Some truths I hope my girls will learn from the legacy of their mothers and grandmothers:

1. By developing the God-given nature to nurture, women have a unique opportunity to change the world.
2. The influence of a mother has no limit and no end. She can share every aspect of her education and experience in the atmosphere of love she fashions.
   
3. Creating a home is a way of creating a world.
4. Women have abilities beyond their wildest dreams to organize and create.
5. Women are the soul of a family and a community.

It's been said that women are the survival kit of the human race. That responsibility has been handed down from generation to generation.

I think it's something inside us!

Now it's your turn~

Comment, blog, or think about these questions:

1. What is the main responsibility of a mother?
2. What was your decision to be a mother, or not to be a mother, based on?
3. How do you think the role of motherhood has changed since you were a child?
4. Is that good or bad?
5. How do you feel about the role of motherhood personally?

Write down how you feel about the big questions for your posterity. What's written down becomes the history future generations will search for. Let your story be part of their understanding.

Life in the Motherhood

Who are all these kids and why are they calling me mom?

I used to be this woman: young, formerly cute, with a bad attitude and a mean face. I started out with great theories on raising kids. Then one day I found a 25-pound bag of sugar spread evenly on the storage room floor. The kids and their friends were ice-skating in their socks over the slippery crystals.

Chalking it up to bad outside influences, I kept them isolated from naughty neighbor children. The next thing they designed was a swimming pool. They covered the shower drain with a towel and let the water overflow onto the bathroom floor. The plan was to fill up the bathroom and swim like fish in an aquarium. The resulting flood ruined the tile, and the carpet in the next room.

Experts on child-rearing have never bothered having children. If they did, they'd know nothing works. My theories toppled like blocks in a playroom.

When the corner of the boys bedroom started attracting flies, I investigated. Hmmm ... what was the stinky, sticky liquid that had stiffened the carpet and eaten away the carpet pad ... even the floor boards were dissolving ... Could it be that animals lived in this room and had marked their spot with urine? These could NOT be my children! My children were obediently doing their extra reading at bedtime, not filling their toy box with bodily fluids!

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.

There were emotional issues, too. One kid had a conniption fit when the tub drain was released, convinced that he and all of his loved ones would be sucked down pipes and live in the sewer muck forever. He could hear the plug being released from any room in the house and broke into screams of terror. Another kid refused to take baths. He sat fully clothed on the bathroom floor and stirred the bathwater so it would sound like he was washing his sweat-stained arms.

Fears of wind, car washes, and vacuums ran rampant at our house. Two kids "rolled" their heads in a rhythmic effort to sooth themselves to sleep ... for hours every night! I sat in darkened bedrooms to scare away bad dreams, and laid in darkened doorways to rescue sleepwalkers.

My bad dreams involved taking them out in public. Mom rearranged the furniture one year for Thanksgiving. She hauled the ping-pong table upstairs to the dining room, and set it with her lovely silver and china. The meal got underway, with instructions on where to sit and thanks to great-grandma for her homemade watermelon pickles. "Everybody fold your arms. It's time for the prayer."

I scanned the room for my cute little boys while my sister searched for hers. Suddenly the decorative metal room divider lurched towards the table. As we all looked up in horror we saw four little monkeys clutching the aluminum scroll-work as it fell from it's place between the ceiling and the half-wall. In the nick of time, our husbands caught it before our sons became the centerpiece. Turkey time.

I childproofed the house but they keep getting back in.

I'm not telling these stories to brag. I just want to establish my credentials as an honest-to-goodness mom. Thirty years of on-the-job training taught me that most naughty behavior is just a stage. Happily all seven kids grew out of all conduct unbecoming, and now it's entertaining to watch them deal with their own little rascals.

But what do you do between "the baby just rolled over!" and "he's going away to college?" My dad used to say, "Just love 'em, and make them mind." So, how do you teach them to mind? What works? Time outs, grounding, incentives, threats, taking away privileges, little chats? What's fair? What if you're inconsistent? Is there a place for spanking? (If I was a young mother now I'd be turned in for child abuse for sure.)

(All illustrations here are from the darling book Jillian Jiggs, by Phoebe Gilman.)

As a parent or grandparent, you've been on the front lines and your experience, good and bad, is valuable. If you're not a parent, you were a kid. How did your parents handle tantrums, lying, bad grades, curfew, swearing, speeding tickets or whatever your vice happened to be?

Share!

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Introducing
Kate Juniper Halverson

"Twenty-one grandchildren?" my friend gasped. "Can you even remember their names?" What a silly question! They are the result of my life's work. Let me explain.

One night 43 years ago I sat at a table in Salzburg, Austria surrounded by students. Someone asked someone else if they wanted kids and we all announced how many we wanted. I said "Twelve" at the same time a boy at the other end said "Twelve" and someone else said, "You two ought to get together." We did.

One of our first conversations was "working moms." It was a hot topic in the late 60's with women's lib and birth control offering opportunities to break traditional molds. I told Dee I wanted to be a professional mother, not a mom by default. That was what he wanted for his kids, too.

The whole Ann Romney flap has got me flapping. Stay-at-home-moms were often looked down on in my day. Some people assumed that since working moms did mom stuff, too, those of us who stayed home only did half the work they did. I won't go all defensive here (actually I just did, but I deleted those paragraphs) but I will say I worked full-time. My work was to raise seven well-adjusted, happy kids (we didn't make it to twelve) who would contribute goodness to the world.

I am totally satisfied with my career choice—
especially when I see the results!

Your Life Story: Create White Space

You walk into a bookstore, looking for just the right read. A cover blurb here, a dust-jacket there, an inviting display table—they catch your attention, and you thumb through some pages. Best-selling hardcovers, a rack of new paperbacks, an author you like, your book-club selection. How do you choose? Do you read a random chapter? Start at the beginning? Check the number of pages?

I pick a book based on it's white space. I'm not enticed by pages jam-packed with unrelieved words. Long, mind-numbing paragraphs invite skimming, and tiny margins scream "boring." White space suggests dialogue, characters, time to breathe and enjoy the story, or helpful sub-chapters and room to examine the facts. I like a built-in place to take a cocoa break and turn a book upside down for the night.

Real life needs some white space, too.

When I was a young mom, the modern motto was "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan . . ." implying that a woman could have it all, be it all and do it all. There was a built-in shame factor to that thinking. I assumed there was something wrong with me because I couldn't do it all; I was embarrassed by my deficiency. So I put a lot of energy into appearing to be as capable as I thought everyone else was. Eventually I was just skimming all those long, unfocused paragraphs, missing the meaning of my story. I needed some white space.

Wise editing makes a book readable. If a writer stuffed the pages with every locale, adventure, romance, or thrill she thought up, it would be an overwhelming fantasy. Even the characters would be confused by the dialogue and the plot could unravel. Enlightened authors, of books or life stories, learn to create some white space.

You're writing your life story—
take time to enjoy every chapter.

Make Yourself at Home

"Son, your mother is really a remarkable woman."

The Family in America had a great article by Bryce Christensen. He wrote that the number of homeless people on our streets does not begin to reveal the scope of homelessness in America.

"For since when did the word home signify merely physical shelter, or homelessness merely the lack of shelter? The desperate people sleeping beneath sheets of cardboard above heating grates, and probing for food in dumpsters deserve sympathetic attention. But those who lack housing are not the only people who lack homes.

"For as long as people have used the word, home has signified not only shelter, but also emotional commitment, security, and belonging. Home has connoted not just a necessary roof and warm radiator, but a place sanctified by the abiding ties of wedlock, parenthood, and family obligation; a place demanding sacrifice and devotion, but promising loving care and warm acceptance.

"Their lives anchored in some place fortified by the ties of marriage and family, the great majority of Americans have—until fairly recently—been able to refer to some special place as home, and to do so with the full and rich meaning of that word. In recent decades a devastating number of Americans cannot claim that secure base of family ties that previous generations recognized as the essence of a home."

1922 Magazine Cover

Harold B. Lee said, "The most important work you will ever do will be within the walls of your own home." You don't need to jump over the moon to be remarkable!