The role of a mother is vast: a mother tends, nurtures, encourages, teaches, forms, corrects, cares for, protects, provides, calls forth, cleans, orders, cuddles, and repeats – every day, week in week out, month in month out, year in year out – for years!! Much of this activity is done alone. Much of her work is unseen and unsung. The reward is often hidden from her as her children grow up and grow out of her care and into the world. 

Some mothers suffer rejection at the hands of their children, other mothers suffer endless neediness from their offspring. Life can be cruel and unjust. Motherhood can be thankless and rewarding all at once! 

The modern context has not helped Motherhood. The role of “mother” is attacked and derided as meaningless and unnecessary. The need to earn a wage to meet the exponential cost of living has demanded that mothers abandon the role of motherhood and homemaker and place her children into the hands of multiple “carers”.

A carer is not a mother. Whilst I do not wish to denigrate the great love and affection and devotion that the early childhood carers have for the children in their care – at the end of the shift they go home – they leave the children in the hands of another “carer”. And so, there can develop this core wound in a child that they are dispensable.

I digress. But I do so to make a point. When a child has the heart knowledge that their mother is always there for them, that their mother knows their needs before they express them, that their mother will tend to them in sickness and in health, they experience the growth of confident trust, of worthiness, and of the beauty of a reliable presence in their life.

This mothering that mothers live can be a lonesome task. It can be depleting of the heart if it remains thankless and unobserved. Mothers need the reliable trustworthy presence of other women in their lives.

Mothers need mothering. 

We remain human, our needs remain human, what fills us up remains human. Many of us mother out of the wounds from our own mothers, and there are many times when it is a case of “the blind leading the blind.” We bash away, we make mistakes, we feel crushed when we yell and lose our temper, we make funny memes about our failures and try to make light of the deep needs of our hearts as they often go unmet.

I don’t think that we were designed to mother in isolation from a community of mothers and families. I don’t think that it is healthy to spend so much time alone with little people. Like all the goods of life – a shared experience of mothering is life giving. Being with other people helps us not to give way to the frustrations we feel, we see other mother’s needs that we can respond to, others see our needs and we can be responded to.

When we are sad, we need a shoulder to rest upon and weep; when we are happy, we need to share laughter and jokes; when we are hungry, we need to be fed; when we are confused, we need help to see clearly; when we feel grief, we sometimes need a lap to sob in. We often need an extended hug – we need to be held.

The particular quality that I am speaking of is the detached goodness of a mother. Those with children know it: our toddler falls down, they come and weep and accept a cuddle and some consoling words, and then they recover and run off back to the activity, and we let them go. There is immense freedom in this kind of mothering. It is not reciprocated in the moment. It is not equal. It is holding, then letting go.

Edith Stein says that the sin of possession is what women struggle with the most. This impacts how we mother, how we wife, how we friend, and how we think of our things. As mothers, our role is to form our children in order that we can let them go out into the world and not keep a grasping hold of them. As friends to one another, it requires that we continually receive one another into our hearts, and then let each other go. 

Our times have caused great confusion. Our capacity for proper feminine intimacy have been sullied by sexual implications and confused desires. Our very real and genuine desire for feminine intimacy is good and comes from a God who built us for intimate communion with Him. He gave us His son, He gives us the Mother of His Son with whom He entrusted the Motherhood of all: intimate love.

But life in the modern context is like a great walled garden that has been abandoned to weeds, to overgrown wilderness, to disorder, to cruel neglect, and disharmony. It strikes me that our task as Christian women is to bring order – slowly, painstakingly – to our own hearts, so that we might help others bring order to their own. This task is both internal and external, it is obtained through the discipline required of virtue. 

There is the ordering of the self as the daughter of God.
There is the ordering of our psycho-sexual selves.
There is the ordering of our feminine self.
There is the ordering of the self as daughter.
There is the ordering of the self as wife.
There is the ordering of the self as friend.

There is the ordering of the self as mother.

There is the ordering of the ordering of our homes, our workplaces, our worship spaces.

The Catholic Christian woman can be lumbered with the belief that she has to appear to be perfect and to have it “all together”. The “perfect wife; who can find her” is a piece of scripture that often haunts us; because of course the answer is – NO ONE!!! 

Many mothers become threadbare, and we have not the darning skills necessary to patch ourselves. The “patches” that we do apply are often pathetic bandaids that just serve to uphold a “false self” that will tear apart completely in time.

And this is where the “mothering” comes in. We need other women to teach us to woman! The fact that we are fallen is often lost on us; the reality that we are dis-integrated and in need of integration is forgotten in the pursuit of a big home with two flash cars and memberships to all the children’s sporting clubs within coo-ee!

We are often crushed under the weight of perfectionism and of comparison to others. As the saying goes, “comparison is the thief of joy.” And yet, we mothers often compare ourselves to other mothers. As my husband says, “women dress for other women.” What he means by this is that men, by and large, do not notice our new hairstyle, our children’s outfits, their shoes – but other women do!

Once more – we need a mother figure. She need not be any older. She need not be a biological mum! She need not be perfect – for she will not be perfect – but in the area where we are deficient in the moment, we need a “mother” to step into our pain, our weakness, our frailty, to hold us and then call us on, teach us with compassion how to grow, to become the “whole” woman we are called to: the holy women.

My favourite mystery is The Visitation. In this decade we ponder the devoted love of Mary, carrying the Lord of the Universe in her belly, travelling to see Elizabeth, who carries John the Baptist in her womb. They greet and hold each other in an intimate display of pure affection and love. To our pagan world this image of love and devotion must be extremely confronting. This – for me – is the icon of love that we should aim for with our female friendships; this is the utter and pure devotion that we desire to feel from another woman when she comes to attend to our heart and help in our home.

In my life I have been blessed with a wondrous array of role models. These women, through their love and desire for holiness, have demonstrated various aspects of “order” that I have learned from and have applied in my life. Some have demonstrated an order in the home, some in their faithfulness to prayer, some in their tenderness toward their children, others in their living of the way they “wife”, yet more in the way they hold and nurture and attend to the needs of those around them. 

When there is no judgement of me, I have flourished under the tender gaze of their love. To love someone is to desire their good, to desire their flourishing, to desire their healing and to desire that they are happy! Happiness comes when there is a correct ordering of “goods”, a correct ordering of our vocational call in life, and intimate union with Jesus Christ. 

In short, the primacy of the ordering of our heart must be our priority. An inward going outward motion. The overflowing of our inner order out into the world will bring healing. As mothers, this is our role in the family – to send loved children out into the world to live love. The world is in dire need of ordered love.

An ordered mother’s love is passionate, deeply protective, radically oriented to the true, the good and the beautiful. A mother’s love calls us forward, encourages us, consoles us, strengthens us, lives our suffering with us and says, “I see you! I love you! You are doing a wonderful job! Keep going!”

May we all manifest deeply the attitude of Mary, our Mother, as Gerald Vann OP writes of her in The Water and the Fire, “She is the embodiment of the perfection of human love in its blending of strength and tenderness.”

~ Sarah McDonald

Sarah is married to James and they are blessed with four children. Sarah gained a degree in Education, had a cerebral hemorrhage and returned to study Chinese Medicine and shiatsu therapy. By her account, she wasted her 20s gallivanting around the world before experiencing a conversion in Paris at the 1997 World Youth Day.

She and James have recently moved to the foothills of the Snowy Mountains where Sarah teaches grammar at the Augustine Academy Liberal Arts School.