How to Be A Good Mother...
According to our pastor, being a good mother really isn't that hard.
And as much as I have to laugh at the suggestion that parenting is easy, he made enough points that I started to take notes. With his permission I have summarized and compressed and paraphrased and added to put together a join list of 5 sort of easy things you need to do to be a good mom.
1. Consecrate our child to God. Baptism is the first step here. We should consecrate our babies to God and bring them in communion with God and His Church.
2. Give your child Jesus. My Pastor brought up of the old adage "you can't give what you don't have". Mothers should be setting aside time to develop their own personal relationships with Jesus so that this can act as a model for normal living. Just as you may give them an appreciation for sports, or art, or music, or literature, you too can give them Jesus.
3. Be sacrificial in your mothering. Serve with love - not begrudgingly. Don't hang on to the past or worry about the future - just give what you have to give. My father used to say "if you don't go to bed tired, your didn't do enough". Never is that more true that with mothering. Somedays it feels like we don't do enough, yet we go to bed (and some mornings wake up) exhausted. Motherhood is a sacrifice and we often have to do things that we dont want to do... but we know we are going to do them anyway so put a smile on your face and take a deep breathe and bring God in to your moment to moment acts of service.
4. Pray for your child. At all stages in their lives. And don't stop praying.
5. Bless your child. Numbers 6:22-27 instructs the israelites how exactly to bless their children and we have adopted it as our bedtime blessing.
The Lord bless you and keep you!
The Lord let his face shine upon
you, and be gracious to you!
The Lord look upon you kindly and
give you peace!
So shall they invoke my name upon the Israelites,
and I will bless them.
It gets a little awkward now that my oldest is bigger than me, but I still try to bless him at every opportunity.Too often, we moms set ourselves an impossibly high bar. Our kids have to be the smartest, prettiest, most polite, most creative, and most athletic or we have failed. Our measure of motherhood shouldn't hang on the snippets of our children's behaviors, but rather should focus on what we are doing in these five areas. Beyond that we have to let go. Our children have free will. All we can do is love them, keep them relatively safe and well fed, and give their spiritual life a firm foundation so that they can develop a relationship with Christ. Now doesn't that seem easy?
