BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
It’s a well-known fact amongst ministers that Mother’s
Day is a next to impossible thing to preach on. For every
person who brings a sainted mother to church on
Mother’s Day for a little well-deserved appreciation,
there is someone else gritting their teeth over the utterly
inadequate job their mother did of raising them. And, as a mother through adoption,
I’m keenly aware that the dichotomy of those two hypothetical people is only a shadow
of the complex and ambivalent feelings of those who have never known their birth
mother, or who have chosen not to parent a child to whom they gave birth, or who have
chosen not to give birth to a pregnancy. There is no simple, unambivalent way to talk
about motherhood.
The more I think about my own experience as a mother, and the more I talk with
friends who are mothers, the more I get caught up in what I would call the Goldilocks
Paradox. You remember Goldilocks. She breaks into the house of the Bear family
while they are off on some sort of a family outing. And far from feeling ashamed of her
reckless and invasive behavior, she sets about criticizing everything. The Papa Bear’s
chair is too big. The Mama Bear’s chair is too small. The Papa Bear’s porridge is too
hot. The Mama Bear’s porridge is too cold. Only the Baby Bear has things just right.
Having a child, it seems to me, is a great
deal like having Goldilocks break into your
home, only without the option of scaring
her off at the end of the story. This small,
imperious being moves in and takes up
residence, and there is no way that the parental role will ever be just right. Only the
baby gets to be perfect. In any given situation your response as a parent will be too
hard or too soft, too warm or too cold. The job of a parent is to provide children with
limitless, unconditional love and affirmation, with a deep sense of safety and of being
at home in the world and in their own bodies. At the same time, however, a parent is
also charged with setting limits, teaching boundaries and self-control, ensuring that a
child knows what behaviors are unacceptable and what things are terribly dangerous.
Children cannot thrive—perhaps cannot even survive—without both all-encompassing
love and clear boundaries and limits, and those two essential qualities are invariably at
odds. It is our task to teach our children that they can be anything, do anything, that
they have the power to live out their wildest dreams. At the same time, we must teach
them to avoid what is unsafe, to check their unwise impulses, to speak politely and use
the right silverware—or, more realistically, to use silverware at all.
There is, as far as I can tell, no way to do it right, nor any way to tell whether at any
given moment you have made the right choice. At what age, if any, do you put babies
on a sleeping schedule and let them cry themselves to sleep? What is a categorically
unsafe thing to climb on, and what only looks dangerous when it is merely adventurous?
How old is old enough to walk alone to a friend’s house, or to stay in the house
while you run an errand?
There is no clear-cut, Baby Bear, just-right answer. So the chances are good that much
of the time what we got from our mother was too hard or too soft, too distant or too
confining, too restrictive or too permissive, too demanding or too indifferent, anything
but just right.
Of course, what we rarely acknowledge
on Mother’s Day is that our
moms probably had just as complicated
and ambivalent feelings about raising
us as we may have about how we were
raised. I have talked to a wide variety
of loving, dedicated moms who have
confessed that, while they would never
hit their child and abhor child abuse,
they nonetheless fully understand, in
the pit of the stomach as well as in the
rational mind, how it is that parents
come to physically hurt their children.
I couldn’t say for sure, but I rely on the
assumption that my own personal mix
of devotion and murderous rage is
probably more typical of motherhood
than the beatific images of the
Madonna which are held up for us as
expectation and ideal. Mothers have
been viewed through the archetypal
split of the passive, all-loving
Madonna or the terrifying energy of
the goddess Kali who devours her children
as she dances. The truth of the
dance of motherhood, however, is
something much richer and more complicated
than that good mother/bad
mother split. Our experience of our
mothers, and their experience of us,
leads us straight into the heart of the
paradox of human life—the reality that
we are, at one and the same time, inextricably
bound to and inseparable from
all of life and that at the same time we
are also independent beings, living our
individual lives within the boundaries
of our individual skins. Through our
mothers we are given the primal experience
of unity, the sensation of
floating, utterly secure and utterly
bonded, within the body of another.
Before we learn to identify our separate
selves it is our mother’s body that
sustains us, that serves our every need.
And it is through the failure of that
mother’s body to perfectly read and
respond to our every desire that we
first discover our separateness, our
distinct and independent identity.
We want unconditional, unquestioning
love, to be loved simply because we are there. But we also want to be recognized
for our unique selves, our particular
accomplishments. We want our
soccer games attended, our pictures on
the refrigerator, our cartwheels or football
tosses endlessly and individually
praised. All of our lives, it seems, we
are caught up in that same dance of
separateness and unity, sensing that we
are somehow only whole in relationship,
in connection, yet knowing at the
same time that our growth as human
beings depends upon our development
as independent individuals with a set of
experiences and opinions that are
unique in the world.
The trick about love is that it exists not
only because of our unity, our profound
connection to one another, but
also because of our difference. Love
depends upon there being an “other” to
whom we can reach out. The primal
union of an infant may be perfect or
ecstatic, but it isn’t really love. Love
exists when we cross the boundaries,
when we acknowledge and appreciate
someone for who they are, when we
connect across our diversity, when we
allow the skin which defines us to
touch.
And in my life, certainly the greatest
and scariest adventure into this realm
of love was the choice to bring a child
into our family. Adopting a child is a
leap of faith of such magnitude as to
seem more like free-fall. What sensible
person would commit to loving a total
stranger, some random person off the
street? Of course, Jesus said “Love
your neighbor,” but even he didn’t
suggest that you take that neighbor,
whatever neighbor you happened to
get, and bring them into your house for
the next two decades. We’re talking love here—not some namby-pamby
sort of general goodwill, but unconditional,
diaper-changing, tantrumtolerating,
hands-on, unshakeable love.
No questions asked, and no backsies.
There is a prevailing myth amongst
adoptive parents that our children were
somehow destined for us, divinely or
cosmically pre-ordained. It might be
true. I marvel at the ways my daughter
shares her mothers’ love of music and
dancing, of animals and reading and
thrift stores. However, it is also true
that my daughter and I couldn’t be
more different. Mattéa is a raging extrovert
who lives her emotions in operatic
tones. I am reserved by nature, and
inclined to mumble.
Now, it’s possible some committee of
angels did the calculations and determined
to put us together. Or maybe the
truth is more shattering, and more
beautiful. Perhaps it is, in fact, possible
to take any random person and place
them in the center of your heart. Perhaps
love is so possible, so strong, that
all it requires is intimacy, and the will
for it to be so. Perhaps any one of us,
ordinary as we are, could meet up with
any other ordinary person and care for
them and be beholden to them and love
them, love them, for all the rest of our
days.
There are no perfect parents, no single
right way. But there is that ongoing
miracle—whether through birth or
adoption, as mothers or fathers, people
do choose, all the time, to invite Goldilocks
into the house. We make up the
bed and fix the chair and adjust the
porridge until it is just right. We say to
this mysterious stranger, this person
who is, at essence, always unknown to
us, “My house is your house. My heart
is your heart. For now and for always.”
It is, in the end, the quintessential religious
message, the heart of our Unitarian
Universalist faith: whoever you are,
there is a place for you. The table is
set, and you—whatever your quirks—
you are welcome. There is always
enough love.
