Missing Mom: Christ’s Comfort on Difficult Mother’s Days
These days, I get a warning that Mother’s Day is coming. As the fuchsia peonies by my front door prepare to burst into bloom, so does the ache within.
Another Mother’s Day without Mom.
I know before it arrives that this holiday will contain a mixed bouquet of emotions for me. My husband will let me sleep in before church. Our three kids will greet me with handmade cards and sticky French-toast fingers. I will feel appreciated and loved. And then, sometime around mid-afternoon, I will reach for my phone and realize—I want to call Mom. The last two-and-a-half years since she died haven’t unraveled the habit of dialing her number, especially on this day.
These days, I miss her most in my mothering. I am in the thick of a life stage I have never before navigated, and the list of questions I wish I could ask her only grows: Did I read as much as Cora does? Where did Ruby get that crinkle in her nose? Did you ever feel like you were making it up as you went along?
Hard Holidays
Whether you are missing a mother who’s no longer here or grieving a motherhood that’s not what you thought it would be, these Hallmark holidays can be extra hard. As mothers on Mother’s Day, we often bounce between what we think we should feel and what we actually do. But, in the arms of a Savior who said our sorrow would one day be turned to joy,[1] we can find the space to feel both.
Motherhood, after all, has always contained the capacity for great love alongside the prospect of great loss.[2] Learning to embrace both leaves us a little more like Paul, who described himself as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10), and like the Savior who endured great sorrow on the cross “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb. 12:2).
What does that look like on a Mother’s Day—or any day—that leaves us grateful, yet groaning for what we miss? It means we feel the way grief has hollowed us out, leaving us unable to “get it together” sometimes—to be the mom we feel like we should be. But it also means finding in that hollow space the capacity for more—more of what truly matters, more depth, and even, surprisingly, more joy.
Holding Tension
Sorrowful-yet-rejoicing reminds me of the evening my son found me sobbing on the stairs and crouched beside me to cry too. Sorrowful-yet-rejoicing reminds me of finding the spray toy my mom bought the kids for their baths and replacing the batteries to give it new life. Sorrowful-yet-rejoicing reminds me of aching for Mom with one breath and being grateful that her suffering is over with the next—that, one day, mine will be, too.
But sorrowful-yet-rejoicing is also a hard tension to hold on my own. When the stomach flu tore through our household for a second week recently, I wished again that I could call and moan to my mom—to hear all over her reminders to “drink some Sprite” and “take a nap.” If I’m honest, I was starting to feel supremely sorry for myself, what with no mother around to comfort me as I comforted my own children. (The stomach flu has a way of taking us down to the studs, doesn’t it?)
Providentially, I was also having this particular pity party in the shower, where I’d taped the words to Romans 8 on the tile wall to help me memorize them. At that moment, my eyes ran over this verse as if for the first time:
“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:16, emphasis mine).
When I was most tempted to wallow in my motherless-ness, this gracious truth washed over me: I am a child of God. Even in my loneliest moments, I am not alone. And the One who owns and holds all things together has made himself my inheritance. I have the comfort I crave, and I have in him access to all that I truly need, even now.
Being Held
Motherhood is already a practice of holding what is precious—like peonies and toddler-blown bubbles and memories of good mothers—with an open palm. And, I’ve found, it is also the practice of learning again to be held.
These moments of missing, then, have become for me arrows back to the One who alone satisfies my greatest longings.
Longing, after all, is woven into the fabric of mothering and of being mothered—of seasons that are too short and too long at the same time. Longing reminds me that right now can be good and hard and brief all at the same time. Longing reminds me to hold still, to hold on to what is in my arms, and to let myself be held while I do.
When our first child was born, I used a dry erase marker to scrawl the words of Isaiah 40:11 across a mirror in her nursery: “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.”
I sensed, in my early days of mothering, that I would need to be reminded: I am not the one holding this life together. And as I continue mothering, now without my own mom, I see I still need the reminder. And, even when I forget, I am still held, too.
[1] John 16:20
[2] Genesis 3:16
