Emptying That Makes Us Full

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you amazing women who make me both a better mother and a better person! For all of the emptying you do, may your hearts be full today! ~ love, Lara

After the aerobic chase of cajoling my teenager into a 15-second photoshoot to memorialize the first day of his senior year in high school, I comfortably settled myself back into my morning routine. Only my husband kept interrupting my coffee euphoria by lamenting how sad it was that our son had reached this milestone that would leave us empty nesters in a year’s time.

“It’s so sad. Aren’t you sad?”  he repeatedly asked.  Half-jokingly I responded, “I’m always sad.  So today is just another day for me.”

And, while I don’t really think of myself as a sad person, I have long recognized the loss that comes with motherhood. It’s been a long journey in grief that began sometime around the loss of my belly button during pregnancy. I’ve been grieving the first of countless lasts since when only mere days after their birth the umbilical cord, the lifeline that once tied their lives to mine, unceremoniously crusted over and lost itself under the rumple of sheets. From there, the lasts continued without any fanfare of formal goodbyes. There was the last time I nursed; the last time I read them a good night story; the last time they slept in bed with me; the last time I packed a lunch; the last time I volunteered in the classroom; the last time I patiently waited while bored in the toy aisle; the last story time at the library; the last time I carried them on my hip; the last time I spent weeks planning a themed birthday party.

I could write volumes on the lasts of motherhood and yes, it would make me sad. But because I’ve been told that it’s important to get out of bed in the morning, I try not to look back. Still, I recognize the inherent imbalance in parenting. Sometimes it feels eerily akin to a bad middle school crush where you live, breathe, and surely would die for that cute boy across the room. Only he meets your unmatched devotion with a vague and indifferent acknowledgment of your existence that is somehow associated with being fed.

It hardly seems romantic, much less fair. But motherhood was never meant to be a two-way street. It’s inherently a giving away of self. It’s sacrifice and sleepless nights. Motherhood is exhaustive and exhausting. It’s frustrating and formidable. It’s all the scary and confusing words you can muster and then a few more that exist in some unknown-to-you language experienced as stomach spasms, migraines, mental breakdowns, or garden-variety heart attacks.

When your newborn spikes a fever, your toddler crawls out of their bed for the umpteenth time, your middle schooler struggles with making friends, your teenager does something epically stupid that’s immortalized on social media, or your adult child experiences a profound loss that you can’t fix, you realize just how much words fail to capture the spectrum of patience, unconditional love, and black coffee which motherhood demands. Being a mama is not a frilly experience of poetic endearment. I’ve never seen a greeting card that describes the supernatural strength, courage, endurance, and overwhelmingly raw ache that it encompasses.

And yet, being a mother has allowed me to experience the deepest most joyful love I’ve known. The emptying of self we experience in motherhood fills us with something far greater. Mothers embrace sacrifice with an uncanny enthusiasm to unravel the best parts of ourselves so that our children can be wrapped in the silky threads of our love. Becoming a mother fundamentally and unalterably changes our identities. Motherhood isn’t about putting our children’s needs before our own, it’s that inexplicable way that their needs supersede our own. No matter how fulfilling or engaging my other life pursuits are, none of them can erode the core component of my maternal identity.  Foremost, I am a mother.  I have a primal need to nurture, protect, and ensure my children’s future.  Whatever I must lose to accomplish that, I lose with joy. This isn’t an either/or experience of good or bad; easy or hard; happy or sad. It’s ands that go on forever linking the coexistence of love’s joy with the sacrifice and loss it entails.

I may get less of them as they grow older, but they remain the biggest part of me. So, whether it’s their first day of school or their last, I’m used to being sad. But the paradox of motherhood, of love itself, is that in the end, this sadness, emptying, and sacrifice ends up being one more thing to be happy about. So, yeah today is just another day for me.

To Love and Be Loved

Everyone asks you when you are little what you what to be when you grow up. Most kids I knew wanted to be something cool like a truck driver or a zookeeper. I just wanted to be a mom. This seemed like an ordinary vocation and so I was always trying to think of something more interesting. Mostly, I considered what I didn’t want to be. At the very top of this list – I knew with great certitude that I didn’t want to be a nun.

While I liked the sisters who taught at my Catholic grade school, I couldn’t wrap my head around the solitude of not having a family. More superficially, I didn’t like the clothes nuns wore or that none of them wore lipstick or cute earrings. Yet, in the years since, I’ve become so enamored with the concept of religious life that I tell my husband that I’m going to join a convent after he dies. (I just need to find one that accepts cats and pink lipstick).

I’m in awe of the sisters I know and know of – the remarkable things they accomplish; the way they glow with peace and joy; and their humility that belies the power they have to indelibly change lives. Of course, no one embodied this more than Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She showed me how cool it was to be a nun. She taught me that there is more than one way to be a mother and more importantly, what it really means to be beautiful.  She was mercy plain, simple, and profound. She didn’t need frivolities because the beauty she exuded came from the purity of her love for God. It radiated.

She brought mercy into the mundanity of care for the sick and dying by doing small things with great love. And by extension, she showed the world how small things become big. Her appeal was universal and her legacy and influence extend beyond what the best statisticians could measure just in my life alone.

I recently read “To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa,” by Jim Towey. In the mid-1980s, Towey had the honor of meeting Mother Teresa while he was a congressional staffer and lawyer. He tells the remarkable story of their unique friendship and how it changed the course of his life. Towey handled many of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity’s legal affairs. He traveled with and helped expand Mother Teresa’s initiatives to care for the sick and the unwanted.

His book gives incredible insight and examples of this great saint that are so fitting with the aim of which she lived– simple stories of the magnitude of small acts. Certainly, Towey himself is one of those stories. On the day he met Mother Teresa and visited the Home of the Dying in India, he was sent to clean the wounds of a man with scabies. That’s not really what Towey in his starched white shirt and dress shoes expected and neither was anything that came after.

That’s probably the best part of the story – of any story that involves God working in our lives – whether it’s Towey’s life, Mother Teresa’s, my life, or yours, is that we really can’t grasp all of the ways God will transform us and our small acts of love. We are often too afraid of what comes after to take the leap of faith to fully surrender our lives to God’s will. Yet, the real takeaway of Mother Teresa’s life is that we can be saints too. We don’t have to join religious life or the Peace Corps or move to India. There are countless ways to practice mercy as an organic part of our daily lives regardless of our vocation. These acts of mercy fall like dominos changing life after life spreading love ad infinitum.

Whether we are nine or ninety, perhaps the answer to the question of what we want to be when we grow up should be the same regardless of whether we are truck drivers, teachers, mothers, lawyers, or sisters. We can be Saints. And, that has to be the coolest vocation not only in this lifetime but in the next.

Hi all ~ If you are in the Jacksonville, Florida area, Jim Towey will be speaking Wednesday, May 10th at the Carla Harris Performing Arts Center at Bishop Kenny High School at 6:30 p.m.

Either way, I encourage you to read his book for its insight into the nuances of Mother Teresa’s life and the beautiful friendship she shared with Towey. To Love and Be Loved is an incredible account of the enormous power of a tiny woman who saw herself as nothing but ordinary, who by example taught us the path of the small way to become extraordinary.

I hope to see you Wednesday. ~ Love, Lara