By Don Burger | For The Brookings Register
We recently celebrated Mother’s Day, a day my wife has long described as “a wretched evil that never should have been invented.” She made this determination several years ago after recognizing that she felt like a failure as a mother every Mother’s Day. On that day, our young children would fight with each other instead of getting along, breakfast in bed tended somehow to be both burnt and undercooked, and the sermons at church — focused almost exclusively on idealized depictions of perfect mothers and their families — just made all the women in the congregation feel worse by comparison. Her expectations for Mother’s Day — in line with those church depictions of perfect motherhood — just never quite measured up with reality.
Now our children are mostly grown. They have matured out of their rowdy, harum-scarum boyhoods into men who make choices that bring us, their parents, a lot of joy. People today come up to my wife or me and tell us that we must be wonderful parents to have raised such sons. Typically, our response to such comments is that our sons are great, to be sure, but that we really cannot claim any credit for it. They are just good men and they were sent to us that way. We can’t take credit for their good choices any more than we can take credit for their poor choices (of which there are plenty). We simply did the best we could as parents to teach them correct principles, and then we have to let them make and live with the choices they make either living in accordance with or in opposition to those principles.
For parents who are in the thick of raising children, for parents who have children who make choices contrary to your desires, for parents who struggle with feelings of inadequacy and failure, remember this: God is the perfect parent (we call him Heavenly Father). I guarantee that his children (us) do things all the time that are contrary to his will for us. Does that make him a failed parent? I don’t think so.
I invite you to bring God into your family and your parenting. His grace will make up the difference between your shortcomings and imperfections. With Him, Mother’s Day really can be a day to celebrate being a parent, even when our kids don’t do what we want them to do. It’s OK. You are enough.
This week’s Reflections column was written by Don Burger, bishop at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
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