'Hallmark' didn't write about your mom...now what?

There must be more people than me that didn't grow up with the "Beaver's Mom" or even a closely related personality. I will clarify that absolutely wholeheartedly love and honor my mother NOW but it wasn't always that easy. Someone must identify with me as we live in a time and place when most parents (especially Baby Boomer parents) were not that in touch with what God says about being a leader or great at parenting in general. 

I understand that some parenting "styles" that were famous led some of our parents astray. The reality of my parents was a little bit different. They had both been broken beyond compare and divorced (my dad more times than he likes to admit) with broken relationships in large abundance. The largest area of brokenness for BOTH of my parents came through their childhood experiences with parents. Let's face it, I am NOT an opponent of excuses, so by the time you are old enough to get married, divorced and married again - I believe you should have these issues worked through. Alas, they did not have anything even put in a pile to work on, because for them they were just too self-absorbed at times to realize there were better ways.

Now, I will interject this small thought - this blog is not a pitty party, for I need nothing of the sort, but only a glimpse to show you that I can empathize. So, my parents were dysfunctional which is after all a learned behavior and not something we are crippled with a birth. My mother especially had a rough childhood and lost her ability to really nurture a small child. Although in her story I seemed to be the infant that didn't want to be nurtured but my reality was more like a stand-offish mother most of the time who lacked compassion until SHE wanted to be smothered in her children, and by then we wanted nothing to do with it. EVEN through group therapy, individual therapy and some serious years of Jesus doing things to fix the brokenness my parents created there are still struggles in my life to allow my mom to try to hug me. She knows this, so I am not hiding the truth. 

And although my parents gave me things, as I plan to share in future blogs, my point is my mom wasn't the Mother that Hallmark writes all those cards for. We didn't have a relationship that felt anything like those warm and fuzzy or rose covered cards in the store. In my adolescence and innocent youth I often created my own cards, and my mother kept them to "prove my inability to love her" because they were riddled with weird thoughts from me. I would try to conjure up the nicest possible thing to say like, "she likes to cook but not things I like." It was raw and embarrassing as I grew into an adult. 

There is hope if you too have this type of memory. Every night around the age of 8 without much fail I would pray for God to talk to my mom, be real to her, show her He was real to me. She mocked God, and often used the church as a source of discipline if I didn't do the right thing....then I couldn't go for a week. If I was sick on Monday and stayed home from school then Wednesday night church was not allowed. I had no hope to believe this would ever change and in reality my relationship with my mom felt stale and impossible. I didn't know how to love her by then and she didn't seem to know how to love me. 

Let me share with you a truth that set me free: All of my therapy in the world combined couldn't begin to change my childhood or who my mother was or wasn't for me ~ GOD COULD! 

Some one is thinking the way I thought - "God doesn't let us have a childhood over again." Well, no not exactly, but God transformed my need to go back and relive it. And in the Hope that comes with a devotional prayer and constant petition to the Heavens.... He did start changing my mom. And my mom was a hard nut to crack, and even harder one to shut up long enough for God to speak! (Love you mom!)

As an adult I would pray for my mom but much less often until I felt even God had given up on changing or speaking to her. The change and sudden transformation of my mother & her life was both in an instant and is still being changed, Praise God. But it came out of "nowhere" as some would say. One night, she showed up at my home church and was changed before she left. She repented of so many mistakes in front of my home church in a few short weeks my mother started to sound like someone overwhelmed with a compassionate love that takes you somewhere over the rainbow. 

I still faced the problem of our past, and you will always have those disappointments, even WHEN (not if) God makes deep transformations in people you love. No Hallmark card will EVER work for me when looking for Mother's Day cards, but not in a bad way anymore. Now I struggle to find one that says, "You once were a stranger though you gave me life and although we lived in the same home, I longed to know you; I am so thankful for who you are now and who you are to my children and I love making the new memories and moving past the old pain, learning to be loved by you is making all the difference on this Mother's Day." 

They don't make them that raw and that real, but that my dear friends, is why they sell blank cards with beautiful pictures on them. 

For the HOPE that we can fill it up with, not the unrealistic kind of hope but the one that comes from the giver of Life and can ACTUALLY set you free to love, free to believe and free to forgive. Yes, I said forgive, because my story didn't stop when my mother's life met the One true Lover, my story only begins there. The transformation couldn't even start until I completely and forever agreed to forgive her, EVEN IF she NEVER changed and never wanted to love me the way I thought I needed it. My forgiveness unlocked the door that let her in to a place to receive a Savior. 

I hope you know that Hallmark or American Greetings doesn't have as large of an audience as they want you to believe when it comes to what truth is being written between those pages. They simply sell what people want their mom's or childhoods to look like. The only real problem with that is when we forget why we need Jesus, we never really look for a solution to our biggest problems: our pain in our past. We all have some, and without admitting it to someone safe, we will never ask Jesus, the only carpenter qualified, to repair what some other human broke within our lives. 

I hope you can honor your mom, as I honor mine. Even when they seem they don't deserve it, you never know when treated them as Jesus would might just Save their Life and change yours for eternity. 

God Bless You.