How do we invite it in? That is, the privilege of family, especially on this Mother’s Day when the great divide between what we think we have and what we most deserve toils with our love.
A woman’s worth is measured not by what she must endure or stand firm against, or her hours of labour in loving her children to the best of her ability. She is measured, sized up and expected to be everything to everyone all of the time, all the while building a bank balance to meet the sizeable demands of security and expectation.
Being a mother is a vocation of love. And the most worthwhile of all professions that seeks no payment, only the privilege of responsibility in teaching her children to be proud of who they are.
And in her dedication to her family, we as one woman dedicated to all women - the modern mother - become the explorer to all dreams, past, present and future.
We share the aches of our grandmothers, whose beauty, wisdom and rich intelligence was forsaken to the limitations of opportunity. It is they we carry forward in our womb and in our heart as our undying promise that we will listen to what binds us to feel complete.
Our daughters are our messengers of hope, carving the unknown path to honouring what we could not. It is the waiting of time that we must feel so as to reveal just how those same precious qualities of our hard earnt strength and determined courage are remembered against the backdrop of a measured life.
How we invite it in becomes our wisdom as we listen and look far into the future to see deep into the past to know how the present-day moment is held in the intelligence of our hands by the choices we have made.
Strength and beauty is our wisdom to honour. We pass it on as love. We touch it in the holding of hands. And we embrace it in the hugging of our children. Love is our enduring practice that seeks no payment, no reward, just the truth of a heart that knows how to invite it in and how to make it a home.
The picture is of my daughter and my mother. I stand between what my grandmothers endured and what the future of families holds.
