From Where I Sit                             Judith Lynch (Melbourne)                        Judith's previous articles       Judith's website    

May 12, 2012                                MOTHERS …AND MORE  
 

Last weekend my youngest daughter hosted a Tupperware party. Eight women aged about twenty through to fiftyish, and me, sitting around  a colourful display of kitchen plastic. After choosing a couple of “I can’t live without…” items, I sat back to enjoy the coffee, nibbles and company.  

Every one of those women planning major Tupperware overhauls of their messy kitchen cupboards was what my mother would have called a working mum, employed outside the home, either full time or part  time. There was an aliveness about them that I both appreciated and envied. These chattering women with their glowing skin, long hair and casual  jeans, looked years younger than my grandmother did  at the same age and not for the first time  I was  struck by the difference a  couple of generations has made.  

But like the long line of women they come from, these young women work really hard at mothering. The way they do it may differ in many ways from the way they were mothered, but the basics are the same. They want their children to be healthy, happy, safe. I used to shudder at the thought of day-long child care, now I’m not so sure. Mothers nurture, but so do professional carers and fill in grandmothers, as well as aunts who never married or who have no family of their own  

Now I have a floaty kind of mind and as I was writing this I somehow drifted into another aspect of mothering – the expression, Holy Mother Church. Well, the Church is nothing much like my idea of a mother. My own mother died suddenly as a result of a fall many years ago. I still miss her. I regret that I didn’t know her better, that I was so wrapped up in my own life that I never got round to asking the questions that could have helped  me link my life with my familial line of mothers.  She was a good mum, but a bit distant, and even if she never actually said it, I knew that I was loved for myself.    

Back to Holy Mother Church. I try to bring softness and understanding and openness to my own mothering. I admit to occasional frustrations with my children and I’m not blind to their shortcomings, (possible because they picked them up from me!), but there’s a bond there that overrides it all. It’s called love.  

This doesn’t sound like Church as I have experienced it. I see a  Church that presents itself  more like a novel set in Victorian times, the kind with an over-strict and distant father figure, focusing on the sons while ignoring the needs and rights of the daughters, a “just you wait till your father gets home” type of parent, ready to uphold  rules and punish infringements. There’s not much mothering there.    

If the title Holy Mother Church is to have any validity in my twenty first century life then I expect it to treat all the “children” as equals. I would want to know that if my lifestyle doesn’t conform to their norm or the basic relationship in my life breaks down irrevocably, that I would be supported and nurtured with loving compassion and care – just like a mother does.  

I don’t see that happening. For a while, in the years following Vatican 2, I thought it was a possibility. But it was never going to be that easy. Nearly fifty years on I still have hope that one day our Church leadership will issue many less prohibitions and open up to the loving, motherly wisdom of the small army of Sophia women quietly working away in hidden places.   

To all who mothering women, whoever you mother and wherever it happens, may you never forget that you are God’s loving face for those you mother.    

Happy Mother’s Day!