Today, the primary children will sing a hymn titled “I often go walking.” I’ll show my cards upfront: I love this song. It was written by Phyllis Kay Luch, the illustrator of the current children’s songbook. It is the only song she personally contributed to the collection. These are the lyrics:
I often go walking in meadows of clover,
And I gather armfuls of blossoms of blue.
I gather the blossoms the whole meadow over;
Dear mother, all flowers remind me of you.
O mother, I give you my love with each flower
To give forth sweet fragrance a whole lifetime through;
For if I love blossoms and meadows and walking,
I learn how to love them, dear mother, from you.
The first time I heard this song, I thought it was a sweet, though perhaps somewhat saccharine praise of mothers and motherhood. The imagery of flowers, fragrances, and meadows is both lovely and a bit ponderous. Still, it’s a nice opportunity to reflect on our own angel mothers as we listen to Phyllis address hers.
Today is Mother’s Day. It’s a day that carries a lot of complex emotions for so many women. For myself, I often feel real cognitive dissonance between the work of motherhood in daily life, and the sincere praises of mothers featuring images of flowers and fragrances and meadows.
Because for me, parenting is usually much grittier than baking cookies or picking wildflowers. It’s absolutely one of the most meaningful, soul-defining parts of my life. And it’s also, without a doubt, the ugliest work I do. Not just wiping bums or cleaning puke, though that’s not not part of it. But the emotional labor. The frequent sleep deprivation. The sitting by myself in a corner for a few minutes to avoid shouting. Sometimes shouting anyway. This isn’t work I feel naturally adept at.
I really want to be a good person, and a good mom. I try hard. And I fail a lot. Basic things, like patience, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, vulnerability, responsibility. Embarrassingly, I think I fail most at home and church, the two places I am most committed to and care about with my whole soul. That is terribly inconvenient, because as we have heard from David O. McKay, “no other success can compensate for failure in the home.”
Alas, I am no angel mother. In the trenches of home and family life, there have been days when it felt like all I could hope for was to be a good enough mom. There have been times when I’ve worried I’ve fallen short even of that.
And so today, I wanted to address any woman or mother or parent or human who, like me, tries very hard to be good, and still fails.
First, I do think we are in good company, because the history of humanity has been a record of thoroughly imperfect families. Cain killed Abel. Abraham banished Ishmael. Rebecca tricked Isaac. Jacob favored Joseph. The family of Lehi and Sariah collapsed into violence and ruin. Failure after failure. Hurt perpetuating hurt. Search if you will, but you will not find a perfect family in all of scripture or anywhere in history.
When I was a teenager, I offered to digitize my Great-Grandma Sadie’s writings for a young women’s project. I received a massive box from my grandmother with planners dating back before the 1970’s. As I looked through them, I found names written down on almost every date. I asked my mother what they were. She told me they were the people who had upset or disappointed my great-grandmother that day. Sadie made a habit of writing names like grievances in her planner and then calling those individuals to inform them that they were now in her book. My mother’s name was there, multiple times. She cried when Sadie called to tell her. I was stunned by the meanness of this practice, and refused to transcribe the planners.
But I did type out her journal, which featured only a brief autobiography, a few copied quotes, and a shopping list scrawled on the back of a K-Mart receipt. She wrote about discovering the friend who had swindled her impoverished family out of thousands of dollars every harvest because they weren’t educated enough to realize it. She wrote about the intense loneliness and betrayal she felt when her siblings moved away, leaving her all alone to care for an aging and increasingly needy mother. And on the shopping list, she wrote a reminder to purchase a card for my Uncle Ken’s birthday, and to call him. I never knew my Uncle Ken very well. I only knew that he tried to be good, but had an unwell mind which made loving difficult, especially for a strict moralist like Sadie. I thought the effort behind her reminder was beautiful and redemptive. I glimpsed a grandmother who was striving, imperfectly, to love a very imperfect grandson.
While an inheritance of godliness is ours, so is this: a terribly complex legacy of profoundly flawed matriarchs and patriarchs. Their blood is in our blood. Their glories and failures are reflected in our triumphs and inadequacies.
Saying that, I also believe there are some blessings to shared brokenness.
Several of the documentaries my husband Josh and I and I have been involved in deal with child and adolescent mental wellness. In the course of producing those films, we interviewed some of the nation’s leading experts in that field. We tried to bring their knowledge to our parenting. And there were times I watched my boy sharing a little better than his friends, or riding a bike a bit earlier than his cousins, and I thought I was a pretty good parent.
Then humiliatingly, Josh and I were accused of child abuse and became the subjects of a very thorough and public investigation into the most intimate spaces of our lives. I recall feeling deep embarrassment as we called friends begging for favors like “could my children and in-laws live in your basement for an indefinite period of time?” or “could we stay in your guesthouse this weekend in case the police come to our home to arrest us” or even “would you please write a character statement for us to send to the legal authorities?” I qualified almost every request with “if you’re willing and comfortable” because who was I, an accused child abuser, to ask for others to vouch for my character? My first week back at church with our children was very hard. As I entered the chapel clutching my baby under the state-mandated supervision of my in-laws, I felt everyone looking at me.
Of course I wish our CPS case had never happened for so many reasons. But I did learn to be humble about my parenting. I was, after all, the only mother in the playgroup on the abuse registry. It prepared me to have open conversations with other parents in similar situations, even parents more culpable than I. And I began to remember with greater kindness the unkindnesses in my own family history. The intense, painful, and public scrutiny of my parental weaknesses was a lesson in turning my heart to my foremothers and forefathers, and the mothers and fathers all around me.
It is awkward, difficult, and sometimes painful to observe brokenness and unloving behavior in our own families, whether distant or recent. But as someone who is herself broken and often quite difficult to love, I am determined to face it honestly and compassionately.
I think it is useful context for you to know that in fact, Phyllis Luch did not have an angel mother. As she explained in a fireside discussing her hymn:
I loved my mother though no one could be close to her. Many times…I wished she would die; the pain she caused (though she could not help it) was too great. In truth my mother was a shattered and unknowable non-personality; lost in a world of demons and tormentors. Fifty years later we now have medicines to help somewhat, this form of insanity. The hallucinations, crazy gestures, violent and vulgar behaviors of schizophrenia were part of our daily lives.
In her sermon, Phyllis describes a childhood that was frequently frightening, dank, and uncertain. The miseries of her mother’s many limitations compounded upon the children and family. And yet, despite this background and when she could have contributed a piece about anything, Phyllis wrote a hymn about motherhood, addressed to her own very imperfect mother.
So what is this song about, if not an idyllic mother in a field of flowers? Perhaps it’s an ode to motherhood in general. Perhaps it’s an imagination of what sort of a mother she wished she’d known. But it is also a record of Phyllis’ sincere effort to reach out in genuine gratitude, charity, and appreciation to the mother she had. The only place she recalled her mother being at peace was when the family would go out into fields and meadows. There, 10 year old Phyllis was astonished to find that her mother knew the name of even the shiest and most insignificant wildflower.
The song is a peace offering, a flower, an exercise in gritty love extended to a mother in full view of her failures and shortcomings. And, perhaps, it is a prayer that other children will learn to extend the same frank honesty and healing compassion to their parents, blossom for blossom.
To be part of a family is to take part in the often ugly work of loving. Children will delight you, bless you, break you. And, despite their best efforts and purest intentions, so will parents. So much of family life involves mutual toleration, generosity, and patience. It is an ongoing commitment from mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, to dedicate ourselves again and again to people as beautifully and painfully human as we are. It’s a lot to ask, and we don’t always get it right. But we try again, and we hope. Because as Chieko Okazaki has said, “To choose hope is to choose life. To choose hope is to choose love.” I do love my children and my family with everything I have in me. Like my mother loves me. Like my grandmother loves her. Like Sadie loved them both. And I believe in a God who is a great consecrator of love.
Phyllis’ point in writing her hymn, or my point in talking about it at least, is that we do not attempt the heavy task of turning our hearts to our mothers and fathers because they were perfect or easy to love. We do it because that effort of love transforms us and them. As Phyllis once wrote, “We can use our failures, hurts, bad circumstances, etc. as dirt to cover ourselves with or as mulch to grow a violet or a sunflower or a giant redwood for many birds to nest in.”
This laboring love is redemptive and challenging, courageous and demanding. It is a love that must learn to withstand tantrums and shouting, generational hurts and broken hearts. It is a love that persists beyond our own failures and inadequacies, as well as beyond hers and his. It is a love that can be knocked down over and over again and keep returning. A love that will never, ever give up on the child.
Three years ago this July, we blessed my then infant son Cal. We had just been allowed limited visitation a few days before with no reassurances that it would remain in place. As there were several family members in town anyway working to help us regain custody, we decided to bless our child while we knew we still could. My grandmother sent a white outfit to dress him in. My family gathered on zoom and in the living room of a ward member’s home where my children were living. Partway through the blessing, Clarence ran into the circle to hold Cal’s hand and Josh’s leg. My boys were both encircled by a family fiercely dedicated to their wellbeing. The situation was furtive. But the room was suffused with a determined, unwavering love. Josh and I wrote the blessing together on our drive. I wanted to share a portion of it today:
Cal, we have learned that we cannot promise you safety. We cannot promise you our home. We cannot promise you all good the things every parent wants to promise their children. But we commit our love to you. And you are being rescued now, by love. A boundless love you will never remember. But it will forge you, save you, guide you, become you. We love you, Cal. And we hope our love will bring you home.
Today and always, I am grateful for the determined love of my deeply good and imperfect parents and family. It has rescued me many times, and it has brought me home.
May we accept the grace of our Heavenly Parents to take the failures that bury us and turn them into mulch. May we use the gritty soil of a family’s imperfect love to grow beautiful things like flowers, and forgiveness, and compassion. May we continue that work into eternity together as mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, until at last the whole world becomes a garden with so many blossoms, and we are home again. This is our legacy. Happy Mother’s Day.
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