Journey to a Mother's Heart chapter 4

Women carry the essence of Christmas in the home. The decorations, the cookies, the activities flow through the efforts of moms’ orchestration. Cards are initiated from her desk, representing well wishes of the family. Gift exchanges at school happen because mom remembers. Women carry the chaotic schedules of social dynamics all wanting to capitalize on the joy of the season. Finding time to breathe while making things merry and bright pulls tension into the beauty of light and darkness, into the warm homes and cold nights, into the heart of anticipation and sorrow. To be a successful mom is to navigate these hurdles to the crescendo of a tree filled with presents and a room of familial bliss.

A Christmas tea, however, is full of delicate thoughtfulness to set the stage for treating the women, who make up the bottom of the list of being taken care of. A special tea offers a chance to dress up and enjoy feeling beautiful for an evening. A night like this, a gathering of church women more than 10 years before I became Catholic, presented the fork in the path I was on. This tea became my road to understanding Mary’s heart as a mother.

I had been asked to write a reflection piece to share at the tea. In my heart I knew what I struggled with – a desire to preserve the innocent wonder of my children in a world that hurt. I struggled with the noise of perfection’s cry, calling me to more decorations, more presents, more thoughtful gestures, more, more, more. I was running on empty. In the silence of the nights, my heart grew heavier. Why did Christmas have to carry pain?

My dad had always gone to the back pasture and cut down a tree. Mom and Grandmother sent us away as they wrapped presents on the dining room table. Cookies and breads shaped like candy canes began to fill the air with the scent of freshly baked goodies.

As I grew from child into a young woman, memories changed. My mother sat in a darkened room when I returned from college. This began her last year with the diagnosis of cancer. Winter cloaked so much in darkness. As a young mother, I desired to protect my children. Finances were tight. With more effort I knew I could make magic happen, but I couldn’t. Instead I found shortness of patience, resentment from being last, and fatigue from competing. Where was that silent night when I needed one?

When asked to share a Christmas reflection for the ladies tea, I chose Mary. If anyone knew the chaos and disarray of the season, she did.

Mary swaddled her newborn son and 33 years later stood staring and weeping at the nailed feet of the same son. Every breath he took from the moment he was born, led him closer to the cross. The manger she laid him in acted as the first cross and his swaddling clothes the first burial wraps. She didn’t know this. Her journey unknown while holding her baby resonated with me. What did Mary do with all of the foreshadowing that she had embraced with her vows to be the handmaiden of God? Her role in the nativity couldn’t just end. Words like Ave or Regina, or Madonna created impossible blockades in my mother’s heart. I needed to see the young woman, who didn’t have a birthing plan or safety, but instead needed resilience, patience, and grit.

According to Chaim Bentorah, swaddling clothes were used to wrap the cutting of the umbilical cord after putting salt upon the cut. Mary's gesture demonstrated the infant’s loyalty to the heavenly plan set into motion thousands of years prior. The closeness of life to death’s mortality generated a sense of awe. Mary had to escape in the night to save her baby from the soldier’s sword. She navigated poverty and disbelief, shielded by her husband’s good name. She heard the whispers, the praise, the curiosity, the doubt gossiped around Galilee and beyond. Yet how did she stand there at the foot of the cross? How did she face her disfigured love hanging in humiliation? When she heard the words, “My God why has Thou abandoned me” did her heart echo the disillusionment of pain’s arrow? In that still evening’s light as I searched for the words to my reflection for the tea, Mary’s revelation that she had given birth not only to her son, but to her God, her Lord, her Savior clung to me. He had always been with her through it all.

To celebrate this Christmas tea, I wished to treat the ladies to step into Mary’s sandals with me. The reflection turned into a monologue. Two rolling pins made an ad hoc scroll to hold the words from her position at the cross.

Years later, in a moment born of desperation and frustration with my faith, I found those rolling pins, tore off the writing, and shredded any chance of reading her heart on the page again. My beliefs had been more than enough when I was Protestant. Here as a Catholic, I felt like I had given up more than enough, I got angry, but not at God. Mary had messed things up for me. Her role as the Queen of heaven and Holy Mother did not sit in my understanding easily. I was tired. I just wanted to be a good mom. That was enough. But once the door of questions opened, I couldn’t just walk away. I needed to be sure. Was Mary who the Catholic church claimed she was or did she simply have a singular place in the gospel story?