Is Motherhood Misunderstood?

Honestly, I do get a little miffed when hearing complaints about motherhood. It’s the same miffed I get when hearing employees who work in customer service complain about customers. I mean, I wouldn’t complain about headaches associated with driving big rigs across the country because I wouldn’t take on a career, or job I wasn’t passionate about.

And I know. I know. Not everyone has the perspicacity to know where their ultimate passions loll. It’s not easy trying to reconcile passions, with eking out a means of survival… without complaints… otherwise defined as existing in relative comfort. You’ve got to really be in tune with yourself to beat the outside noise and move in the direction of what keeps your harmony equalized.

As it would be, motherhood is not a vocation we can stick our toe in to test the water. Stick one toe in, even if it’s a pinky toe, and produce so much as one child; desire or no desire, or passion or no passion… that mother…like it or not… is getting immersed in the call to motherhood. It’s why, miffed as I often get, I do empathize with mothers likening motherhood to demeaning tasks perpetuated as having no value... or marginal value. I hear it a lot, often vented so innocuously many don’t realize what’s really being conveyed. ‘I love my children, but don’t want to be stuck in the house cooking, cleaning...’ …and what this message really is saying is, this is not a job worthy of respect.

A favorite quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Of course, I’d take that quote a whole foot further. Service engineers who physically keep our streets and communities clean, ranks at the top of valuable vocations. Aside from picturing what our surroundings would look like without people called to do jobs that receive no ovations, any job that serves mankind is valuable. Motherhood, as it so happens, out ranks them all.

Like I always say, without people, and that being people raised by mothers who love and are committed to every faucet of their work, knowing it is the most important charge in the world, are the true wings behind every vocation we hold up to a light. There would be no need for doctors, lawyers, scientists, service engineers, teachers…and the list goes on…extending as exhaustive as a mother’s responsibilities. We need mothers, and more so, mothers devoted to motherhood.

I just finished reading My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King, a wonderful memoir…which I had no doubt… and as well read I Chose to Stay by Salome Thomas-EL, another commendable memoir.

Happy Mother’s Day!