Mother’s Day evokes strong emotions, both good and bad. This is partly because, since the Fall, each of our mothers fits roughly into either the ideal type of motherhood or the anti-ideal—the diabolical type—of motherhood. In our annual cultural celebration of Mother’s Day, we tend to elevate the bare position of motherhood itself—as if it is a good in itself—or even just the fact of womanhood (which, perhaps, was not originally a separate distinction before the Fall). So, many Mother’s Day celebrations become simple acclimations of, “You’re a mom! You’re a woman! Congratulations! Good for you!” However, contemplating the virtues and vices of motherhood types reveals that a mother can be nearly as much a curse as a blessing.
I know this reflection is not the usual fare for Mother’s Day. But cautionary tales exist for important reasons. Recognizing the surreptitious presence of the vices of diabolical motherhood can help us course-correct as we seek to be life-givers, rather than soul-suckers.
The Ideal Type
Eve is a good place to start. Her name means “mother of all the living,” or even “source of life.” The irony, of course, is her fatal mistake—her disobedience made her mother of all the dead. However, Eve is named—or at least we are told her name—after the Fall. God’s grace to her was her fecundity through which the promised Seed would once again make her mother of all the living. Although God’s command to multiply now comes with pain (and sometimes without biological descendants), it is still the fundamental part of our nature as women: we nurture, propagate, cultivate, enflesh.
Mary, though, is a better place to land. The inspired Word explicitly states that Christ is the new Adam. In a like manner, the Christian tradition has long held that Mary is the new Eve. Rather than grasping for knowledge that was not given (who else would have been satisfied with Gabriel’s answer to her reasonable question, “How will this be?”), she chose a life-giving, submissive obedience. She did not desire to be as God; she was a servant of the Lord, intent on magnifying Another.
Do not forget: Joseph could have had her stoned. Her life was on the line. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13, ESV). In her limited understanding of what would unfold, this ideal type, Mary, was willing to lay down her life for Another. That is the virtue at the heart of ideal motherhood: a humble self-sacrifice, decreasing so another may increase.
Mary was not without her motherhood failures, though; I am sure losing Jesus for three days in the city of Jerusalem haunted her for a while! And what was she about, telling the wedding servers to get instructions from Jesus, when He had already reminded her that His hour had not yet come? No, Mary was not perfect, and even her miraculous, unique motherhood could not protect her from the temptations all other mothers face.
It was not merely the position of “Mother of the Christ” itself that bestowed honor on Mary. In Luke 11:27, a woman in the crowd of Jesus’ followers tried to offer this type of positional honor to Mary: “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” Jesus corrected her by assuring her that it was not the mere fact of Mary’s motherhood itself that made her blessed but her receptivity and obedience to the Word of God: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Lk. 11:28) This obedience became characteristic of Mary’s life, as she proved to be not only a life-giver to the Messiah but a life-receiver as well, a recipient of Living Water and a faithful follower.
The Diabolical Type
The Western tradition also bequeaths to us the well-developed embodiment of diabolical motherhood in the person of the Evil Stepmother. Think of the stories of Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, The Juniper Tree, and so on. These women are truly evil, inflicting horrible emotional and physical harm on those entrusted to their care.
Why is it that these diabolical mother figures are nearly always stepmothers? Stepmothers are not evil, inherently. Virtuous women have a beautiful capacity to give loving care to children to whom they did not give birth. The truth behind the stories is that the evil, selfish behavior in which these women engage disqualifies them from the role of mother—any woman who seeks her own gain above her child’s is not truly a mother. It is antithetical to the nature of motherhood.
If the ideal mother is life-giving, the diabolical mother is soul-sucking. She is the needy wife who wrings everything from her husband and still is not satisfied; she is the jealous mother who cannot bear for her child to have any need that she cannot supply; she is the self-serving woman who lives solely by the mantra, “put your own oxygen mask on first.” She is Mrs. Joe Gargery, Lady Macbeth, and Lewis’s Orual.
Let us think more about Orual for a moment. In Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Orual is the older half-sister to Psyche, whom she has raised like a daughter. Psyche is intended to be sacrificed to Cupid (Ungit, in Lewis’s tale), but Orual discovers this “sacrifice” has been a marriage instead. Psyche is adored by a god and is blessedly happy. But it is a happiness that Orual cannot understand or believe, and so she convinces Psyche to betray the god, resulting in her banishment.
On one level, I sympathize with Orual. She acted only on her best reasoning; did she not truly believe Psyche to be in danger? But we see the true heart behind all of Orual’s seemingly well-intended actions when she is judged before the gods. She reads out before them from the scroll of her life:
Oh, you’ll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad of it for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn’t given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way? . . . You stole her to make her happy, did you? . . . Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word means? Mine![1]
Orual’s “love” was one that consumed. First Psyche, then her advisor, Bardia. Life-giving requires self-sacrifice, while soul-sucking always sacrifices the true good of others for our own sakes. Bitter Orual suffered the judgment of her life of manipulation and consumption.
Pursuing the Ideal
Mother Teresa said that to love is to “give until it hurts.” “[T]he mother who is thinking of abortion [the ne plus ultra of diabolical motherhood], should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child.”[2] The cultural acceptance of the diabolical type of motherhood—exemplified in abortion—has its beginnings in more seemingly harmless places. Mother Teresa observed that the horror of abortion is made acceptable because of our embrace of contraception: “In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily.”[3] The self-giving love of motherhood begins even before our children do.
Pursuing the ideal type begins in a commitment to honor God’s creative intention for us as women and pursue nurturing, propagating, and life-giving. The beauty is that this ideal of motherhood can be pursued no matter the stage of life or type of family God provides. “Every woman is created to ‘mother’ and ‘nest.’ Even if she never bears biological children, every woman is created to welcome, beget, and nurture life.”[4] This life-giving happens in small, daily ways by creating for others rather than consuming for ourselves; building up rather than tearing down. Our words, heart attitudes, and acts of service will reveal whether we are patterning our life after the ideal type.
Eve had the promise and command of joyful, creative, life-giving work before her, but she chose instead to indulge in diabolical fantasies of her own future as a powerful, independent, knowledge-possessed woman. Mary had the real possibility of her own death before her (and indeed, “a sword . . . pierce[d] through [her] own soul” [Luke 2:35]), yet she chose humble obedience to her calling as life-giver. Through her obedience, we have all been given access to Life itself in the person of Jesus Christ.
[1] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956; repr., Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1984), 292.
[2] St. Teresa of Calcutta, “Address to the National Prayer Breakfast,” Washington, D. C., Feb. 4, 1994, https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/21/address-to-the-national-prayer-breakfast-feb-4-1994/.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Mary A. Kassian and Nancy Leigh DeMoss, True Woman 101: Divine Design; An Eight Week Study on Biblical Womanhood (Chicago: Moody, 2012), 83.
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