mothering without limits {the giving that never runs out}

Psst…I have rediscovered the secret to mothering without limits.  And just in time for Mother’s Day.

Sometimes in the middle of a meal, she puts down her fork, a thin tink against scalloped edge.  The silver flashes, a change in the light just barely perceived, as she loosens her grip.  Oh my, the things that happen to our souls when we’re brave enough to let go.

The sound draws our attention away from the conversation, the adolescent streaming of you know and he said and I’m like, to see her clasp her hands together and close her eyes against intrusion, bending her head ever so slightly over the plate, the meal.  We exchange glances, alarmed.  Her lips move, shaping words we can’t hear, delicate, intimate sound she offers only to God.  She’s so lost in what she’s saying that she doesn’t notice our silence.

She’s praying, Zoe mouths across the table at us, exaggerating the syllables so that we will understand.  I nod, pressing my lips together.  Yes.  She is.  Zoe opens her eyes wide.  Oh.no.   I smile.  Now I smile.  Because Riley has reminded me again that prayer isn’t only for our emergencies.

“So what were you saying about…”I say out loud in my normal tone, glancing away from Riley, knowing she will not want to open her eyes to our scrutiny.  Riley struggles nearly every meal with the fear that she will gag on her food, a fear that autism grows into a spore-throwing, nourishment-stealing weed, one of those aggressive obsessions that takes over the landscape of her mind.  I have tried yanking it free, the thick-trunked stalk, but the thing has thorns that pierce, and there are limits to a mother’s strength.  My determination to fix the situation only sometimes breaks the worried stalk in half, and it bleeds milk that drips all over my stinging hands, and right then I know we’ll only temporarily be rid of it. Obsessive anxiety is an ugly growth that never stops springing up right in the middle of the most beautiful blooms.  And Riley is so beautiful.

For a while, Riley’s paralyzing fear made it nearly impossible for her to eat, so much so that meals took her three times as long, and she almost never ate more than half of her portion.  And then we started praying about her “worries,” wrapped around her in knots, because I just didn’t know what else to do for her.  That’s when things began to change–when this mother stopped relying on her own strength and started calling upon God’s.

We had exhausted every immediate potential solution, and like I said, my hands were left weak and stinging by all that fruitless effort.  We mothers will do ourselves right into the ground if we think it will save our children, and having done all I knew to do, I realized that I had fallen into a trap subtly woven into the way we phrase our thoughts about reaching out to God in prayer.  All we can do is pray.  I’m trying to stop using that sentence.  The only thing I know to do is pray comes out of my mouth as an expression of my helplessness, my powerlessness, my weakness; and it suggests that asking God for help is what to do when I can’t fix it myself.  It’s a spoken lie, betraying the shadowy limitations of my faith, because while prayer illuminates my powerlessness, it also engages the dead-raising Power of the Almighty God.  And let’s see, if it’s really between what I can do and what He can do, why treat Him like the last resort?

Suddenly, I realized I needed to change both my words and my approach.  So, I started gathering Zoe and Adam in huddles around their sister every time anxiety dripped off her cheeks in tears, when she’d say, It’s just that every time it’s so hard for me, and that word hard would shatter in sharp shards.  I started praying out loud and praying hard and praying right then.  I started asking God to teach me to say, “Let’s pray, and then let’s see if God has something for us to do,” and I started looking into Riley’s ocean eyes and holding her chin so she’d look at me and giving her the first, the best way:  You pray.  Whenever you start thinking about it.  Every time.  Right then.  You pray. 

And so she does.

And that one thing—that turn of His hands on me—strengthens more than any other mothering I’ll ever do because it reaches past improbability and all the way into His arms, His strength, His limitlessness.  For nothing is impossible for God.  So there it is:  the secret to mothering without limits is the real and complete reliance upon His strength.

Riley prays, and I watch relief rise in her like a light.  I watch her find her smile, and I think: How is it that things can get so out of order?  The subtlety of that strategy alarms me, the way prayer can become the thing I do after I’ve tried everything else; the way turning to God can become what I do after I’ve exhausted and rediscovered the limits of my own resources.  It should not be so.  Oh Lord, I believe.  Help me in my unbelief.

These days I find it beautiful that God didn’t take away Riley’s anxiety, but He used it to teach her– and by extension, to remind me—to pray first.  Somewhere in the middle of our mother-daughter flailing, my daughter learned to cut down the ugly fear-weed at the root.  Word says “We take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5),” but Riley would have trouble explaining what that means.  She’d get lost unpacking and untangling all the words.  And yet, she knows how to live it.

So, sometimes—less and less all the time—right in the middle of a meal, she puts down her fork.  And she has a real conversation with God, and we get to watch His sheer Love slice through her fear.  Silver flashes, barely perceptible.  Her lips stop moving as that light falls across her face, and she smiles.  And then she opens her eyes, reaching again for her fork without explanation or comment or any doubt about the Power at work within her.

And I try not to make a big deal, to offer her that dignity, but it still makes me giddy that when she reaches the limits of me she discovers the depths of Him.