My sister is going to the convent this fall. Since Mollie was officially accepted at the beginning of the summer, I’ve watched as she has made arrangements to give away her car, her MacBook Pro, her art supplies, furniture, décor, her super comfy, light blue flats (now in my closet) . . . everything.
A few weeks ago she invited me over to her house to pick out whatever I wanted. All of her worldly possessions, save a few clothes she set aside for the remainder of the summer and a small box of sentimental things she will take with her, were evicted from their usual whereabouts to be sorted, offered to family and friends, and the rest given away.
As I sat on the floor, working my way through piles of clothes, setting aside what I wanted, I asked her, “Is this hard for you?”
“Kind of,” she answered. “But I just have to remember what I’m doing it for, and all I’ll be gaining.” I nodded, amazed by her willingness to give up so much to gain a greater intimacy with Jesus.
A few days later, Mollie was feeding my one-month-old son a bottle. He spit up on her, leaving a nice cottage-cheesy stain on her dress. As she tried to wipe it up before it set in, she commented, “As a mom you really have to be detached from your clothes!”
I laughed. Mollie, who had literally just given away all her clothes for her vocation to religious life, is commenting on the detachment required by my vocation?
But later what she said kept coming back to me.
What Mollie didn’t really know when she made that comment was that I have been struggling a lot with just that. Prior to George being born, I bought some new nursing-friendly clothes. I had the vision of myself as a new mom, glowing with love for her newborn, looking fresh, capable, and fashionable as she dealt with sleep deprivation like a champ and simultaneously nursed and played engagingly with her two-year-old.
Fast forward to after George’s birth and this kid exuded more bodily fluids than I could’ve believed. Between frequent spit-ups and the unexplainable number of times he leaked out of his diapers in the first few weeks, my cute new clothes quickly became soiled, spotted, and thinned out from so many washes and stain-removing treatments. It was like this baby was deliberately targeting my clothing. Even at his baptism, right after pulling George back to me from the font, I felt a warm trickle and realized he’d yet again leaked out of a diaper, right onto my sweet, floral dress. The kicker was he somehow didn’t get any on his baptismal outfit.
It was frustrating, but what mother could hold a grudge against her child over some clothing?
Mollie’s remark about detachment got me contemplating the different ways God draws us to himself by helping us surrender to him. Back in Lent, I listened to a podcast in which a priest pointed out that we can only surrender to God the parts of ourselves that we know about. Like in Lent, we recognize we are inordinately attached to social media or coffee or Netflix, and so we surrender one of those to the Lord for 40 days so that God can begin to fill the space it had been occupying in our lives.
But there are so many facets about ourselves that are hidden even to us. So many wounds we don’t notice are coloring our perception of the world. So many attachments we don’t realize are hindering us from greater happiness. Only God knows the depths and intricacies of our persons because He created us! So how can we surrender our entire selves to him without the help of his guiding hand? We can’t.
The priest said that if there is even an inkling of desire in our wills to surrender everything to the Lord, He will respond by sending things into our lives to help us realize a sin, wound, or attachment, and then make the conscious, willful decision to surrender it to Him.
Enter our children.
Regarding his effort to reach spiritual detachment, St. Poemen, a monk and Desert Father, writes: “There are three things which I am not able to do without: food, clothing, and sleep, but I can restrict them to some extent.”
As moms, we don’t have to try to restrict these things.
Food? I can’t count the number of times I’ve abandoned a barely-touched cup of coffee until 4 in the afternoon, only to dump it down the drain because I don’t want my nursing baby to be up all night. Or the times I’ve gotten around to fixing my breakfast after the toddler’s high chair has been vacated and the baby has been nursed, only to hear little feet run up behind me: “Mommy, share?”
Clothing? We already talked about the spit-up stains. But how about having to let go of your favorite jeans after they no longer fit over your child-bearing hips? Or the section of your closet that goes untouched except for the occasional night out?
And sleep! Maybe it’s just that I’m in the newborn phase again, but the time of sleeping through the night and taking a nap without having to weigh whether I need it more than a shower are behind me, at least for now.
It’s clear I’ve dwelt over the loss of these things. I’ve felt their lack and struggled with it. But I would never want to go back to that time when I had food, clothing, and sleep in abundance, but didn’t have my sons.
No, as moms, we don’t have to try to restrict these attachments. But we do have to decide to surrender what we’ve lost to God.
The same demand of detachment is on us as on those in religious life. Jesus bids all of us to “renounce all that [we have]” to be his disciples (Lk 14:33). But while religious make a gift of their worldly attachments at the outset of their vocation, those of us called to family life have that call to detachment, in a sense, imposed on us. After feeling that demand, placed chiefly on us by the needs of our children, we have the opportunity to make a gift of those things, not just to our children, but to the Lord.
How do we do this? It can be simple. Make a section in your closet of “surrendered clothing”—those pieces you normally grab with a sigh as you recall the likelihood of stains in your immediate future, and instead call to mind that the clothing in that section, splotched and stretched and thinned out as they are, have become a sacrifice to the Lord that He is grateful for.
As you dump that cold cup of coffee down the drain, praise the Lord for the day you’ve had and start a conversation with him in that moment about all the things you’ve done while you weren’t sipping on that coffee.
When you’re up in the night breastfeeding unite your offering of your body to your child with His offering of His Body for us. Or when your child comes to you sick at midnight or you are waiting up for your teenager, offer the difficulty of it for an intention, and let Him tell you about a time His Mother did the same for Him.
These acts of surrender will make us more peaceful individuals and happier mothers, but most importantly, they are the decisive motion that turns a necessary detachment into a precious gift to God, and our attachment to Him is then able to grow stronger, our relationship deeper . . . which is what this life and this vocation is all about.
Awkward hand placement brought to you by afore-mentioned pee stain.
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