Just Get To It

"Just" usually diminishes or lessens in everyday speak. "I'm just going to eat one more bite," or "I'm just going to Community College," or, "I'm just the team manager." In stepping on the scale you tell yourself it's just five more pounds, and even on the torture device called a treadmill you convince yourself it's just ten more minutes of agony.

Which is all fine and good, except I've realized in myself and others the tendency for a young woman to say, in response to the ever-asked, "what are you going to do when you graduate/grow-up" -- "I just want to be a mom."

Whoa. Just want to be a mom? I know why we say it - it's to mark our path. We're acknowledging no desire or plans to climb the corporate ladder or "find" ourselves in Budaphest. But we need to take the "just" out, because there is nothing diminished or simple or less about mothering. I'm not very old, and I've not spent much time on the children ride in the amusement park of life, but between national levels of competition and study abroad and graduate school and professorship and everything else, mothering is the hardest thing yet. Perhaps graduate school and teaching are hard in a certain intellectual way, but discovering what the Duke of Windsor was wearing to Queen Elizabeth's Coronation Ceremony without using the Internet is a totally different animal than trying to cook dinner and monitor a toddler who loves chalk and a young lady who wants to climb the outside of the stairs and know where food goes after you chew it and a ringing phone and...did I add the garlic?

So, let's remove just, at least from this part of the conversation. We're all agreed motherhood is hard and requires an absurd and supernatural dying to self to really love crazy town. That also means that "I just want to be a mom" cannot be an excuse for laziness. If we have established that motherhood is one of the most challenging occupations on the planet, are you preparing your daughters to meet it? With grace? Well equipped? Have they bought their books and passed their tests and refined their skills? Have they completed all 90 credits of course work?

On a quick pass through Proverbs 31, let's consider some areas of distribution credit:

• Wisdom and Understanding: How much wisdom does your daughter have? Does she listen to, read, digest, and study good things? Does she have a mind trained to discern good and evil? Can she examine and critically analyze culture, art, film, and literature to both engage with her husband in profitable conversations and train up her children to do the same? How much time has she spent with older women learning from them? Does she love the Word? Is she memorizing it?
• Time Management: Can your daughter get up on time? Can she make and stick to a schedule? Does she exercise regularly for the right reasons - does she redeem her time in general? The Proverbs 31 woman can pack a whole lot into a day, and laziness doesn't even hang around her doorstep.
• Talents: have you developed your daughter's talents? Do you even know them? Is she artistic - can she sew or knit or paint? Is she mathematical - does she love design or building? Is she a servant? What about nursing or medicine or teaching? Can she take great photographs? Play the piano? Organize? The Proverbs 31 woman knows her talents and performs all of them with excellence for the good of her family and community.
• Hard Worker: I think this lady has some calluses - does your daughter work hard? Can she sweat? Can she climb up into blistering attics and rewire a kitchen without complaining? Can she garden - does she know how to raise her own food if necessary for her family? Can she run and lift weights and make her arms strong?
• Money and Thrift: can your daughter plan out meals for a week? Does she then know good prices on food items - can she locate the best deals, buy the food for a week, and prepare it? Does she understand finances, how to balance a checkbook, keep a budget, the difference between an IRA and a 401K? What about good stock to invest in? Does she know how to take her talents and market them - how to creatively seek out new merchant ships and travel and help provide for her family?
• Selflessness and service: when was the last time your daughter opened her hand to the poor? Served in a soup kitchen? Went on a mission trip? Opened her eyes and offered to watch a couple's kids so they could have an anniversary date together?

And then there is childhood development and artistic crafts with pasta noodles and not only seeking after discipleship but turning around and discipling others. There is a willingness to enter the front lines and not hide behind well-decorated doors. There is an ability to make a home full of warmth and life and personality, and a knowledge of how to change diapers or dislodge a marble from a nose.

Obviously we learn as we go, and as we seek Him, God makes great mothers out of all of us, no matter our level of preparation. And the best preparation for being a mother and a wife is being a godly woman. Who knows what your future holds. But if you want to just be a Mom, then you better just get off your hindquarters and start building some serious muscle.