Category Archives: Motherhood

The Jealous Mom

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Jealousy seems like such an ugly word, doesn’t it?In these undiscerning times, we’ve learned to equate jealousy to its illegitimate half-brother, covetousness. Many times when you see a person accused of jealousy, that person is being defrauded of his rights, often brazenly to his face. As an example, a young man who is engaged to one girl might accuse her of jealousy when she becomes irritated at his attentions to another. By accusing her in that way, he deflects attention from his unfaithfulness by making her feel ashamed for caring that he is unfaithful.

 

She: Why are you talking so sweetly to my adversary while she twirls her hair in such a fetching manner?
He: What are you, jealous? If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a jealous woman!

Likewise, our God is a jealous God. Much atheist ink has been spilled over the spurious objection that jealousy is a petty and ugly thing that would be beneath the hypothetical God who, since He doesn’t exist, must take on whatever characteristics the atheist assumes would be most fitting for an Almighty God. Conveniently, he can then argue with this Being from his imagination instead of facing the real Almighty. But atheists don’t get to define God. He is Self-defining, and if He says He is jealous, then we’d better pay attention to what He means by that.

Jealousy is not a petty emotion, but a protective and loving one. There is a distinction between jealousy and covetousness: Jealousy has a right. Covetousness has none.

So, what does this have to do with mothering, you ask? Well, lots, actually. One of the most effective tools that Satan has used in our parents’ generation and ours to separate children from the influence of parents is the accusation of jealousy.

You think that a mommy’s kiss on an injured knee would be more fitting than a teacher putting a sterile band-aid on it? Why would you be so controlling? So involved? So jealous?

You don’t want other women raising your children? Tsk-tsk.

You don’t think Sunday School teachers can catechize your children better than you can? What do you think you are, some kind of theologian?

You won’t allow your kids to watch certain “kids’” programming because it blatantly indoctrinates children to believe that parents are at best cluelessly irrelevant, and at worst sinister killjoys?

You think that the public school version of sex education, history, and literature will corrupt your children’s morals, misinform their choices, and ruin their lives? That they would be better off learning about, oh, everything really, in the context of a loving home?JEALOUS! You are jealous, like that mean old God of yours!

Moms, don’t fall for this!

The World will try to convince you that you are a petty, small, and controlling person, if you think that you are the person to whom your children should turn for their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs. We’ve been made to feel ashamed of our God-given, natural longing to be our babies’ first and best companions and friends.

Why is that? Are we not the possessors of the right and duty to nurture and guide our young? Are we not the ones who know both first and best what our children need? Of course we are!

But Satan is as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. And do you know what prey is the easiest to devour? Unprotected young. They are weak and inexperienced, delicious and tender morsels for a hungry but cowardly enemy.  All intentional, thoughtful Christian moms are belittled by the world as “helicopter parents” for the high crime of demanding to know what their children are being taught, wishing to teach them their own faith, and wanting to control the influences that are brought to bear on those young lives.

This belittling is done for the same reasons, and in the same ways, as the cheating husband. The calumny is meant to shame us into surrendering our rights and privileges as the rightful participants in that intimate relationship. They intend to usurp our thrones as beloved Guides in our childrens’ lives. While allegations of jealousy are hurled at our heads, accusing us of “controlling” our children, the truth is that for a parent to willingly give up control of a child’s upbringing to a stranger employed by a godless State is the true dereliction of duty.

A woman who allows her husband to flirt with other women without rebuke is not an open-minded and loving girl, but a dupe and an abused woman. Not only that, but she encourages his sin by winking at it.

A God who doesn’t mind if you worship other gods is a cuckold, not a Being with the inherent dignity of Yahweh.

So what is a mother who allows the State and its propagandists to make her feel that her interest in her own children’s well-being is somehow dirty, abusive, or petty? They are the abusers. She is being defrauded of her family by a covetous and thieving “society”, and made to feel that she is wrong for objecting.

So, moms (and dads, but I speak to moms), know this: It is not only OK to be a jealous mom, it is a holy calling. Guard your children’s hearts. Guard their minds. Guide their choices. It is a father and mother’s duty, not the state’s, to ensure an education in righteousness. Don’t let the accusation of jealousy put you on the defensive. Do what God has given you to do.

(Note: This is a repost from December 1, 2014.)

Just Mommy

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This is a repost from June 3, 2010. I can’t believe it has been eleven years since I wrote this! I’d write some things differently, and far more strongly now.

Just Mommy

I loved my second grade teacher. She had long, (bottle) blonde hair, and a sweet smile. Not only was she beautiful to me, but she had a clothesline strung across the classroom with stuffed animals and Hot Wheels clipped to it for bribing her students to work. A certain number of books read equaled a beautiful stuffed animal or doll in my pudgy little hands. Come to think of it, I loved my 5th grade teacher from the bottom of my heart, too, and she was also pretty handy with the prizes. We may be onto something here..

Anyway, I digress. Where were we? Oh, yeah. My teacher broke my heart.
She didn’t do anything mean, really. She just asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. She had us write about it, actually. My paper went something like this:

When I grow up, I want to be a mommy. I think I’d be good at it. I’d like lots of children.

Maybe there was more to it than that. I don’t remember. I turned in my paper, with the requisite poorly-drawn picture to illustrate. Instead of marking it with the usual red check-mark and smiley face, Miss Dixon called me to her desk.

“What else?”

I didn’t know what she meant, so I just looked at her with that slack-jawed, confused look that I still get when I’m dumbfounded. (That’s about twice a day, if you wondered.) She tried again. “What else do you want to be when you grow up? Mommy isn’t enough.”

I took my paper back to my seat and pondered for a moment. I was a sensitive child, and my feelings were more than a little hurt. What did she mean, what else? Mommy is BIG. Mommy is the whole world! It really was all I cared to be.

Being a second-grader, and not at all indoctrinated in philosophies of homemaking and childrearing, I didn’t argue. I struggled to come up with something else to write. Tears in my eyes (yeah, I was a wuss), I finally settled on saying I’d like to become a nurse.

Nurses are like mommies, but with thermometers, right?

I never really wanted to be a nurse, of course, but it was the answer I gave when asked this all-important question for the rest of my school years. Sometimes, just to shake things up, I said I’d like to be a doctor. I really did have an interest in medicine, and a good head for science, so it could have happened if I’d had any encouragement at all. I used to be a little bit bitter about the fact that no one cared what I “did with my life” or tried to encourage me in my studies. Now I wonder if God didn’t put blinders on the people around me to keep them from seeing my potential to do “more”.

My teacher thought she was doing the right thing in encouraging me to think outside the stuffy old traditional box, I’m sure. For all I know, she may have thought I needed her to help me shake off the tyranny of the patriarchy. But I didn’t appreciate being told I should do more than be wife and mother. What I felt, in that wordless way kids have of understanding things, was that there was something unjust about a world that didn’t think “mommy” was enough.

I grew, but that ambition my teacher was trying to instill in me didn’t. Thanks to her “guidance”, I grew up knowing I had to do something else with my life. Like everyone else, I learned to think of “mother” as something you become after you’ve proven that you can do grown-up stuff.

After high school I got a job. Then another. Then another. All my jobs involved changing adult diapers and administering meds in rest homes and group homes. I even started nursing school, but quit in despair. I hated it. Nursing is a calling, and I was decidedly not called. The book-work was easy enough, but the job itself made me want to scream. The one thing I knew for certain was that you should never, ever scream at sick people, so I packed it up and went home.

They say God draws straight with crooked lines. Through a series of bad choices I ended up jobless and without any desire to find a new job, or even to live at all. If it hadn’t been for all the dumb mistakes I made in high school and beyond, I’d probably have a “fulfilling” career by now. Instead, thanks to His mercy, I’m rejoicing in my growing family, filling the role of help-meet to a faithful and hard-working man, and looking forward to a life of (cover your eyes, feminists) submission to God’s will–and my husband’s.

The only problem is, I wasn’t trained to this! I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to roll up my sleeves and get down to the business of homemaking. No one told me there was this much work to do, or how many different plates I was going to have to spin at one time. There wasn’t anyone to tell me all this, because I didn’t actually know any homemakers. This is the job that I was told wasn’t enough to keep a woman’s mind active and her spirit content?

Seriously?

I’ve learned the hard way how to run my household and raise my children, and I’m going to pass along to my own daughter what I’ve learned. When some young man comes along to take her away from me, I’m going to make sure she doesn’t spend the first years of marriage twiddling her thumbs and wondering exactly what she’s supposed to be doing with all this “free” time–or worse, ignoring the most beautiful vocation on Earth because someone once told her “Mommy’s not enough.”