Heroic Motherhood
There is part of a poem that has become an old saying, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” It is the refrain in an 1865 poem by William Ross Wallace called, “What Rules the World.” I highly encourage you to read it.
Motherhood can certainly be done poorly, even demonically, but motherhood done right is noble and heroic.
The incredible power and responsibility of mothers to shape culture, the future, and the world begins as human life does, with sex. More specifically it begins with hypergamy – a woman’s inclination to bestow the gift of sex on a man she believes is worthy. Hypergamy literally means “up-marrying” but it doesn’t necessarily have to do with marriage as specifically as sex. By establishing what qualities makes a man “up” or “higher” and therefore worthy or more worthy of sex, women establish the male hierarchy – and in doing so determine what qualities will shape the culture and get passed on into the future.
When women use this power well, the character and strength of their society and culture ascends and flourishes and the future looks brighter for everyone. When hypergamy is poorly done – when sex is given to men of low account and sex is traded for something less than maturity, commitment, and virtue – civilizations decline and the future dims as inferior qualities and their repercussions are rewarded, multiplied, and passed on into the future.
Navigating these waters well, especially as a young woman, can be challenging and often demands wisdom, maturity, strength, patience, and self-control. However she does it though, it will shape our world and our future.
When bad men attempt to use force and violence to take this right to choose from a woman, good men, born of good women, should stop it.
The second heroic choice a mother makes is in bringing life into the world. I often joke with my wife that if men had to bring children into the world humans would have died off in the first generation. Pregnancy in itself often brings on months of challenges and even suffering. There is also the risk that the baby won’t make it and all your labor, love, difficulty, and pain will give birth to nothing but heartache. Then there is the delivery. In the modern Western world we can insulate ourselves a bit from the reality of what childbirth is and has been for every other group of women in the world. Even then, it is still dangerous, life-threatening to both mother and child, incredibly painful, and hard on the body. Even women who experientially know the reality of the risks, the losses, and the suffering of this journey often choose it again, and even again, to bring life into the world. Some woman did that for you, for me, and for every one of us. Some woman thought that life, your life, was worth the risk, the suffering, and the sacrifice. I can’t think of a clearer image of courage and selfless heroism.
Then, once the baby is born the call to self-sacrifice doesn’t end, but becomes a day-by-day, night-by-night, and sometimes moment by moment setting aside of the self for the wellbeing of someone else – someone who needs you and is depending on you.
Here again, women are shapers of culture and the future. Human development is front loaded. This means the love, care and attention (or lack of) you give to a baby in the womb, at eight days old, eight weeks old, eight months old, or a three years old is going to have a bigger impact on who they are, who they become, and who they can become then the same care and attention (or lack of) you give an eighteen-year-old or eighty-year-old. The emotional, relational, and nutritional care given to someone at the beginning of life greatly shapes the rest of their life. According to the National Institute of Health, that early care overwhelmingly comes from the mother. In most situations, the mother is the primary protector, caretaker, and teacher for babies and young children. The presence and role of the father is critical as well but often takes the form of primarily being the protector, provider, and encourager for the mother. To put it another way, the mother is often the one who watches over the baby while the father watches over the mother.
This critical care for a little human’s physical, intellectual, emotional, and moral development in their pivotal younger years requires an enormous amount of work, personal sacrifice, good judgment, problem-solving skills, and self-awareness to be done well.
Here is the particularly heroic part of motherhood through all of these years – a good mother doesn’t do all of these things for her own benefit. The good mother doesn’t say yes to being “mother” so she can keep her son or her daughter close and always – but to offer them to themselves, to the world, and to God. This is what Mary said “yes” to when she said “yes” to being the mother of Jesus. She would love and care for her son, knowing all the while that she was raising him to give him to a world that needed him and that was far from safe. Mary is the literal icon of heroic motherhood, but she is not alone. Our world has been incredibly enriched by the billions of moral, creative, intelligent, healthy, and productive lives that mothers have offered to the world.
Our culture, our world, and our future has always been and will always be shaped by the hand that rocks the cradle.
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