A Mother’s Prayer

It’s been so long since I wrote on my blog; I almost forgot how to log into it. Yesterday, I found a box of files and inside one file was a stack of devotionals; some I wrote, some I collected from over the years and used at various times. I decided to write something about each one. As my cousin Mandy Marshall said on my Facebook page, “If you saved them….then they must have something for us all.”

A Mother’s Prayer

O God, help me always to remember that you have given to me the most important task in the world, the task of making a home.

Help me to remember this when I am tired of making beds, and washing clothes, and cooking meals, and cleaning floors, and mending clothes, and standing in shops. Help me to remember it when I am physically tired in body, and when I am weary in mind with the same things which have to be done again and again, day in and day out.

Help me never to be irritable, never to be impatient, and never to be cross. Keep me always sweet. Help me to remember how much my husband and my children need me and help me not to get annoyed when they take me for granted, and when they never seem to think of the extra work they sometimes cause me.

Help me to make this home such that the family will always be eager to come back to it, and such that, when the children grow up and go out to their own homes, they will have nothing but happy memories of the home from which they have come.

This I ask for your love’s sake. Amen

Jill Tritton, 1982

It was 1982 when this poem came across my desk. There are no notes written beside it to indicate how I came upon it. I was 32 years old and we had just moved our family to Kingwood, Texas. My husband’s commute to his office was forty-five minutes to an hour in the mornings and up to two hours returning home. He would leave the house around five o’clock in the morning and return around seven-thirty in the evening. It made for a long day for me and the four children.

But the next nine years were some of the best years of my life. Between homeroom mother, Girl Scout leader, Cub Scout den mother, team mom, Sunday School teacher, director of the Mother’s Day Out at church, Elder, and active in my P.E.O. chapter, I barely had time to breathe much less wash the clothes, clean the house, cook our meals. But somehow I did it.

My sister-in-law Margaret, whose family lived in Kingwood, is an excellent housekeeper with an eye for decorating. I always admired her ability to make her home so beautiful and yet accessible. Moving to Houston meant for the first time in our married life, we would live near family, and only a few blocks away. It was heaven. But I did not have Margaret’s skills at housekeeping so I hired a cleaning service about the time Margaret and family joined the country club. One day, my daughter asked Margaret why we were not members of the club and Margaret told her that I would prefer to have a clean house then join the club. There was some truth in that. The real reason we did not join the club is that my husband does not play golf or tennis and he thought it a waste of time and money. I on the other hand would have given up the cleaning service in a heartbeat to be a member of the club. But there was some consolation that although my house was always a cluttered mess, it was clean underneath, thanks to the service, and for that I’m grateful.

Those were formative years for my children and as they were growing up, I too was maturing both spiritually and chronologically. I look at this prayer and am reminded that my in life in those days was to be and do all things for everyone, no matter what. I cooked, I cleaned, I sewed, I carpooled, and I volunteered at the schools, church and community. And I did so without regret or complaint (for the most part.)

And now that my children are grown and have homes of their own, I see them following in my footsteps building a life with their own families around the memories they have of the life we built. I know this when I’m in their homes and see them using the parenting skills I used. I know this when I see the love they have for their children as a reflection of the love I have for them. I see this when they share with me how they feel about being parents.

My daughter paid me the best compliment the other day. She called to tell me that her two-year-old daughter was acting out at the grocery store so she took her outside and sat with her on the bench. Trying diligently to express how her behavior was inappropriate, her daughter got worse until, my daughter yelled at her saying, “I’ve had it.” And then she said she thought to herself, “I’m turning into Mamma.” You would think I might be offended by this, but the real honor is that she didn’t hesitate telling me this story, not that it happened at all.

To make a home, to raise a family, to be the person God wants me to be; that was my Mother’s Prayer.