Mother's Day did not disappoint. At least if you kept your eyes on the effusive accolades, and floral tributes. My own children called from five states, sent sunflowers and chocolate, and said mushy things. What I really wanted, and I told them, was help moving my chicken coops out of the ubiquitous mud. It was not a pretty job, but with five sets of arms we did it. Now my chickens can again enjoy dry feet and grass.

But the day after Mother's day, a few timid messages emerged on social media about the less than rosy memories. One man was brave enough to say that his mother, now gone, was hard to love. She died of cancer. Untreated. Which was either precipitated by or exacerbated by mental illness. He has gone looking for more of his mother, who died to him years before her body caved in, but all he can find is her fierce belief in God and trust in His Word. He wishes there was more than that, but there isn't. And yet it is enough. 

Another woman admitted that most of the time she does not know what she is doing, as her oldest has pointed out. I suddenly had an image of myself as a small girl asking my own mother for a verdict. Could I go? Could I stay up for the party? Can I get a new dress? She had a far away look which at the time I assumed meant she was scanning the vast reservoir of her wisdom. But now I know she was scraping an empty barrel. 

"We'll see," she would say. I was annoyed that she didn't just tell me and get it over with it, but she was grasping for a margin of time in which to breath. And pray. 

She too wrestled with mental illness, and lost much of herself in the struggle. 

Knowing this, as I am convinced He does, God hands over vulnerable and perfect babies into the arms of women who fail in epic proportions, fall on their faces, and flail in the mud. 

Yet in His mercy, God lifts us up again into greener pastures, and smilingly offers us the chance to try again.