Mama Maxima Culpa

Whenever one of my children is in some kind of pain, my knee-jerk reaction is to blame myself. Thus far, I’ve held myself personally responsible for:

• Two chipped teeth

• Three buckle-fractured tibias

• Dozens of black eyes

• Scores of mid-mass shrieks

• Hundreds of fevers, headaches, and hurt tummies

• Thousands of scrapes, bumps, and bruises

• One whole nimbus cloud of disappointment and hurt feelings, most especially the ones sustained when schoolmates deem packed lunches “disgusting.”

Mama culpa, Mama culpa, Mama maxima culpa.

Sometimes, my children’s pain is not my fault. And sometimes, it is. But in either case, I probably need to calm down.

First, please humor the following “Lake Day” analogy.

A few weeks ago, my family drove the twelve-passenger south on the highway and up the pass for a few days in a mountain town, including one day on an adjacent jewel of a lake. We had raincoats and water shoes and stand-up paddleboards. We had all the ingredients for croissant sandwiches and hamburgers; we had hot chocolate cups and a way to boil water. We had relatives who brought kayaks in a trailer. In short, we had everything we needed for a great Lake Day when we rolled up to the edge of it at 10 a.m. that Wednesday.

Wind—very strong wind—blew out of the west all day long. It was never safe to take the boats out. So, the disappointment the children experienced in not getting to go on water was… not my fault.

A lot of things fall into that “Lake Day” category. Pain and disappointment come relentlessly out of the West, even though we’ve packed everything we needed.

There’s an element of absurdity in watching your children suffer, which is one of the reasons I think mothers blame themselves for everything. If they were suffering because we were defective, then maybe we could somehow be fixed. And then, voila, no more suffering children. But we can’t control the wind. And our children’s lives would be all the weirder if we could.

Alright, now for the pain my children experience that definitely is my fault.

I make mistakes and commit sins, ones related to motherhood and otherwise, though I’m not sure how much of my life could be considered “not related to motherhood.” At this point, I’m in it for life. I can be apathetic, and unfair, and mean, and overbearing. And that hurts my children.

Yet, I’m still the most qualified teacher my children have. Well, one of two. As St. John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio:

“The task of giving education is rooted in the primary vocation of married couples to participate in God’s creative activity: by begetting in love and for love a new person who has within himself or herself the vocation to growth and development, parents by that very fact take on the task of helping that person effectively to live a fully human life.”

I have an immense effect on their environment. In the ways that only their mother could, I’m to help them live a fully human life (gulp). St. JPII continues in that section of the encyclical to quote Vatican II, reminding us that “The family is the first school of those social virtues which every society needs.”

My responsibility to educate them is all tangled up with my ability to help and to hurt them. One of the ways that my children are learning forgiveness is by forgiving me.

Pain is part of every human life. My children will endure plenty of it, “Mama culpa” and otherwise. The cynical question sounds like, “Then why have them in the first place?” This is a culturally pervasive viewpoint, but it’s not exactly new. Let’s end with something that I should probably always end these posts with: a St. Zélie Martin quote. This is from St. Zélie’s letter to her sister-in-law, Céline Guérin, penned in 1871, the day after Céline had given birth to a stillborn child. Zélie had lost several children of her own:

“When I closed the eyes of my dear little children and when I buried them, I felt great pain, but it was always with resignation. I didn’t regret the sorrows and problems that I had endured for them. Several people said to me, ‘It would be much better never to have had them.’ I can’t bear that kind of talk. I don’t think the sorrows and problems could be weighed against the eternal happiness of my children. So they weren’t lost forever. Life is short and full of misery. We’ll see them again in heaven.”

Zelie’s writing about the problems and sorrows that she’s endured, but it encourages me that even the sorrows and problems that I cause for my children can’t be weighed against the chance at a fully human life and the ultimate hope of eternity with God in heaven.

Maybe next year we’ll get on the water

On the Calendar: Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

The Gospel for Sunday is once again from Matthew, this time including Jesus lines like:

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?
Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge.
Even all the hairs of your head are counted.
So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

and then immediately after:

Everyone who acknowledges me before others
I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.
But whoever denies me before others,
I will deny before my heavenly Father."

So comforting and terrifying in equal measure, as Jesus dialogue is wont to be.

Speaking of which, this next week we celebrate the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (July 24)—pretty sure the Nativity celebrations are limited to him, Jesus, and Mary, so, they keep it in the family, I suppose.

I had to paste last week’s poll results because I loved them and am also struggling to get through my summer stack. I started Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book Sabbath and finished Shirley Jackson’s Among the Savages so I am reading… reading out loud? Not so much.

Today, for the purpose of a future article, I’d love to know…

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