With God’s help, Eve “brought forth” this other living creature—“Cain.” (Genesis 4:1). “Later she gave birth to his brother Abel” (v.2). It was Mother Eve who nursed the first children. She taught them how to be; how to be human. How to grow up out in the fields of God. Maybe, like Eve, you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. You’re just trying to raise children among the wild things.
Fiction writer Andrew Klavan writes with foreboding about our culture losing the value of motherhood and femininity. Machoism acts as if women occupied a second-class role, and feminism acts as if vulnerability or nurture is a plague to avoid. Both of these are dangerous extremes to avoid. Klavan has an insightful interpretation of author Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein: “To me, the greatness of the story, the horror of the story, and the threat to humanity the story portrays lie in the fact that Frankenstein has usurped the power not of God but of women. He’s made a man without a mother. His science has eliminated the principle of femininity from the creation of human life.”
What do we lose if we lose mothers? Why is the worth of “mother” so incalculable? And why does our society have such difficulty embracing and celebrating the full power of womanhood and motherhood?
Both nature and civilization were already present within Eve at the dawn of the first lights. She grew up in God’s garden but saw the wilting consequences of her insurrection. She learned the hard way not to lose the balance of what we are: God-made, not man-made; powerful, yet fragile; God-like, but not limitless. She taught the boys how to make a home yet venture into the daring “beyond.” How to tend the fields needed to prevent deprivation, look beyond the fields they managed, and worship the God of the "beyond."
Eve was the boy’s teacher and mother—these two wild things, these drastically different sons. Each was like a different species of human in their temperament: in one heart was gentility, and in the other, jealousy. Abel, the worshipful. Cain, the sullen and brooding. Maybe you’re trying to raise astonishingly different personalities in your home. It can feel impossible at times.
Mother Eve was trying to nurture hope and progress beyond the curse of her own calamity and grief. She taught her boys that we can rebuild, cultivate, grow, progress, and develop. A mother instills this hope instinctively. Children must grow out of their clothes and their mother’s house. They must learn to be leaders and masters of their own destiny. They have to leave the nest of security and previous achievements and experience the risk of responsibility for themselves.
A mother also teaches them not just to be virile and competent but to stay connected, to rest, honor, nurture, and worship. Boys who are only fierce are volatile and, in the end, destructive. They must also become civilized and kind. They must become servants as well as lords. Girls who are insecure will become jealous instead of courageous. They will destroy instead of create. So, a mother must lead her children out of immaturity and victimhood into the full responsibility of adulthood.
Yet, she does this through her own limitations. A mother’s anxiety will tarnish our armor, and her peace will burnish it. Her turmoil and her templates discolor the water in the aquarium her guppies swim in. We see the world through our mother’s eyes and experience it first through her soul—as it were. Our mothers forge our earliest experiences and shape our entire worldview. Is the world hostile or hopeful? Is it beautiful or grotesque? Mother knows. William Wordsworth, in his poem “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” offers up these same thoughts,
Blest the infant Babe,
blest the Babe,
Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep
Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul
Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye! For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
Objects through widest intercourse of sense.
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.
Mothers have a dynamic and irreplaceable role in shaping their children’s worldview and bonding them to certain limitations or opportunities. Eve was a co-ruler alongside her husband. Together, their great task was to be lords of the earth in the image of the Creator and to mature the next generation of humans out of the wilderness of animal instincts and onto the path of becoming “Sons of God.” What a noble and challenging calling! Moms, your role is as vital as ever. Don’t forfeit your authority to rule the earth and raise your children. Don’t get hampered in daily details. Your children are still your greatest investment. One day, they will jealously or justly rule the world.
Tags: teacher, children, mothers, human, just, nature, eve, parenting, nurture, jealous, mothers day, wild, feminism, babe, civilized, machoism
