The Mirror That Was Not Gentle

We are told a story about aging. That time sands people down. That the sharp ones finally go soft. That our difficult mothers turn sweet at the end.

I kept waiting for that mother. She never came. She is simply my mother, still exactly herself. And I still show up. I still answer the phone at four in the morning.

The fuller account is in my memoir, and it is honest there in ways it needs to be. What I want to preach about here is that particular kind of love, because I live it, and I know I am not the only one.

You love somebody who has never once made it easy. Somebody who was supposed to soften and did not. Somebody who still cuts you, still turns away, still withholds the tenderness you have spent your whole life waiting for. And you keep showing up anyway.

Let Me Tell You What That Is

That kind of love is not sweetness. Sweetness is easy. Sweetness is what you feel toward people who are kind to you. It costs nothing and it requires no decision. What you are doing is harder and rarer. You are choosing to love somebody who may never love you back the way you need. You are showing up for somebody who may never say thank you, never say sorry, never say I am proud of you, or even I am glad you came.

And I Am Not Going to Promise You a Turn

And I am not going to promise you that they will change at the end. Some people do. Some do not. Mine did not, and I have stopped organizing my hope around it. That is not bitterness. It is realism, and realism is actually what makes it possible to keep going, because you stop being wounded fresh every time they are exactly who they have always been.

Love Is a Command, Not a Feeling

Matthew 5:44 says, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. Now notice what that command actually requires. Bless. Do good. Pray. All actions. If love required warmth, that command would be impossible. Jesus commanded something you can obey without feeling anything, which is precisely why He commanded it in that form. So on the day you show up with nothing tender in you at all, and you are kind anyway, you are not a hypocrite. You are obedient.

Honor Is Not Approval

And Exodus 20:12 says honour thy father and thy mother. People get trapped here because they think honoring means approving, or pretending, or saying it was fine when it was not. It does not. Honor is a posture, not a verdict. You can honor somebody by treating them with dignity, meeting real needs, and refusing to shame them, while being entirely clear-eyed about who they are. In fact, only a clear-eyed person can honor honestly. Everybody else is just performing.

And You Are Allowed to Be Honest About It

And Scripture never asks you to pretend. The Psalms are full of people telling God the unvarnished truth about how they have been treated. God preserved every word. So you can say, out loud, in prayer, this hurts and it has always hurt. That is not dishonor. That is honesty, and honesty is where healing starts.

She Taught Me What I Do Not Want to Be

And now let me tell you the strange gift in it, and it is the reason for the title. Even in her hardness, she has been teaching me every day of my life the woman I am determined to be instead. A mirror does not have to be gentle to show you the truth. I learned tenderness by knowing its absence. I learned what a warm word is worth because I had to work all day for one. I learned exactly what I would never do to my own children, because it was done to me.

That is not a justification for what happened. God is not the author of that. But Genesis 50:20 says what was meant for evil, God meant unto good, and that is what He has done with it.

Take the Lesson, Refuse the Pattern

So take the lesson and refuse the pattern. Let the hardness teach you softness. Let the withholding teach you generosity. Let the silence teach you to say the words out loud to the people in your life. That is how you keep a hard inheritance from becoming a hard person.

Set Your Expectation Where Reality Is

Stop going in hoping for the mother you never had. Go in prepared for the one you have. That single adjustment will spare you more pain than anything else in this teaching. Most of the fresh wounding in these relationships comes from expecting something that has never once been available.

Limits Are Allowed

And you are allowed to have limits. Shorter calls. Fewer visits. Boundaries around what you will discuss. Romans 12:18 says, if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably. God built room into the command for the fact that it takes two.

Guard the Root

And watch for bitterness, because this situation grows it. Hebrews 12:15 says, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled. Notice the last part. Many be defiled. Bitterness does not stay in you. It leaks into the people who did nothing to you.

And Refuse to Disappear

And do not vanish into it. I bear witness to her. I sit beside her. And whether she softens or never does, I refuse to let her disappear. And I refuse to disappear myself. Both of those are the assignment. Not one or the other.

So hear me, whoever is loving somebody who has never made it easy. What you are doing is not small and it is not weakness. It is the harder, rarer kind of love, and it looks more like God's love than the easy kind ever will, because He has been loving people who do not love Him back since the beginning. Take the lesson. Refuse the pattern. Keep your limits. Guard the root. And do not disappear.