To mark Mothering Sunday, the Church of England recently commissioned a poll to discover “Britain’s ideal mother.” Now this is actually quite a tricky question to answer. First of all, what are the qualities that make an ideal mother? And secondly, does anyone in the world measure up to them?
It’s perhaps not surprising that the 2000 people surveyed should have offered a very wide range of answers; Princess Diana, although the most popular choice, was named by only 5%. In second place was “my own mother”. You can look at that in two ways. Good news, that “my own mother” was high in the rankings - or bad news, that less than 5% of the sample rated their own mother more highly than a celebrity or a fictional character?
One of the problems is that the vast majority of us have, in the nature of things, only ever had one mother. The mothering skills of other women can only be viewed from outside the family - with all the limitations of that viewpoint. Most ‘mothering’ happens in private, behind the scenes; we know all the weaknesses and remember all the failures of our own mothers, which makes it all too easy to put celebrity mothers on a pedestal and assume that they are better. At least for Princess Diana we have the testimony of her two sons that she was “the best mum in the world”, which makes her a worthy occupant of the ‘top spot’.
The competition from the world of fiction is even stiffer. Characters like Molly Weasley and Mrs March were, after all, specially crafted by their authors to be exceptionally good mothers. But they do, as a result, set an artificially high standard that I suspect few real women can consistently live up to.
What really does surprise me about the survey result is that third place was taken by Mother Theresa - a worthy and godly woman, certainly, but one who never had any children of her own. So why was she ranked so highly as a mother? Are we inclined to project good qualities onto people that we admire, when we have no other information to go on? The same could be said of the Virgin Mary (who came 8th in the poll). Although she did have several children, the Bible tells us virtually nothing of her mothering capabilities; we just assume that she “must have been” the ideal mother simply because she was chosen by God to be the mother of His Son. What, in fact, do we know? That she gave the young Jesus a ticking-off for getting lost in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-48), and that when He was grown-up the relationship between them was, at best, a bit strained (John 2:3,4; Mark 3:21,32-35). This shows, at least, that she was a ‘real’ mother, not an artificial construct.
What does the Bible have to say about the ideal mother? The book of Proverbs has a chapter devoted to a good wife (who is also a mother). I read this at my own mother’s funeral:
“She speaks with wisdom,
and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children arise and call her blessed…” (Proverbs 31:26-28)
It’s perhaps not surprising that the 2000 people surveyed should have offered a very wide range of answers; Princess Diana, although the most popular choice, was named by only 5%. In second place was “my own mother”. You can look at that in two ways. Good news, that “my own mother” was high in the rankings - or bad news, that less than 5% of the sample rated their own mother more highly than a celebrity or a fictional character?
One of the problems is that the vast majority of us have, in the nature of things, only ever had one mother. The mothering skills of other women can only be viewed from outside the family - with all the limitations of that viewpoint. Most ‘mothering’ happens in private, behind the scenes; we know all the weaknesses and remember all the failures of our own mothers, which makes it all too easy to put celebrity mothers on a pedestal and assume that they are better. At least for Princess Diana we have the testimony of her two sons that she was “the best mum in the world”, which makes her a worthy occupant of the ‘top spot’.
The competition from the world of fiction is even stiffer. Characters like Molly Weasley and Mrs March were, after all, specially crafted by their authors to be exceptionally good mothers. But they do, as a result, set an artificially high standard that I suspect few real women can consistently live up to.
What really does surprise me about the survey result is that third place was taken by Mother Theresa - a worthy and godly woman, certainly, but one who never had any children of her own. So why was she ranked so highly as a mother? Are we inclined to project good qualities onto people that we admire, when we have no other information to go on? The same could be said of the Virgin Mary (who came 8th in the poll). Although she did have several children, the Bible tells us virtually nothing of her mothering capabilities; we just assume that she “must have been” the ideal mother simply because she was chosen by God to be the mother of His Son. What, in fact, do we know? That she gave the young Jesus a ticking-off for getting lost in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-48), and that when He was grown-up the relationship between them was, at best, a bit strained (John 2:3,4; Mark 3:21,32-35). This shows, at least, that she was a ‘real’ mother, not an artificial construct.
What does the Bible have to say about the ideal mother? The book of Proverbs has a chapter devoted to a good wife (who is also a mother). I read this at my own mother’s funeral:
“She speaks with wisdom,
and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children arise and call her blessed…” (Proverbs 31:26-28)