5 Ingredient mothering

I love cooking made simple. I especially love those recipes whose ingredient lists are 5 items or less.

Good mothering is simple.

1^ST add a great helping of the fear of God. What would bread be without flour?—nothing but a pile of mushy goo. What is mothering without God and His word?—a pile of emotional mess.

God’s love, expressed as a Father giving up His own Son, is the beginning of good mothering. I know for a certainty that my own sinful nature is not the gauge that should be used to meter out life for my children. I am as incontinent as the weather—one day in good spirits, the next in the depths of despair.

It is also with the idea in mind that these children are not my own that I keep my own desires in check. It is not often, but it has happened that a child would possibly push me over the brink into the chasm of unrestrained malevolence. The knowledge of God and His injunctions to deal with mercy and imitate His benevolence keeps me on track.

Conversely, if I listen too much to their complaints and crying, I can be swayed to think of themselves as lifelong “victims”—never able to persevere through adversity to reach their full potential.

Next, mix in a lot of “sugar”—take in deep drafts of the deliciousness of each child. Spend lots of time enjoying how they are made, how they move, how they speak, how they think. Let your delight overflow with massive amounts of praise, adoration, and affection.

How I love holding my baby and kissing her fuzzy head, listening to her when she giggles as I tickle her, catching her adoring gaze and meeting it with eyes brimming with tears of deep emotion. I often place my toddler on the counter beside me while I work in the kitchen, and she talks to me and I get to hear the first inklings of the person she is inside. I drink in the sweetness of my 5-year-old’s smile, the voice of my 7-year-old, the caress of my 9-year-old, and the different stages and personalities of all of my children, even up to the 26-year-old who is daily learning to be a mother herself.

And don’t forget the salt. By itself, sodium chloride is bitter, and even scalding, but mixed in the right amounts, it brings out the best in all the rest of the ingredients. Correction by itself can scald a child’s heart, but when mixed with the proper amounts of love and affection, brings about the best results.

Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the demands of life and think of children as necessary nuisances, and so correction under these circumstances conveys this attitude to the children, and they respond by acting out our own expectations of them. We then feel justified at “cracking down”, and the cycle repeats itself over and over again. This is when we become discouraged, wanting to give up and ruing the day we ever birthed them!

But without any correction at all, life is filled with uncertainty for the child. He is new to this life, and he hasn’t a clue how to control his own desires and emotions, let alone his body and its natural urges. He needs us to give him parameters, lines of inclusion and exclusion, and to give him consequences to keep him within or without these lines. Where there is a proper balance of correction and love, a child’s heart is at rest.

Milk is symbolic of abundant provision. Children have basic human needs of food and warmth, but good mothering goes beyond these. No matter the circumstances, a good mother gives her children the best she is able.

My daughter Anna recently told me the story of a mother in India who worked around the clock in the house of a merchant just to earn the privilege of gaining a place for her baby to sleep on the stoop of a door. This mother stinted her own nutrition to provide for the child, and eventually worked herself into the grave. As soon as the mother died, the little boy wandered about aimlessly, until some missionaries were called and who gave him a place to rest. Even though her means were nil to none, she gave her best, her all, to lavish provision upon her child.

No matter what our current provisions may be, we need to bestow upon our children the best we can provide. We owe it to them with the most clean, organized, and pleasant surroundings possible. We need to care for their clothing—not only that they are practical, but modest and pleasing to the eye.

We need to offer food that is nourishing and delicious, served with flourish and generosity. Whether it is a bowl of oatmeal or a steak dinner, it’s the smile and the attitude that will make the taste either good or bad.

Leavening gives bread texture and volume. Mothers need to add some fullness and height to their children. They need to encourage higher thinking, higher goals, higher speech and conduct.

Of course we are mindful that our homes are places of relaxation and comfort, but they should never be let go until they become pigsties. Children need to be taught manners and taught to speak properly, to love each other and the elderly, young and helpless.

They need to be instructed in personal hygiene, in the care of their environment. They need to have an appetite developed, not for cheap entertainment, but for time well spent in the inculcation of mental and artistic pursuits and disciplines that bring out the best in man and womankind.

Planning family times with this in mind is a great part of our jobs as mothers. We need to give alternatives to the entertainments of our age which actually work against true recreation.

Then, when we have added and mixed and shaped and formed to the best of our ability, we must trust God to do the proofing and the baking. He is the Master, and our efforts are only as effective as His blessing on them, and the choice of the child itself to receive them.

I often think I have taught my children the things they will need, but then I realize they must make them their own. Just because they leave my home doesn’t mean they are “finished products”; life does a fuller, deeper work when they leave. But the foundations laid here have given them all the head-start they have needed to brace for the many cold winds that have blown and will blow across their path in the years to come.