I have four married children now, which still feels like the sort of sentence that should belong to a woman older and wiser than I often feel myself to be.
Four of my children have stood at the beginning of their own households, made vows, joined their lives to someone else’s, and begun building families and rhythms and traditions that are no longer merely extensions of mine. They are theirs now. Their tables. Their couches. Their small decisions. Their daily faithfulness. Their dishes in the sink and conversations in the kitchen and babies passed from arm to arm.
And of all the women who raised the people my children married, I only knew one of them beforehand. That means there are mothers whose names were once unknown to me whose faithfulness I now see echoed in the lives of people I love.
Isn’t that something that takes your breath away?
A woman spent years mothering in a home I never entered, praying prayers I never heard, teaching lessons I never witnessed, correcting attitudes I never saw, making meals I never tasted, wiping tears I never knew had fallen, and then one day, because of the providence of God, the child she raised becomes part of my family.
And suddenly, I begin to see her.
Not fully, of course. No mother’s work can ever be fully measured from the outside. There are too many hidden sacrifices, too many late-night conversations, too many moments when she chose patience instead of irritation or repentance instead of pride or endurance instead of escape. There are too many ordinary days that looked like nothing at the time but were actually forming a soul.
But I see traces of her.
I see her in the stories they tell, and in the instincts they carry.
I see it in the way they handle conflict, the way they apologize, the way they laugh, the way they serve, the way they enter a room, the way they think about family and loyalty and faithfulness and home. I see pieces of the homes that raised them being carried into the homes they are now building with my children.
I see it in the recipes that now show up at our gatherings, dishes that were once favorites around another family’s table and have somehow made their way to mine. As a person whose love is often expressed in a pan of cornbread or a cake layered with cream cheese frosting, there is something profoundly beautiful about that to me—the way a recipe can cross the threshold of a family and bring with it more than ingredients. It carries memory, childhood, and the invisible labor of a woman who fed her people again and again, perhaps without realizing that one day her child would serve that same dish in another home, to people she had not yet met, in a family she did not yet know would become connected to hers.
I am grateful. So profoundly grateful.
Grateful for women who did work I could not see. Grateful for correction I never heard, prayers I was not present for, sacrifices I will never fully know, and ordinary days of mothering that were not glamorous at the time but formed someone who would one day become woven into the life of my own family.
How can I not feel wave after wave of thankfulness for something like this?
Motherhood can feel so small when you are in the middle of it.
It can feel like one more meal, one more correction, one more ride, one more conversation, one more morning of waking up tired and choosing to be faithful anyway. It can feel like you are pouring yourself out into a life that may not fully understand the weight of what you are giving. It can feel repetitive and thankless and hidden and draining in a way that you understand without me even really saying if you’ve been walking this for years.
But, friends, the Lord sees it all.
He sees us when we pray over a child who is not yet ready to listen, and when we apologize for being too quick to assume a child is lying. He sees us when we chose the hard thing rather than defaulting to staus quo, and when we keepsconfessing our dependence on Christ because we know we cannot form a child’s soul by our own strength.
And sometimes, years later, another mother sees the fruit of what only God has seen.
That is one of the unexpected gifts of having married children. You begin to understand that your family’s story is not the only one God has been writing. While you were busy raising your children, other mothers were raising theirs. All along, there were many tables at which the Lord was present, weaving together traditions and tales that would some day scatter… only to reassemble in another location and be woven in amongst threads gathered from so many other narratives.
Sitting beside women who now call my children part of their family gave me eyes to see that I was praying prayers far too small for the children still in my home who are not yet married.
You see, I used to pray mainly for the person they would someday marry. And I still do.I pray for their future spouses, if marriage is what the Lord has for them. I pray that these men and women will know Christ, love His Word, walk in humility, and have hearts that are tender to conviction and steady in faithfulness. I pray for their character, their protection, their growth, their obedience, their courage, their joy, their love, their safety.
But now I pray differently too; now I pray for the mother raising that future son-in-law or daughter-in-law as well.
I pray for the woman whose name I may not know yet, the woman who may be scrambling eggs this morning for a child who will one day sit around my table. I pray she is faithful. I pray she leans into Jesus and not her own strength on the hardest days. I pray she does not grow weary in doing good, even when the fruit feels far away. I pray she speaks truth and understands grace. I pray she knows when to hold the line and when to soften her voice. I pray she loves her children fiercely, and so well that they understand her love was never meant to hold them in place forever.
Because that is part of the work too, isn’t it?
We are not raising children to remain forever at our own tables. We are raising them to follow Christ, wherever that leads. If that calling looks like marriage, we are raising them to leave and cleave, to build households of their own, to carry some echo from our homes and submit even that to the Lord as they establish something new.
It’s ok that it hurt to read that, because if you haven’t yet walked it out you will learn, over and over again, that preparing a child for adulthood is not a betrayal of the years spent holding them close— it’s part of the stewardship.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” —Genesis 2:24
That verse is beautiful when you are young and dreaming of marriage. I remember scanning a list of possible vows when my engagement ring hadn’t yet worn a groove in my finger, and that verse standing out. It was what I wanted— my husband to pull away from his parents, and start something totally new, totally ours, from the the ground up.
But as a mother?
As I’ve counted down the days to being the Mother of the Bride or the Mother of the Groom, I’ve had to remember that my child’s marriage doesn’t erase me or my family or the home I built for them. Rather, it rightly orders what God had planned from the beginning. My children are not possessions to be kept, but souls entrusted to me for a season. I have nurtured them, taught them, discipled them, and loved them in ways I never imagined possible back when I was the one on the other side of the leaving.
And now… I look at my teenagers now and wonder what stories God may be writing for them. With whom will they leave? And to whom will they cleave?
I wonder whose table their future spouse may be sitting at today. What meal is on that table? I wonder what traditions are being formed, and how they will make their way into the fabric of the future of my family. I wonder what lessons are being learned about how to relate to people, what love looks like, and what a supportive family feels like.
But mostly, I wonder about the mother, because she is the thermostat for all of it.
Maybe she is exhausted today. Maybe she feels like she is failing. Maybe she is correcting the same attitude in my future son-in-law for the hundredth time, or praying through tears for the hurt my future daughter-in-law is feeling. She might be trying to make a meal stretch, or asking the Lord to help her respond with wisdom instead of fear to a circumstance that will eventually be relayed to me by a man or woman who was a child when it shaped them.
I’ve watched the fruit of other women’s mothering enter my family. Children-in-law who did not arrive out of nowhere, but come carrying years of formation, correction, affection, stories, habits, and love. They come with recipes from tables I never sat around and stories from homes whose walls saw life that now colors the life my child will lead. They come with phrases they repeat, and discipline styles they experienced, and ideas about God and faith that require space in my living room.
I’ve seen the echo of mothers I did not know, and I am humbled by it.
The work we are doing in our homes may one day bless people we will never meet. Or it may bless people who are, right now, strangers to us but will one day become family. The prayers I say with my 5 year-old each night might be the same ones spoken over the grandchild another woman scoops into her arms. The chili I make in my kitchen might show up at a family potluck six states away.
Maybe, by the funny measure of grace God uses to connect His people, the mother of someone who will someday sit around my table is reading this right now. If she is, I hope she feels the prayers I am praying for her.
I hope she is encouraged in the work she is doing today.
I hope she remembers that Jesus is present in the ordinary, that He sees what is hidden, that He strengthens weary hands, and that no faithful act of mothering offered to Him is wasted.
And truthfully?
I hope she is praying for me too.
In Christ,
Heather
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