Beware the Intruders!
I just read a really horrifying story in Slovie Jungreis Wolff’s fantastic new book Raising a Child with Soul. A happy wife and mother of one happy husband and two happy children hosts a couple for several weeks who, it turns out, are on the brink of divorce.
The getting-divorced mother is really down on motherhood and marriage, telling our heroine she is sick and tired of taking care of other people all the time. And hey, you only have one life to live, so why not live it up?
Up until those weeks with that friend, the happy mother had thought she was the luckiest woman in the world, the envy of everyone in her community. But the getting-divorced mother slowly convinces her that she is in fact the world’s biggest sucker for falling for all that “Fulfillment through Marriage and Motherhood” nonsense. What century (make that MILLENIUM!) is she living in anyway?!
Within a few months, our happy heroine has become a clinically depressed mother of two children in therapy and the ex-wife of a very miserable and stunned ex-husband.
OK, this is a really dramatic story that might sound really far from anything relating to us or our lives. But I think the message is so important for EACH one of us. We moms need to be constantly vigilant to expose ourselves to the right messages that are going to help us towards achieving our ultimate JewishMOM mission in life because: “The wise woman will build her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.”
What books are you reading? What movies are you seeing? Who are you hanging out with? Are the influences you choose to allow into your consciousness putting you on the train towards your goal of being a pumped and amazing mom or are they sending you off on a train with a one-way ticket to nowhere?
And don’t forget…”The woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator second only G-d.” -Helen Hunt Jackson
