Sunday, June 17, 2012

The Power of Moms

I would like to welcome any new visitors here today. Perhaps you clicked over from the essay about my dad on The Power of Moms today.

When I was a girl I loved the movie Gidget--the  original with Sandra Dee. It is such a girl-power show. And yet, there was a line at the end of the movie that really bothered my budding teenage sensibility. Gidget's mother asks her to read out from a sampler stitched by her great-grandmother. It says, "To be a real woman is to bring out the best in a man."

What?

Can that be right?

For a long time I would have said, "No way," but a husband and three sons later I'm not so sure anymore. I think that the real power of women does lie in influencing others. Maybe most particularly men.

Today is Father's Day. I'm away from my little men in order to spend the day with my own dad. My dear Plantboy willingly took the boys this weekend without hesitation. I got the real gift this Father's Day: a mom's weekend out! He is such a good man. I'm grateful for the way he has allowed the women in his life--sisters, mother, wife--to mold and shape him. I have truly seen the best of him, and I'm grateful to have been part of his life.

It is a strange thing sometimes being in a houseful of men, but a powerful blessing too. Daily I see the influence that I can have. I understand what Gidget's mother was trying to teach her.

2 comments:

Kimberly Bluestocking said...

I needed that today. Too often I focus on what I want to get out of life and relationships. When I shift my focus to what I can do to nurture others, we're all a lot happier.

chris w said...

This is one of my favorite quotes ever:

E. T. Sullivan once wrote these interesting words: “When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way. He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home and of some obscure mother. And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits. The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies.”
(as quoted by Gordon B. Hinckley in These Our Little Ones.)