The Mother’s Day Message I Never Got to Preach

Mom in our VW bug with all 10 of us and still smiling!

This year, I didn’t get a chance to preach a Mother’s Day message.

And yet over the last few days, I found myself needing to write one anyway.

Maybe because retirement has a way of making you look backward with softer eyes.

Or maybe because some memories take decades before you finally understand what you were really seeing.

One of my earliest memories of visiting my mom’s homeplace in Leola is, honestly… not liking it very much.

I was a town kid by then.

And that farm felt rough to me.

I didn’t like the smells.

I didn’t like the animals — especially the turkeys. Those things were terrifying.

And I most certainly did not like the outhouse.

I remember arriving there and feeling out of place almost immediately. Everything about it felt foreign to me. Raw. Windblown. Weathered.

But looking back now, I think what unsettled me most wasn’t really the farm itself.

It was that I could feel — even as a child — that home carried shadows for my mother.

This wasn’t nostalgia country for her.

This was survival country.

Eleven siblings.

A father dying young.

Scratching out a living on the cold northern prairies during the Great Depression.

Mom would talk about winters upstairs in that farmhouse, how cold it got at night. She said sometimes you could see your breath in the bedrooms. The kids would huddle near the heat vent trying to catch whatever warmth drifted upward.

She hated oatmeal almost her entire life.

As a kid, I never understood why.

Later she told us that during the Depression, there were stretches when oatmeal was sometimes all they had.

Not the cozy oatmeal of commercials and happy breakfasts.

Survival oatmeal.

The kind that leaves a memory in your body.

And one of the things I understand more deeply now is just how much grief and instability hovered over that family.

My mother’s first father died by suicide.

The second man who entered the family eventually ended up in a mental institution — what they called an “insane asylum” in those days.

And there was “Mamma.”

Just Mamma… and twelve kids… trying to hold on.

Trying to survive winters.

Trying to survive poverty.

Trying to survive grief.

Trying to survive shame and uncertainty and all the things families in those years often carried silently.

And yet, despite all that hardship, there was strength in that family too.

Real prairie strength.

The kind forged by weather and labor and necessity.

I remember noticing as a kid that none of the men in that family seemed to have all their fingers.

Farm life had taken its toll.

Missing fingertips. Crushed knuckles. Bent hands. Scars from machinery and livestock and years of hard labor.

These weren’t people who worked with ideas all day. Their bodies carried the evidence of survival.

And somehow, even with all that hardship, they laughed.

That’s what amazes me now.

They could have become bitter.

Hard.

Closed off.

But instead there was warmth around those tables. Teasing. Storytelling. Generosity. A kind of stubborn joy.

The one thing I did love about going home with Mom was her family.

Because when that family got together, there was always laughter.

Not polished laughter.

Not country-club laughter.

Not everything-is-perfect laughter.

It was deeper than that.

It was the kind of laughter shared by survivors.

People who had been through hard things together.

People who knew cold and loss and disappointment.

People who had learned how to tease each other and laugh at themselves because sometimes laughter was the only way to keep going.

Looking back now, I realize what I was seeing.

I was watching a family of survivors.

And many of them were what I’ve come to call:

Chain breakers.

People who inherited hardship… but refused to pass all of it on.

Mom was one of those people.

She grew up in a world that expected very little from women beyond survival and sacrifice. A world where daughters were sometimes encouraged to quit school early so the family could make it another season.

But somehow, through determination and the help of an older sister named Margaret, Mom made it to college.

And once she got there, something in her widened.

She began to believe she was allowed to have a voice.

A calling.

A life of her own.

That may not sound revolutionary now.

But for a farm girl from the Dakota prairie in those years?

It was.

I know on Mother’s Day we often celebrate what I might call the “Book of Proverbs 31 woman.”

The caregiver.

The homemaker.

The steady presence holding family life together.

And there’s beauty in that.

But this year, I found myself wanting to honor another kind of motherhood too.

The mother as chain breaker.

The mother as world expander.

The mother as pioneer of new pathways.

Women who inherited limitations… and quietly pushed beyond them so their children might breathe freer air.

Women who challenged assumptions simply by insisting: “I deserve a life too.”

Women who carried the criticism of their generation so the next generation could carry a little less shame, a little more freedom, a little more possibility.

That was my mother.

And this year, I found myself thinking about that again as I listened to our own kids talk about Cyndy.

I had asked them to send short video reflections for Mother’s Day.

There were, of course, many beautiful comments about traditional motherhood:

her steadiness, her love, her presence, the ways she held family life together through the years.

But what struck me most was something else.

They were deeply proud of her for continuing to become herself.

Cyndy has always had that kind of mind.

She used to laugh that whenever she took vocational aptitude tests as a young woman, the results always said she should become a car mechanic.

Which, in those days, wasn’t exactly presented as an option for women.

But the truth is, she has always been deeply mechanical and analytical. She likes systems. She likes figuring out how things work. She likes solving problems.

And when computers came along, something in her just took off.

You could almost feel a door opening.

The world had finally caught up enough to make room for gifts that had been there all along.

After years devoted to raising children and caring for others, she carved out a meaningful career for herself. She kept learning. Kept growing. Kept expanding instead of shrinking.

And I think our kids noticed that.

They saw courage in her willingness to begin again.

To risk.

To grow.

To rediscover purpose after exhausting seasons of caregiving.

They saw a woman who refused to believe her story had already been written.

And maybe that’s another form of chain breaking too.

Not simply surviving your era…

but gently pushing against its limits.

And there was another thread running through all their reflections too:

her willingness to patiently listen to their ideas and dreams.

Not just tolerate them.

Not rush past them.

Really listen.

Even when the ideas changed every six months.

Even when the dreams were unrealistic or half-formed or messy.

Even when life was busy and exhausting.

She made room for them.

And I think our kids felt that.

They felt what it was like to grow up around someone who believed their inner world mattered.

That kind of listening is its own form of motherhood.

Not controlling.

Not scripting.

Not forcing.

But nurturing possibility.

Making space for a child to slowly become themselves.

And maybe that connects back to the women I’ve been thinking about this Mother’s Day — the chain breakers, the world expanders, the pioneers.

Because one of the greatest gifts a mother can give is not simply protection from the world…

but permission to imagine a larger one.

And when I look back now at that little farmhouse on the prairie — all that hardship, all that cold, all that grief — I find myself emotional for a different reason than I ever expected as a child.

Because somehow… my mother survived it.

More than survived it.

She loved.

She taught.

She laughed.

She raised children.

She kept growing.

She carved out an impressive career.

She widened the world for the people around her.

Against all odds, she thrived.

And maybe that is one of the holiest things a human being can do.

Your pastor, thankful for the women who widened the world,

Brook