Mother's Day

Mother's Day is "supposed" to be a happy day for honoring mothers.

It is really sad when a mother cannot see who her child really is and is blind to the potential for who her child may become. KatieLyn has a mom who was excellent in providing 'mom' skills during early childhood. She does a good job controlling her children's environment as guarding their safety.  But when it comes to adequately nurturing the emerging adult and to let go just enough at the right times, she stinks.

The day that I met Gwen, she was treating her then-28 year-old daughter as though she was 14, half her biological age.  Gwen's speech was filled with criticism disguised as 'helping' KatieLyn in her own best interest.  I believe that many of KatieLyn's insecurities result from the relationship that she shares with her mother. As long as KatieLyn is insecure, she feels a need for her mother. As long as KatieLyn feels that she needs her mother's approval, Gwen can derive her own sense of self worth from it.

This, in a nutshell, describes their codependency: Gwen gets her own sense of self-worth by keeping her daughter from realizing her own sense of self-worth. KatieLyn makes an idol of her mother because she has never been allowed to develop enough as an individual to be able to trust in a man's love for her.

Kids should not have to ask for permission to grow up!

Rather than doing the Proverbs 22:6 thing and training up a child in the way he or she should go, Gwen trained up KatieLyn to be her go-to support person. They share, not so much a healthy mother/daughter relationship, but a need-meeting codependency.
  
The Lesson
The ability to become a good mother is dependent upon many things, but first and foremost, the #1 criteria for judging success is the answer to the question: Have I raised a successful, independent adult who knows and honors the Lord? 
The ability to do this is proportional to how well we know our God and how much time we spend in His Word ourselves; and then upon how much we follow through with what God reveals to us.

In KatieLyn's case there were two big red flags.
◙ One is that KatieLyn is not an independent adult. She is trapped more deeply than ever in a codependency.
◙ The second, and the one that fits the Mother's Day post, is the more disturbing of the two.  We could see the pathway in God's design to allow KatieLyn to blossom into her own person. What became alarming after KatieLyn ran home in the middle of the night was just how little Gwen respected Joe's ability to hear from the Lord. This is the chief fact that led me to conclude that Gwen rarely, if ever, hears from the Lord, and that she is not in the habit of listening.  She certainly blathered on about her "misgivings" enough to convince me that she never really heard what God had to say about the marriage. KatieLyn was running back home to a Mother who was clueless and who would go on to give her the worst advice of her life.