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I’m Not That Kind of Mother

By Barbara Curtis

“Honey, I’m just not that kind of mother,” I said.

Jasmine, my 7-year-old Campbell-Soup-Kid-cheeked daughter, stopped her enthusiastic hopping up and down. Suddenly she looked very small.

She’d come home from school ready to burst with excitement, bouncing into the kitchen where I was making dinner to tell me about the big cake decorating contest at her upcoming school fair.

“Can we make a cake, Mom? Can we?”

A simple request for most moms. Not so simple for me. Back then, making a cake for a cake contest posed such a challenge to my self-image and the way I’d conducted my first 13 years of motherhood, Jasmine might as well have asked me to climb Mount Everest.

“Honey, I’m just not that kind of mother,” I said again with more That’s that in my voice.

But though my voice was firm, inside I was squirming. There was something too familiar about this scene—something in the sadness of Jasmine’s shoulders as she turned away, the resignation gathering like a heavy cloak around my little girl—that gave me pause. I began to wonder what it meant when I said I wasn’t that kind of mom.

I thought of my own mom and her lack of involvement in my life. But what choice did she have? Abandoned with three young children, working two jobs to keep a roof over our heads, coming home exhausted long after we had gone to bed, she turned to booze to numb the pain. She had crazy, mixed-up relationships with men. And so finally, between work and her problems with alcohol and men, there really wasn’t much of Mama left. Clearly, she hadn’t been the cake-making type.

Ironically, despite my best intentions not to, I came close to repeating her pattern, ending up at 20-something a divorced mother with two daughters and problems galore—problems with jobs, problems with drugs and alcohol, problems with men.

But God was beginning to reach for my heart, and my life was beginning to change. Obviously some clutter needed clearing. There was the clutter of my feminist politics, which caused me to look down on “womanly” pursuits like cooking, sewing, volunteering at school. And there was the clutter of my own childhood, my own relationship with my mom, which kept me from seeing all that motherhood could be.

I began to realize that every opinion I held on motherhood was up for grabs. It was an awakening of sorts—not the one yet to come when my husband and I found Jesus four years later, but a smaller one. Somehow God opened my eyes to see there were no limits or boundaries to my motherhood, that I could become any kind of mother I wanted to be. That discovery made all the difference in the world in my next 20 years of mothering—and probably the rest of my life.

But it all started with a little girl who wanted her mother to make a cake.

I took Jasmine’s hand and brushed her curls away from her eyes. “Well, maybe we could give it a try,” I said, tentatively.

But when I saw Jasmine’s shoulders lift and hope return to her eyes, my sense of purpose grew.

“What kind of cake were you thinking of?” I asked, hoping it would be something I could actually do. I’ve just never been a creative person at all.

She wanted Garfield, the orange cartoon cat with the mischievous eyes and the ear-to-ear grin. She produced a picture from Sunday’s comics and we set to work, our kitchen becoming a flurry of cake mix, frosting and orange coconut until at last a Garfield—nearly perfect, if I had to say so myself—sat smugly on a foil-wrapped board, just waiting to take his prize.

My husband, sensing some significance, grabbed the camera and took a picture—a picture I treasure to this day.

The next morning, Jasmine and I proudly carried our Garfield cake into her classroom. There, my pride in my accomplishment was quickly cut to size when I saw the other entries, which included a three-dimensional playground, an aerial model of the school, a baseball diamond with game in progress and a five-car train. I stifled a twinge of inadequacy by reminding myself that other mothers had racked up much more experience than my 24 hours.

That we won fifth place in second grade tells me it must have been almost impossible to walk away without an award. Yet for me—someone who never used to do stuff like that for my daughters—it was as good as Olympic gold. And for Jasmine—whose mommy had finally woken up to smell the coffee—it was priceless.

I still have the certificate we won that day, and I keep it and the picture of the cake to remind me not to say no without thinking. Since then, God’s asked me to do some unusual things, and it’s been a joy to be able to say, “Yes, Lord, I’ll do that. It’s not familiar territory at all, but I’m willing to go there if You’ll hold my hand.”

God’s plan for my life couldn’t be fulfilled when I was a woman who could say in all seriousness, “I’m not that kind of mother.” He needed a mother who was willing to take an honest look at herself, to refuse to accept the limitations of the past, to take risks, to stretch and grow, even to throw off the concept of being like all the other mothers in order to become the kind of mother He wanted me to be.

Excerpted from Lord, Please Meet Me in the Laundry Room (Beacon Hill, 2004). Used with permission.

BARBARA CURTIS is mother of 12 - she and her husband Tripp went on to adopt three other children with Down Syndrome following the birth of Jonny and his little sister Madeleine. Barbara is also author of seven books, including Lord, Please Meet Me in the Laundry Room and Mommy, Teach Me!  You can visit her at www.barbaracurtis.com or her blog www.MommyLife.net.