The Hard Love

Linking up to The Gypsy Mama's Five Minute Friday.

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She raised me alone from the time I was six. After my father left all we had was each other. She worked so hard and started at the bottom, climbing her ladder until she could support us both comfortably. She parented alone, she did the best she could during the tumultuous teen years when I did not cooperate much.

She cried, she despaired, she struggled.

She found the best opportunities and brought us here to make a better life. To further education, to learn another language, and unsuspectingly, to find and be found by the One who would save us and with whom we have both fallen in love.

When times were tough in our new land, she made some tough choices and I will never really understand how difficult those times were.

And yet, now that I am a mother, now that I am a little bit in her shoes, not completely for I have a loving partner to support me, I am beginning to realize how hard a mother’s love is.

How deep, how wild, how savage, how primal.

She didn’t know Him all those years. She only knew Him after I had met Him and helped make the introductions. Yet in the strength of her love, in the sacrifices she made for her only child, in her example of laying down her life and her desires for the sake of her daughter, unknowingly she gave me glimpses of His love and it was not difficult for me to grasp the reality of this Loving Parent when I came face to face with Him for the first time.

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