For mean moms

I have kept an old piece of material on my shelf for years, and today it feels especially timely to share. Its source is unknown, but its message is unforgettable. It captures something many children do not understand until much later in life: some of the love we resisted the most was the love we needed the most.

The piece begins with a mother speaking to her children:

Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a parent, I will tell them:

I loved you enough to ask where you were going, with whom, and what time you would be home.

I loved you enough to let you discover for yourself that your new best friend was not the treasure you thought.

I loved you enough to make you return and pay for the candy you had stolen and say to the clerk, “I took this yesterday and want to pay for it.”

I loved you enough to make you clean your room, even when it turned into a drama series with no commercial breaks.

I loved you enough to let you see disappointment in my eyes.

I loved you enough to let you face the consequences of your actions, even when it hurt me deeply to watch you go through it.

And most of all, I loved you enough to say no when I knew you would hate me for it.

That line is the centerpiece.

Good parenting often requires the courage to be temporarily misunderstood.

Then the article shifts gears and says, with humor, “Was your mother mean?

I know mine was. We had the meanest mother in the whole world.”

While others were having soft drinks and junk food for lunch, we had sandwiches. Our mother insisted on knowing where we were at all times. You would think we were under witness protection.

She made us work too. We had to wash dishes, make beds, vacuum floors, do laundry and empty the trash. Looking back, I suspect she went to sleep each night thinking of fresh ways to violate what we then considered the child labor code.

She demanded that we tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. By the time we were teenagers, it seemed she could read minds, which, as you can imagine, was very inconvenient.

While others were allowed to date absurdly early, we had to wait until we were older. Because of our mother, we missed out on many opportunities to make foolish decisions before our brains had fully reported for duty.

And then comes the punchline:

None of us were ever caught shoplifting, vandalizing property, or arrested for a crime. It was all her fault.

Now that we have grown up and left home, we are all educated, responsible, and honest adults. And we are doing our best to be “mean” parents just like Mom was.

Behind the humor lies a truth our culture desperately needs to recover.

Love is not indulgence. Love is not permissiveness. Love is not giving children everything they want the moment they want it.

Real love corrects. Real love guides. Real love sets boundaries. Real love is willing to disappoint in the short term in order to protect in the long term.

Do not confuse kindness with softness and affection with the absence of discipline.

Wise mothers know better. They understand that parenting is not only about making children happy. It is about helping them become honest, responsible, disciplined and good.

And that often means being called unfair, strict, old-fashioned, or yes, mean.

The irony, of course, is that the very things we resisted in childhood often become the things we are most grateful for in adulthood. The rules we disliked built the habits that later helped us. The discipline we complained about formed the character we now depend on. The “no” we resented may have saved us from a future we would have regretted.

A good mother helps shape conscience. She trains the heart. She forms habits. She plants values. She teaches children that life is not only about pleasure, but also about responsibility.

That is not glamorous work. It is demanding, repetitive, exhausting, often unseen, and too frequently unappreciated. Yet it is among the most important work anyone can ever do.

So today, thank God for mothers.

Thank God for the mothers who prayed, corrected, warned, sacrificed, forgave, and stayed.

Thank God for the mothers who loved us enough to make us uncomfortable, enough to tell us the truth, and enough to stand their ground when we were too immature to understand why.

And perhaps this is a good day to do something simple and sincere.

Call your mother. Thank her. Honor her.

And if she was one of those “mean moms,” thank God for that too.

Because very often, what felt like meanness then turns out to have been love in work clothes.

Happy Mother’s Day.

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