Our Lady isn't on Instagram

so why do i treat her like she is?

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

For so long, I’ve tried to compare myself to Mary, tried to find echoes of my motherhood in hers. Months ago—a year ago?—I started writing an essay called “Mary, did you know [motherhood as I know it?]” that was going to explore this topic.¹ Back in May, I started another essay called, “I struggle with Mary, and perhaps that’s the point”—some of which you’ll see repurposed here.

All this to say, for three years now, I’ve regularly asked myself: “Did Mary know motherhood as I know it? Or is my experience of motherhood so fundamentally tainted by original sin that it’s just not even worth asking the question?”

It started when James told me that the Church Fathers are almost unanimous on the birth of Christ being a mystical and, well, non-vaginal event. A divine c-section, if you want to be irreverent about it. “Like light passing through a glass” is the phrase I’ve heard.

That shook me. I pushed back against it for a while, chafing at the loss of this precious experience I thought that she and I had shared. “Well, the Church Fathers were probably just theorizing. They didn’t necessarily know. They weren’t there.” I’ve been blessed to have two simple-enough births (although very different from one another), and found great comfort in the idea of Mary laboring and giving birth as I had. Sacrificing that idea—that comfort—was difficult.

For some people, it might be the idea of her perpetual virginity that’s a stumbling block. Or the Immaculate Conception. Or the Assumption. It might be the idea that God would ask a human woman to knowingly allow her son to be killed. Or maybe it’s her role as mediatrix and intercessor. There are a whole host of things about Mary that make her different. Her life on Earth, while arguably more human than ours (because she was preserved from the stain of original sin), was certainly not normal.

And then parenting… when a baby is a newborn and so small and soft and fresh, it’s easy enough to imagine yourself and Our Lady experiencing the same things: feeding, changing diapers, sleeping, snuggling, staring in adoring wonder at the tiny child in your arms.

But it doesn’t take long—or at least, it didn’t for me—for the effects of Original Sin to start showing up in my parenting (and in my marriage, as a result of the challenges of parenting). The question arose quickly: “How much of this behavior is due to sleep deprivation, and how much is due to vice? How much of this is me experiencing my emotions, and how much of this is me being ruled by them?”

In other words, my experience of motherhood departed pretty quickly from what I imagined the Holy Family’s life looked like. Where I’d hoped to find consolation and closeness to Our Lady in motherhood—after all, everyone talks about the deeply spiritual experience of being pregnant around Christmas—I found only comparison and shame.

Can we even fathom what it must have been like? To be a woman preserved from Original Sin, raising a boy who was God Himself? I’m not sure we can. Or, perhaps we can intellectually, in theory, in theology… but in the day-to-day, I have yet to find good fruit from trying to relate to Mary in this way.

I was saying my rosary on my drive to Choir Camp last week—something of an oddity in itself, as I am rarely faithful to this practice—but with a forty-minute drive and no children or Silly Songs with Larry, I didn’t feel I had an excuse.

Pondering the mysteries of the Ascension and of Pentecost, my mind once again wandered to this topic. The Ascension has become, over the years, a sad sort of Glorious mystery to me: the loss (at least bodily) of Jesus must have been such a cross for the disciples, let alone for His Mother.

Now the tears come easy, when you say you’re leaving
We touched the place the nails went through, wanting one more day with you
But it’s goodbye now, for a little while now
Believing everything you said is true

- “Empty” from Music Inspired by the Story

I console myself with the certainty that He remained present with them in the Eucharist, and that He sent the Holy Spirit to them as He had promised. For Our Lady, this must have felt like a sweet reunion, or perhaps an introduction of her beloved Spouse to her dear friends the Apostles.

But I cannot shake the bittersweetness of it all.

Putting myself in her shoes, I can’t help but feel saddened, disappointed, even deprived—the thought of losing my own children in this way calling to mind all the miscarriages, the stillbirths, the deaths of infants and children I’ve known… Their memories are never far from the front of my mind, and they represent a grief and fear that I usually try to shove down.² There’s rarely a “good time” for openly weeping at the thought of a mother halfway across the country waking up to another day without her child.

“But,” I ask myself—ask Mary—in prayer, “Is that sorrow a good thing? …or is it a sign of a disordered attachment?”

Ah, this old question again. Around and around and around we go.

As I sat with this reality—that my daughters will never bodily ascend into Heaven but remain mystically and sacramentally present on Earth—I began to wonder if trying to put myself in Mary’s shoes (and trying to put her in mine) is the wrong approach.

It hit me like a bolt of lightning then: The first piece of advice I give to new mothers is to get off Instagram. There is so much there that feels predatory to me, as a woman who was off it long before I became a mother, and I hear so many women talk about their motherhood anxiety starting with the phrase, “Well, I was reading this thing on Instagram…”

If I am adamant in my opinion that it is dangerous to expose ourselves to a highly-filtered highlights reel of other people’s lives (to which we compare ourselves, whether consciously or subconsciously), then why do I allow myself to compare my own life to my own assumptions about Mary’s life, whose experience I cannot fathom and do not know?³

That’s what I came to realize: it’s not Mary’s life that I’m comparing myself to when I try to imagine what her motherhood must have looked like. It’s my own perceptions of all my shortcomings, all my fears, all my failures and regrets and what-ifs. And is it any wonder we struggle with her, when this is how we see her? As nothing more than a projection of the person we think we ought to be?

Our Lady isn’t an abstract idea, a concept that we twist to fit our own objective and remake in our own image.

Mary’s role isn’t to be #relatable, nor is it to be this high-in-the-sky ideal, held up on a pedestal as the pinnacle of the female experience. I wondered, as I was thinking and praying and writing this post in my head, if we’re a little bit missing the point, trying to see Mary as our ~ a s p i r a t i o n ~ instead of simply our mother. If the premise of this entire newsletter project is that we’re all just toddlers before the Lord, then why not also before His Mother, whom He gave to us on the Cross?

He didn’t say, “Woman, behold your mentee,” or “Behold your #momgoals”. He said, “Woman, behold your son,” and “Behold your mother.”

It’s not that Our Lady isn’t the paragon of female virtue: she is. And it’s not that she’s not the ultimate mother, whom we ought to imitate: she is. But many of us—particularly women and mothers—struggle with relating to Mary in a way that feels real and meaningful.⁴ And I can’t help but wonder if this is, at least partly, because we don’t know what it means to be her daughters.

Too often, when I look at Mary, I see someone who all my friends tell me I’ll really get along with: the girls’ weekend buddy par excellence.

But is that actually who she is to me?

The Restore the Glory podcast recently did an excellent series on the four relational identities (daughter, sister, bride, mother) with Heather Khym from Abiding Together. While I rarely listen to either of these podcasts, I remembered enjoying what I heard of the similar (longer) series that the Abiding Together ladies did a few years ago, so I thought I’d pop in for the short series as a kind of sparknotes version.

One of the foundational themes that was repeated throughout the Restore the Glory series was this: the earlier identities lay the groundwork for the later ones, and wholeness or brokenness in our understanding of self-as-daughter will show up in sometimes unexpected ways as we grow into the later identities.

In other words, perhaps before I consider Mary-as-role-model (for me as a mother) or Mary-as-mom-friend (that is, a sort of sister to me), I need to learn to rest in my relationship with Mary-as-mother (and myself as daughter).

I took this idea with me throughout the rest of my week at Choir Camp. It was the first week in months—probably even years—that I said my daily rosary for five days in a row. And instead of demanding proofs or signs of love, infusions of divine certainty, a lack of uncomfortable emotions… I just looked for examples of motherly love in the daily events of my life.

And, somewhat to my surprise, I found them.

I found Mary’s maternal care for me (and others) in the series of misunderstandings and miscommunications that led to several kids joining the Choir Camp on the first morning, including a young woman with Down Syndrome whose mother emailed me at ten o’clock the night before camp started. These students “shouldn’t have been there” (at least in terms of my registration deadline), but their delight and joy throughout the week was an obvious example to me of Mary’s maternal heart wanting the best for her children.

I found her in the ease with which a double-booked room was resolved.

I found her in the arrival of our camp t-shirts just on time, just the right quantity in just the right sizes, in spite of some necessary guesswork and a deluge of last-minute sign-ups.

And I’m beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, it’s not that Mary “hasn’t shown up for me” the way that I’ve seen her show up for other people. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t allowed myself to recognize her intercession in my life.

Maybe I’ve been so busy trying to figure it all out on my own that I haven’t stopped to hear her saying to her son, “They have no more wine.”

1. Absolutely a poke at the memes that ruin the Christmas season feel very strongly about the song of the same name, insisting that yes, she did know, and frankly, it’s insulting to her honor that you even feel the need to ask.

2. Probably not healthy but here we are. Don’t at me.

3. This isn’t an apologia about getting off Instagram. Please don’t feel the need to justify your presence there in the comments! I’m not trying to come after anyone or make anyone feel attacked.

4. Not every woman, of course. Some women really do find deep, deep consolation in walking through Advent while heavily pregnant, and to be perfectly honest, I envy them. That being said, I actually notice more men in my life who have a strong devotion to Mary, which I find to be an interesting observation. For many of us women, Mary feels like a bar we’ll never reach, a constant reminder of our faults and failures.