Mothers Move the World

Last week one of my students broke through her dyslexia barrier and to everyone’s astonishment (including her own) shattered her personal writing record. Much as I’d have loved to take credit, I recognized I’d only been privileged to witness a tipping point. Instead of garnering glory, I learned a lesson: Mentors may motivate, but mothers move the world.

Reagan* phoned me Thursday morning as I was simultaneously kissing my school kids good-bye and hugging my preschool class hello. Her daughter, McKenna, had completed her third tutorial with me Wednesday afternoon, and I thought she might have encountered some questions. “We have something to show you,” Reagan announced. The first two of my six three-year-olds were already building blocks in my living room, but I could hear Reagan’s urgency. “Come right over,” I invited.

They arrived in minutes, their faces aglow—and not just with eight-thirty sunshine. McKenna pulled a notebook from her pocket and started to read. Wednesday night, she couldn’t sleep; so she’d put pen to paper and recorded her day. “Sheralee told me to write, so I’m going to,” claimed one of her opening sentences. She must have filled three or four pocket-sized pages with musings.

What made those musings remarkable was that, stifled by her dyslexia, McKenna had never independently written so many consecutive sentences before. Her brain creates stories that suck me right in to lands lying deep in my Thanksgiving dinner or to history behind the Canadian coins in my pocket; but her dyslexia strangles her actual writing.  McKenna circumvents her handicap by illustrating her stories and then dictating them to her mother. Reagan’s biggest concern with McKenna’s first tutorial was that Reagan couldn’t possibly keep taking daily story-book-length dictations and meet all the other demands of her motherhood. “We’ve got to narrow it down to the sentence-level,” she insisted. “I can’t keep up; I’m exhausted!”

I’d be exhausted, too, had I devoted the energy to McKenna that Reagan has exerted for the past six years. Her efforts extend way beyond dictations. She has assumed responsibility for her daughter’s education. She has enrolled her in literature classes. She has researched literacy programs and liver cleanses, micronutrients and ear training, brain gym and brain integration and brain repatterning. She has sought the dyslexia’s roots, and any she can’t eradicate, she is bridging. As McKenna’s breakthrough attested Thursday morning, Reagan hasn’t wasted her effort. One seemingly insignificant step at a time, she is moving mountains and working miracles.

Mothers are the mentors that move the universe. Though not everyone expresses it quite like Abraham Lincoln, most individuals owe all that they are or hope to be to their mothers, angelic or otherwise. As E.T. Sullivan expressed,

When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way. He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home and of some obscure mother. And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits. The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies. (qtd in Gordon B. Hinckley, “These Our Little Ones,” Ensign Dec. 2007)

Babies and mothers, Montserrat Wadsworth, 2013 Nevada Young Mother of the Year, expounds. “While battles rage, diseases spread, and evil rears its ugly head, God is working quietly behind the scenes using mothers and babies to change the world” (Lucy Scouten, “Nevada Mom Changes the World One Baby at a Time,” Church News and Events, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

I saw that world-changing impact Thursday with Reagan and McKenna. They reminded me why Charlotte calls her egg sac, not her Wilbur-saving webs, her “magnum opus” (E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 144). They reminded me why it is even more important that I mentor my sons than my students.

Rachel DeMille captured mother’s potential impact when she wrote,

Raising children is the thing that changes the world the most. Everybody knows this, but Modern Feminism has convinced us that it is cliché, even patronizing. Eve didn’t think so, nor did Sarah. Raising children and mentoring the next generation is the most important thing we can do to change the world. It is the primary role of all women and all men, married or single. It is who we are. It is why we were born. We must train up the leaders of the future with confidence, power, and grace. We must deliver. We must achieve results. . . . If we fail, the world will fail. (“Steel to Gold: Motherhood and Feminism,” A Thomas Jefferson Education Home Companion, 65.)

I hugged McKenna Thursday morning. “Thank you so much for sharing with me,” I said. “You made my whole day.”

Reagan hugged me. “She made my whole year,” she proclaimed.

I nodded and waved and watched mother and daughter go back home to keep moving the world.

*Names changed to protect privacy.