Like mother, like daughter |
Healthy Community
Joe Butler, Coeur d’Alene Press
May 10, 2006
This Mother’s Day, be sure to see your mom. Because, according to writer and speaker Nicole Johnson, moms do have a way of falling away.
“What happens sometimes is that with taking care of children and the home, some moms feel invisible,” Johnson said, “No one notices little things like how the socks end up in the drawers or dinner ends up on the table. But moms are usually the ones behind that.”
Moms, of course, know how hard they work, whether in a professional career or in a domestic situation. But not everyone notices and appreciates this, since, culturally, that’s really what moms are supposed to do.
“You lean in every now and then to listen for the applause, but it’s not always there,” Johnson said. “Of course you’re never going to ask for it, because of the sacrifice involved, so some moms really end up living under a cloak of invisibility.”
Johnson was in the area recently speaking at a regional women’s conference. In her presentation and in her latest book, The Invisible Woman, she compares the modern mother with the builders of some of the great European cathedrals. These took decades, if not centuries, to complete, sometimes by several generations of workers and craftsmen.
“We don’t know the names of all of the people who were involved in building them and putting in all the wonderful art, but people did show up for work on them every day, sacrificed so much for decades, and knew they may never see it complete in their lifetime,” Johnson said. “People were able to find joy in their sacrifice.” Likewise, it may take years for a parent to see any results of their efforts.
To combat the invisibility, she encourages people—mothers and non-mothers alike—to recognize the role of mothers. “Stand up and applaud the beauty of the invisibility,” she said. “Encourage others and tell them they’re not alone. Tell them they’re not disappearing just to disappear but to create something better for the future.”
She writes to every woman, including her sister, who, with 13 kids, is “one of the most invisible people I know.”
Johnson said that there’s no perfect mold or role of a mother, no matter what you think society demands. “No one size fits every one,” she said.
Johnson has been speaking and writing for several years, sometimes with relationship expert Gary Smalley. She has previously worked with Dr. Neil Clark Warren, who created eharmony.com, and is currently working on developing a talk show about relationships and life. Her first book, Fresh Brewed Life, introduced the world to a philosophy that good things can come from pain, unhappiness and negative things, “the broken pieces,” in one’s life.
“I compare life to coffee, that there is an enormous value in just the process of making coffee,” she said. “Just like the rich, full coffee flavor only appears when the beans are broken open and the flavor is freed.”
The message in that book and the five others she’s written is similar—live with passion and purpose. She encourages people to learn to “have a soft heart in a hard heart” to make it in today’s world, which can be simultaneously filled with good people and good experiences and bad people and bad experiences. Johnson is also exploring her own place in the world.
“I don’t necessarily write to all women, but I write about my own issues,” she said. “I find out things as I write, and I struggle with my own daily grind.”
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