Get Domesticated, You Cold Idiot
or the mother-love of God in action
Welcome to the Back of the Flock, where we are slowed down by continual weather-related school closures, the mid-winter icks, never-ending viruses, and four-month sleep regressions from all the babies.
The end of January is birthday palooza as my daughter and I have birthdays only 4 days apart. We celebrated with a girls’ weekend of manicures, movies, and takeout which were amazing, and then, with the good Lord’s help, I somehow made it through her request to spend an entire day at the Mall of America. I’ve also been celebrating with cold plunges at a local lake, 24 kid-free hours as a gift from my good friend Rachel, and with one of the best dinner experiences I’ve ever had.
I almost titled today’s essay, “Frozen Critters in the Hands of a Concerned Rescuer,” as a gentle counter-play to Jonathan Edwards’ intense sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but figured that might be too niche. Instead, I used a random internet comment - “Get domesticated, you cold idiot,” - because it is 2024, and God speaks to us everywhere, even on a corner of Reddit’s internet, sometimes even in what sounds like the voice of Dwight Schrute.. Read on for the story behind the comment, the worst toddler tantrum I ever endured, and how both are parables for the mother-love of God.
One frozen February in 2019, two men were working when they heard sounds of distress coming from the nearby river. As they turned, they spotted a dog trapped in the icy water, struggling to stay afloat. Immediately, they dropped their tools and ran to the dog’s aid, clearing a pathway through the floating ice until they reached the freezing dog. They rushed him to the warmth of their vehicle, one man holding him close as they drove to a nearby veterinary clinic.
It was only then they learned that they’d just rescued a wild wolf. 1
I, of course, stumbled across this BBC story on Instagram, and while I reveled in the compassionate humanity of it all, and enjoyed imagining the apparently grateful/stunned wolf snuggling with a human in the backseat of a car, what really got me were the predictably apt and hilarious memes that the internet offered as a response.2
“Get domesticated, you cold idiot.” I laughed and then proceeded to not stop thinking about it for weeks, because this unlikely story of rescue serves as a parable of incarnation, a perfect picture of the mother love of God who so deeply loves us, despite our unwillingness to see it and accept it.
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My eleven-year-old son is strongly averse to pants and prefers to wear shorts, no matter the season or the regular sub-zero temperatures we often experience here in Minnesota.3 Shorts are, apparently, the tribal costume of his people, their preferred attire, despite the pleas of their desperate parents. But his aversion to weather-appropriate clothing is not some preteen, peer-pressured stunt. It goes back. Way back.
When he was around two, we began to notice some sensory challenges he had, primarily when it came to pants. We happily allowed him to toddle around our house (and often outside in summer months) in little but a diaper, but when we hit winter and averages of 8*F, the right thing to do, the sensible thing to do, was insist that he wear pants.
One Tuesday afternoon, I had to go to Target with some urgency. So I began the process of nursing my then infant daughter, packing the diaper bag, and trying to time out our trip around naps and feedings. As I prepared to leave, I began to attempt to cajole my tiny son into pants. We talked about why it was important to be warm; we opened the front door and felt the cold air outside. But no amount of talking convinced him. Each time I tried to put pants on his small but surprisingly strong legs, he’d kick and squirm and scream and wail.
I tried bribery. I tried timeouts. I tried almost everything, until I finally stuffed his little legs into pants and carried him, screaming, out into the snow to our car, where I strapped him into his car seat before he could wrestle them off his legs.
At this point, we were both crying…and sweating, and I knew the clock was ticking until his baby sister would start to lose it too.
With both kids buckled in, we drove to Target with his intermittent whines and cries about his pants. I kept reassuring him…you can take them off right when we get home…we won’t be at the store long…and I thought he’d resigned himself to his fate by the time we arrived.
After parking, I loaded my daughter and her car seat into the cart, and at his request, I held my son’s hand through the icy parking lot, steering the cart with my other hand. I began to breathe easier…we’d made it. We were here. We just needed to get in and get out. (This was before the days of curbside pickup, one of the greatest advances of our modern age.)
But as we walked through the first set of sliding doors, my son let go of my hand and proceeded to lay down on the dingy entrance mat, which was coated with the tracked-in sand and ice-melt pellets of thousands of winter boots. He then began to scream about pants at the top of his lungs, his tiny limbs flailing in apparent anguish.
There we were, the three of us, all crying or on the verge of tears. People streamed into the store, blasting us with icy air each time the sliding doors opened and closed. Owen continued to scream and cry, and at that moment, I gave up.
I picked him up with that brand of superhuman mom strength reserved for car crashes and particularly egregious tantrums, steered the cart and my daughter with my other hand, loaded them both back in the van, closed the doors, and began to cry. I just sat there, parked, and cried and cried and cried.
I cried because I was tired.
I cried because everything felt hard.
I cried because I was embarrassed.
I cried because I felt like a failure.
I cried because I didn’t know how to help my son.
Nine years after the Great Target Tantrum of 2014, I now have the words to describe exactly how I felt in that freezing entryway:
Get domesticated, you cold idiot.
My love for this tiny, pants-averse human exploded into existence the moment I registered the two positive lines of the pregnancy test. As he grew inside me, my entire narrative shifted and centered around his well-being…I gave up lunch meat and brie and wine. Despite heavy nausea, I tried to eat well from the start; I read all the books and took all the prenatals, and rejoiced in each one of his flutters and kicks. I tried, in those nine months prior to meeting him, to create a life that would make him happy, healthy, and safe because my love for him already knew no bounds.
Our wombs are cultivators of compassion.
In all of those nine months, and in every single day since he had made his arrival, I had tried to mother him with that same womb-like love. And more than anything, in that desperate moment in the Target entry-way, I wanted to keep his little knees warm, to protect his skin from frostbite, and to somehow communicate to him that it was my immense love and care for him, coupled with the fact that I actually knew what was best, that had brought us to that moment on that sand-laden black mat.
What I didn’t know then is that a word for this kind of love has existed for thousands of years in the Hebrew language.
In Exodus 34:6, one of the earliest and subsequently most consistently written descriptions of God, we are told this — “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.”4 The first word we are given to help us understand the nature of God is compassionate. In Hebrew, this word is rakhum (pronounced rock-oom), which has its roots in the Hebrew word for womb, which is reckhem.
We are told that God’s compassion for us is rooted in womb-like care, the tender love of a mother has as she grows her baby within and cares for it in its infancy.5
This love is an active love, one that comes from a mother who is deeply moved, the new mother who springs out of bed at the slightest whimper of her newborn baby.
In the Bible, we come across God’s rakhum when God hears the cries of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt and is deeply moved to the incredible liberating action of the Exodus. We see it again when God hears the cries of his hungry children in the wilderness and is moved with compassion to provide what they need in the form of manna, quail, and water. We are provided yet another example in I King 3, when Solomon tries to settle a dispute between two women who were claiming the same baby. When he brutally offers to split the baby in two, the baby’s true mother is “deeply moved” and insists the other woman have the baby so it could live, thus proving to Solomon that she was its true mother.
Then, at one of Israel’s darkest moments, the exile wrought by their unfaithfulness, the prophet Isaiah again compares God to a mother and asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these might forget, yet I will not forget you.”6
God is full of this womb-wrought compassion is always moving toward us out of motherly love.
That intense feeling of love and desperation I had while sitting with my seething son in that frigid Target entry way, knowing that I knew better than him about how to dress in the cold but my heart breaking over his frustration, over his inability to accept the care I so desperately longed to provide him? That was womb-like love. The two men dropping everything to put themselves at risk on an icy river to rescue what they later learned was a wild animal that could have easily injured them? That was womb-like love.
God is deeply moved by womb-like love to rescue us when we are in states of icy peril, in states of stubborn and misguided refusal, even in the worst of our tantrums and rage. God is deeply moved to run out onto the thin ice and pull us to safety with no thought for his own. He come with a warm blanket in hand and the heater on full blast, ready to rescue and repair us until we’re warm and whole again. God looks at us, full of this womb-love and moved by his all-consuming compassion, warmth shining from his eyes, and whispers as he gently scoop us into his arms, “Get domesticated, you cold idiot.”
This Star Tribune newspaper article photo and caption feels like a peek into my future. The article was written during what we in Minnesota call “a Polar Vortex,” where felt temps reached -50*F.
"Shorts are, apparently, the tribal costume of his people, their preferred attire..." I WILL be thinking about this every time my 2nd graders insists on wearing shorts. Which is...almost every day. 😂
This is beautiful, Elizabeth. Fellow mom of a kid with sensory needs, here. I’ll be thinking about this womb-like love for a while.