On Mother’s Day
Reflections From My Context.
I often talk about my mother. She was an interesting woman, well-read and curious. We had a good relationship, something I’m discovering is rarer than I thought.
She herself did not have a good experience of being mothered as a child. She was raised by her grandmother, because her mother divorced her father and got remarried, and that man did not want another man’s child, so her mother gave her away. She never seemed bitter about it, but it surely must have affected her.
Because of that, my mother lacked in certain mothering skills. And yet she did her best with my sisters and me, and I know she loved us.
I’m telling this for two reasons.
First of all, because my understanding of motherhood can only come from the matrix of my own experience.
And second, while I am no psychologist, it has been my observation that more so than any other relationship, our relationship to our mothers absolutely becomes the frame upon which all our other relationships are built.
And so, when we single out a day like Mother’s day to reflect upon what motherhood is, and how we should honor it, it can get complicated.
Some women birth children, others adopt them. Some of us didn’t feel the call to mother small humans, but we are thankful to those who do, because you are raising up the generation that will care for us in our old age, and that will carry forward the ideas and visions that bring about our advancement as a society.
It’s a big responsibility. We are trusting you to do your best.
Some of us are mothers to animals, understanding that love can take many forms. Species is no barrier to love.
Some of us birth ideas; art, music, or writings, and as we stretch and struggle to bring them forth, we rejoice and worry over them just as if they were our little baby.
We can also be a mother to society through social justice or humanitarian acts, and we pray fervently that our “child” will flourish.
Some long for motherhood, unrequited. Some mourn a blighted childhood. There are arms that ache from the emptiness of a child lost, or a mother gone.
There’s love, and there’s wounds, both in being a child, and in being a mother.
Even if you grew up without your mother, she is still carried within you; you know this, you feel it, because all of our mothers are carried within each of us, only to be born from us, in a deeply archetypal circle of life, because our identities are so bound up in who she was.
Blood and bone, the face in the mirror, our most primal memories.
The ancient Jewish people seemed to know this, and wove into the tales of their beginning barrenness and birth, and mothering sibling rivalries; later Christians added miracles of virginity, that only could come about by the scandal of ancestresses willing to go beyond society’s rules and expectations.
Tamar.
Ruth.
Mary.
It was in this way that God’s purposes were carried forward; through an old woman who laughed to think she could have a child, through midwives who refused the Pharaoh’s orders to kill babies, and teenage girls who had the courage to say yes right to the face of an unexpected angel.
Because no matter how our human mothers shaped us, ultimately, we are shaped by our eternal mother, God.
“Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother.
‘I am the power and Goodness of a Father, but I am the Wisdom of the Mother. I am the unity and the love. The birth-giver and protector. The Mother hen who covers her young with her wings.
I am the nourisher and the companion who brings forth your life as the Mother of all things.
I am the Lord your God.’”
On Mother’s Day we reflect upon this aspect of the divine, as our source of life, as Creatrix.
This is the One who invites us to join in creating what every mother wishes for her children:
A restored world of peace, for all of us to live in.
