For all those who mother...

Painting from http://www.marycassatt.org/

There is a status post going around Facebook right now. It’s kind of a dare to see how many will post a picture of their mothers for Mother’s Day. And the implication might be that those of us who don’t post pictures of our mothers don’t really love or respect our mothers as much as we should.

Now, in general, I don’t repost things too often (I probably do it more than I should), and this is one I wouldn’t mind reposting- because it’s a nice nod to mothers- but I can’t.

Why? Because I’d have to put up a collage of women’s faces. I don’t have one mother.

There’s my first mother Debbie. She’s taught me a lot. She’s the main source of my compassion and empathy, for which I'm so grateful. But, when I was 15, my parents divorced and she moved out. She is still very much my mother, but it meant that her full-time status as my mother stopped. I still respect her and do my best to honor her. And the truth of it is: all of us who mother will mother imperfectly. That’s humanity.

Then there’s my step-mother, Lynn. (She became Lynn Eastman three weeks before I resigned my own claim to that name and became Lynn Diener. Fun little trivia there.) When she married my dad, she made it clear to us (my sisters and I) that though we hadn’t been born to her, we were just as precious to her as her own children (none of whom were born to her either).

The passage in Isaiah 54 makes me think about her:
“Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor…Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back…For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities…”

This is a woman that for reasons we don’t know, never bore children of her own, and wanted and tried to get pregnant. Then, over the course of her life, now has 10 children (not adding in all the in-laws here). She’s taught me so much about myself, and about parenting mindfully and prayerfully. That mothering is an intentional process.

Then there’s my mother-in-law, Leona, who handpicked me to be her daughter. I mean, how much more wanted can a girl feel? She’s always had a heart for those suffering injustice, but it doesn’t stop at being a feeling or a prayer that she offers up, she acts on it. She does what she can and knows how to do (sometimes learning new ways to act) to make things better. And it’s not something she waited to do. She’s taught me that I have the ability to make life better for others now, even with three children clamoring for my attention and clutching my legs. The hurting can’t wait until things are more convenient for me. If I can, and know a way to help, I should.

And those are just the people I currently count among my mothers.

In the past, in pockets of motherly gaps, others have stepped in- like Rose, who was my youth group leader that often mothered me and even took me into her home for a while.

God has shown me that even though I may not have a storybook mother, my story has not been without mothers. And I think my story is richer for it. And it gives me the great relief that when my mothering leaves gaps, God will bring others into my children’s lives to fill in those missing pieces. It also gives me a fuller picture of who God is, and that God is not limited to one human parent’s influence on my life. That is grace.

The idea of mothering has grown more complex for me in the last couple years as I’ve dug into the research for the novel I’m writing.

Because on Mother’s Day, our culture is such now that it will extend the Mother’s Day wishes to those who mother in many ways- like this Pamper’s commercial. (I both love and resent this commercial for many reasons.)

We extend our Happy Mother’s Day greetings to women who became mothers “the old-fashioned way” or through IVF, through surrogacy, through the foster system, and through adoption.

But we fail to remember the mothers who exist without their children. The mothers who’ve lost a child in miscarriage, the mothers who carried a baby in their wombs then willingly or unwillingly relinquished a child for adoption. Mothers whose children have died after birth. The mothers who've held their children briefly, for moments, days, or years.

And we also fail to consider the women desperate to be mothers, the women who have mothered by other means (a loving aunt that takes in her nieces and nephews), and women like Stephanie (a woman I sponsored) who was in her early twenties and took in eight children who had been orphaned by the wars in Rwanda (she was an orphan herself) while living in a refugee camp.

For me, Mother’s Day is a layered with all this complexity and I can’t fit it all into one Facebook status post, nor can I cram all of their faces into one small square portrait.

So this blog post is for all those who mother, and especially those who have mothered in ways that fall outside the parameters of a Hallmark card.

Thank you for loving.

Photo by Stock.xchng