The Mixed Emotions of Mothers’ Day
a sermon preached by the Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at
First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, on Mothers’ Day, May 14, 2006
A reading from Katie Lee Crane:
May means Mother’s day. I’m going to trust Hallmark and daddies and six year-olds and grown-up kids who are mommies themselves to honor the mothers among us as they deserve to be honored – with brass bands, flags flying, breakfast in bed (and kitchen’s cleaned up afterwards). I wish for those mothers a memorable day full of love and laughter.
Sadly, I don’t trust Hallmark to remember the feelings of the women who don’t fit Mother’s Day in quite the same wonderful way. There are no cards on the rack for the women who gave up children for adoption, never to see them again. No cards for the women who face the painful and difficult choice to end a pregnancy. No cards for women who desperately want to conceive and bear children and cannot. No cards for women who have lost children of any age or for the women whose children have abandoned them in anger. There is little consolation for them on a day so full of “motherhood and apple pie.”
Every year when Mother’s Day rolls around, I wish there were just a little less hype about traditional motherhood, and a little more acknowledgement of not-so-traditional “mothers” in our midst – people who come in all colors, shapes, sizes, genders, and ages. And more than anything, I wish there were a lot more empathy for those who suffer because mothers are being honored and they don’t fit in in quite the same wonderful way.
Let us honor them all on this day. Women who conceived. Women who bore. Women who reared. Women who lost. Women who let go. Women who made different choices. And people of any gender who mother. Happy day. May each of you know your worth to all of us.
The Mixed Emotions of Mothers’ Day
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I just don’t know what to do.” The woman’s children were growing up, moving on, moving away, living lives of their own, and she was feeling the losses most acutely. She talked of how she had given birth to her kids in rapid succession, and had loved each one - maybe a bit differently because they were individuals after all, but she loved each deeply nonetheless.
She had given them a good start, she knew, nurturing and caring for them, and she was proud of what she’d done for them as well as proud of who they had become, were becoming.
Family members and others had helped provide enough that the kids had been able to go to good schools and to good colleges, even to study and live abroad. They’d had privileges that many in our society can only dream of, and this was part of the rub at this point in this mother’s life: as she looked back over the years and reflected on her own life and where she was now, it seemed that she had given all of herself - in fact, had given more than she had - to the kids she loved so dearly and that she would do anything for. And now as she watched them spread their wings and soar, she sometimes felt a touch of jealousy, a tiny knife edge of envy, that the kids now had more, or at least had more potential, than she herself had ever had.
“It doesn’t make any sense for me to feel this way,” she said, “but I do, and I don’t know what to do about it. Maybe I just want them to realize what they’ve been given.”
Maybe it doesn’t make any sense, but if you’ve been blessed enough to be a mother or to be anyone else who’s reared or nurtured or even been around children, perhaps you’ve felt this way yourself. As a parent, I’ve often tried - not always tried, but often tried - to give all that I had to children, whether they were mine or someone else’s. And then sometimes, when I’ve seen how well they’ve done with what they’ve been given, I can hear this niggling little voice way back in the darkest recesses of my soul, saying, “Well, those lucky little boogers. They’ll never realize just how good they’ve got it.”
Motherhood is a difficult row to hoe. And this ought to be a day that we acknowledge that fact. But simply talking about the subject can be difficult in a crowd - the more people you gather, the more the likelihood that troublesome emotions will come up. Some of us have moms that we look up to, moms that we put high up on pedestals, moms that are easy to honor and be grateful for. But some of us have more problematic relationships with our mothers, and we may find this day painful in unexpected ways as we reflect on our own lives, on our own mothers or our own mothering, on the myriad meanings of mothering and motherhood.
I have three grandsons now. And I watch them with their mothers when I can, though they are far away, in Houston and Ann Arbor. And I have seen the older two of them go from being babies - that stage of being totally dependent on their caregivers - to being big boys, in a place where they feel completely independent and on their own as lively two-and-a-half-year-olds.
Early on, they couldn’t hold their heads up, couldn’t move around the room, couldn’t feed themselves, didn’t in fact even know the difference between themselves and the rest of the world. When they were hungry, the whole universe was hungry. They were all there was; their immediate needs were all they knew. They were “at one with everything.”
Now, as grand old men long past their second birthdays, they are finally on their own (kind of), and they don’t mind telling you so in no uncertain terms. Oh, they hold their heads up, often with an attitude. They move around rooms so fast I can’t keep up. They can run, they can jump, they can chase other kids. And they can feed themselves - boy, can they feed themselves - if someone will only keep shoveling food toward them. They now recognize that they are separate entities from the rest of the universe, and they firmly believe that the rest of the universe exists only to serve them. (Judging by other people I’ve known, this stage may last for a long, long time.)
I don’t tell you about my near-perfect grandsons simply to brag. I tell you about them because I’ve realized watching them that they wouldn’t be alive today if they had not had mothers who had acted selflessly enough to keep them alive when they were newborns. And contrary to what the boys would tell you, they still need someone there to care for them, to help them make decisions, to keep shoveling food at them, and much of the time, to protect them from themselves.
I very much appreciate my daughters-in-law and my sons who care for my grandkids. Without them, the boys would have no chance at life. I didn’t send any Mothers’ Day cards to Houston or Ann Arbor this year, but now I realize that I might have to next year.
I also realize that, whether we are close to the person we call ‘mother’ or not, we are all indebted to someone. Someone kept us alive those first months and years. Someone mothered us in a fashion that, even if it wasn’t exemplary, was apparently good enough. Even if we developed a difficult relationship with that someone later on, we still owe a debt of gratitude to the one or ones who helped us get to the point where we could care to some degree or other for ourselves.
In that way, aren’t we all “lucky little boogers”? In that way, shouldn’t we all realize just how good we’ve got it?
Mothering is a strange proposition, and we are indebted to people who were doing something that doesn’t make much sense at all in the culture we live in. My mother didn’t get rich by giving birth to me. She didn’t gain power in the world by cooking for my siblings and me. She didn’t garner prestige in the world by keeping me in clean clothes as best she could. For teaching me right from wrong and how to tell the difference between the two, she wasn’t interviewed on Larry King or offered a book deal or even nominated for the Supreme Court.
It doesn’t make any sense that she gave of her time and of her talent and of her resources to give my sibs and me a good start in life. She got nothing of worldly value for her efforts - no money, no power, no moment in the limelight. Nobody ever said publicly, “Wow. Way to go. It’s sure a good thing you’re willing to give away so much of yourself just so those little ones can have a fighting chance at life.”
This mothering thing is not always a feel-good activity. If you’ve ever tried to be a mother to anyone, you may, like the mother at the beginning of this sermon, have come away with a few ambivalent feelings. Maybe that’s because we all get stuck in the “I-me-mine” cultural values of the world from time to time and to some degree or another. We sometimes get too comfortable thinking in terms of, “How am I going to get the best return on my investment?” “Why should I do anything for anyone else?” “What’s in it for me?”
Mothering, on the other hand, is at bottom a selfless, counter-cultural activity. Thank goodness there are a few people out there who can shed their worldly, “I--me-mine” values long enough to look at life differently and to act from a perspective of love.
This perspective of love dictates things like, “You must lose your life to gain it.” Love says, “And the last shall be first.” Love tells the rich to give away everything they have. From that perspective, it is silly to hang on to things, and it’s useless to cling to money or power or prestige. From the perspective of love, it makes wonderful sense to mother someone. The return may be difficult to quantify in terms the world would understand. But for those who have experienced it, that return is more precious than gold, more awe-inspiring than power, more desirable by far than any amount of prestige.
And that’s why we sing the praises of mothering on days like today.
UU minister Mary Harrington says that those who mother or who have been mothered experience many things:
“…Joy and delight, Wistfulness and longing and worry, Unmet needs and unfulfilled dreams, Loss and sorrow, Loss and emptiness, Loss and regret.”
She goes on to say of Mothers’ Day:
“…Today we sing the songs of so many: mothers who are single parents and foster parents, mothers who relinquished their young out of necessity, mothers who found their heart in adoption, mothers who left their children in a thousand ways, mothers who rejoice and mothers who mourn. We sing the songs of the grandmother, the auntie, the classroom teacher, the Sunday School teacher, the babysitter, the neighbor with endless cookies and time.”
And we also sing the song of mothers who have bad days and moments of uncertainty. The mother in the story that began this sermon was having such a bad day and moment of uncertainty when she spoke to me, and I don’t want to leave her story in limbo for you. Very soon after our conversation, she passed along a letter she received that she said brought huge tears to her eyes and made her reconsider those feelings of uncertainty. I’ll end with the letter:
“Dear Mom, Happy Mothers’ Day!
I hope you’ll have a great day celebrating what a great mom, grandma, sister, friend, and teacher you are! You are always so busy working to support others that you don’t recognize how much you are appreciated. Others of us do recognize the sacrifices you make to make sure everyone in the family has so many of the things they need. We realize that you give us many things we don't actually need but are just things you know we really enjoy having.
When you aren’t around, all of our family talks about how excited they will be to see you, and I’ve seen how your grandchildren light up when you get there to hug them, comfort them, and play with them. Even though you may not see it, your support, attention, and joy is the glue that holds our family together and makes the time we spend together so perfect. You are truly the definition of support and love.
I love you so much and hope you take some time to celebrate yourself today.
With much love, your daughter.”
May we each take some time to celebrate mothers and motherhood today. Happy Mothers’ Day to all of you.
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