Mother's Day 2012

Mother's Day was pretty good this year, I actually got a present! I had to make breakfast, but I was excused from lunch and dinner and they only left me a little bit of a mess to clean up at the end of the day. But, just like every year, all day I had a problem with the focus on how Mother's Day is a day for women who have had children. Because I don't believe that's right. I remember a Mother's Day Sunday many years ago when I had just found out that an IUI had failed. This was approaching about three years of trying to get pregnant and I thought that Sunday that i would implode from bitterness, jealously and unfairness. Another woman in the ward had lost her baby just a day after he was born not quite a year earlier and was pregnant again and I was also burning with shame that the only thing I could feel for her was envy. The next Mother's Day found me just barely pregnant from an IVF treatment and feeling like I finally "deserved" to be part of Mother's Day. I was so young. I didn't know that getting pregnant didn't make me a mother any more than putting on a gold medal made me an Olympic athlete. There are still plenty of days when I deserve the title of mother about as much as I deserve the title of Olympic athlete. That is to say, not at all. Since those days, when I finally pulled my self out of my own narcissism enough to notice the people around me, I found this....a whole world of women who have never birthed a child themselves that teach me more about mothering than most women who have. I've often thought about the scripture story of the Good Samaritan that teaches that a neighbor is not someone who lives near you, but someone who helps you. I've seen a plethora of real life parables that have convinced me that a mother is not a woman who has birthed a child but a woman who has love and nurturing in her heart. Heck, if growing a child in your abdomen and pushing it out were all it took to be a mother then there would be no need for the Division of Child Services. My list of childless mother's who inspire me is long. It includes the famous--like Mother Theresa--and women that I've met in my everyday life. Many of them are in Taiwan. Taiwanese culture is such that society in general feels a collective responsibility toward children and while I lived there I was helped along greatly in raising my kids by young and old, parous and nulliparous alike. I loved it that Taiwanese culture did not make the ridiculous assumption that only parous women know something about child raising. Just recently I've met another woman who is so poised and intelligent and perfectly embodies Motherhood. The first few times I met her I was unsure which children were hers because she was so attentive and loving to every child in the room, including mine. Once, Alma made a comment about a craft he was working on, nothing super witty, but it was cute and childish so of course I noticed it. But I looked up to see that she had noticed, too and she said, "Oh, I just love him." Her sincerity astounded me (not least because Alma is so energetically boyish that most people are annoyed by him long before they have a chance to notice his sweetness) and I thought, "I want to be like her." How many of us women save our best love and our tenderest nurturing for the children we grow ourselves? Haven't we all seen the woman who lavishes true love and care on her own children, but can't seem to muster any real affection for the child of another? Like a chef that eats with disdain dishes made by others. It is no great feat to love your own children. Any imbecile can do that. It really would take a heart of stone to not love your own kids. But to see the gem that is in every child and treat them as the precious beings they are, whether they are yours or not, that is difficult and, I think, women who have this quality are the best mothers. So many times I've wished that my older, more experienced self could go back in time and tell my younger, hurting self that bitterness, selfishness and envy all preclude love and those were things that made me not a mother, not my biological inability to conceive. There are so many ways to be a mother, all out there for the taking, and I rejected all of them but the one I wanted. And because I'm a dolt, I didn't realize how wrong I was until many years after I finally did get what I wanted. To this day, I wonder in my heart, if I had, in the end, been denied biological children, would I have ever learned that lesson? Consequently, I've spent the last decade of Mother's Days wondering if I have come far enough yet to deserve the title.