It’s that time of year again. Time to recognize our mothers. To make them breakfast in bed, buy them expensive cards, mold clay into indiscernible lumpish presents at preschool, take them to tea or brunch or dinner, to kiss them, hug them, honor them.
But in my Momma heart it is time to fully consider them. To not only parade around and polish the shiny head’s side of the motherhood coin, but to turn it and look at its tail side too. To ask, and answer, something that perhaps we don’t consider enough – when is a woman a mother?
My husband and I had been trying for a while – too long in my mind, not so long in his mind – to have a baby when this question first began to percolate in my soul.
It was Mother’s Day and I was sitting in church with him as the call came for all mothers to stand and be recognized. My efforts at getting pregnant had not been entirely fruitful – months of peeing on a stick and all I had to show for our efforts was a miscarriage. I was crushed and my pain made me assertive. I rose to stand and my husband reached over to hold me back. The eternal optimist, he figured our time would come. The ever appropriate, he knew that this call to worship was not for mothers without babes in actual arms. A well-intentioned quip from an elderly parishioner, “Your time will come” sealed my fate. I stayed seated, waiting unsuccessfully for my recognition. It didn’t come. It didn’t matter that to me I felt like a mother already. There was no call to stand for “all those who have been touched by motherhood, but are not presently mothers.”
Slowly over the next ten to fifteen years, this question of when is a woman a mother – and the answer to it – kept coming back to me in little life moments.
The moment I learned that one of my cousins lost her infant child – and her motherhood – to the fateful decision of a birthmother who had changed her mind. For 45 – or whatever that state’s waiting period was – blissful days she had been a mom. Now she wasn’t.
The moment I learned that another cousin’s full-term baby had died in utero just days before her due date. For nine glorious months she had been almost a mother. Now she was not even that anymore.
The moment we began the adoption process and I began to dream of another woman, a pregnant woman, who in my dream I had to help give birth before I could deal with my own swollen belly. For some unknown time she was my future daughter’s mother. One day soon she would be mothering nothing more than a memory.
The moment I listened to a film character qualify her status in this manner, “Well I was a mother, but my child died, and so I am no longer even that.” To think that the loss of a child who you had raised to adulthood suddenly left your identity forever altered.
The moment I first witnessed my youngest daughter cry for her birthmother. That day I moved over and made a place for this woman in our home, foreshadowing that we would spend a lot of time grieving her.
And all the moments since that I have read about women who had to give up their children, or lost their children, or chose to end their children’s lives – before birth or after birth.
Through all these moments I have come round to this: A mother is much more than a woman who commits a biblical act, gives birth and brings that child to her breast and into her home. A mother if she wants to be, and if we let her, is so much more.
This year, I will pause to honor all these women. Won’t you join me?
Jane Samuel is married and the mother of three girls (two biological and one adoptive). A former litigator she currently works full-time as a parent, writer and working board member of Attachment Trauma Network, a nonprofit supporting parents of traumatized children with advocacy and education. Her work on travel, ex pat living, adoption and parenting has appeared in the Singapore American Newspaper, Adoption Today and the adoption anthologies: From Home to Homeland and Our Own – Stories Celebrating Adoptive Families. She blogs on parenting children and caring for elderly parents for several local and national online publications.
