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 kitchens 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."
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, as mothers are being honored, 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.