More Than A Mother

Many of you met my sister Kathleen and her son Brian when they came down for my installation. Brian is the only child in our generation, my mother’s only grandchild. And that’s surprising because, of the two of us, Kathleen didn’t want children and I did. I was the one who played with dolls. I was the one who earned money baby-sitting. I had names for four children, two boys and two girls, picked out by the time I was six. My undergraduate degree was in elementary education. I wanted children.

By the time I was forty I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Not only had I never found anyone I wanted to marry, I had just been diagnosed with fibroid tumors and adenomyosis and was facing a hysterectomy. For several months before and after the surgery I looked seriously into adopting an infant girl, even as a single parent. I had missionary friends in Peru, which has a large number of abandoned infants and children, and they would have been happy to take care of all the paperwork on that end. I would have named her Susannah Kathleen. But in the end I decided not to go ahead with it.

There were a number of practical reasons why not; but in the end what it came down to was that I didn’t believe that was what God wanted me to do. I didn’t feel led.

Part of what made the decision process so difficult was that, fifteen years before, when I was twenty-five, I had had an abortion. And for most of those 15 years I had believed that the reason I wasn’t finding anyone to marry and have children by was that God - whom I wasn’t sure I believed in anyway - was punishing me for what I had done. And after I became a Christian, which happened when I was thirty-six, even as the Holy Spirit was slowly and laboriously changing me from an abortion rights activist into a pro-life advocate, I continued to believe that I deserved to be childless. That I couldn’t expect anything else. That it was only just.

So Mother’s Days were painful for me - but not as painful as they were for other women. There weren’t any Mother’s Day cards for Chris, whose year-old daughter Elizabeth died the year before I joined the church. There wasn’t one for Nancy, either, who had her third miscarriage when we were in Bible study together. And then there was Penny, whose son Scott was killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was eight. I remember Diane, too, whose son Terry was in prison in Texas for dealing cocaine. And I remember Lucy, who hadn’t heard from her daughter Kim since the day she ran away from home, the year before her high school graduation. I remember these women now. But I only half-noticed at the time. Or - I noticed, but I didn’t let it really sink in.

But then something happened.

My sort-of-sister Caryl, who once was married to my brother Nate, and who wanted children as badly as ever I had, if not more so, married again and got pregnant. And as a good, life-long Episcopalian, she looked around to find a suitable godmother. And although Caryl’s brother and sister-in-law were designated as guardians of whatever children she and Chad would have, they are Jewish, and she wanted someone whom she could count on to raise them as Christians. So she asked me if I would accept the responsibility.

And that is how I became a mother. I became a mother after I had had a hysterectomy, through no action or initiative of my own, as a free gift of God, as a direct result of my commitment to Him. And what I learned about God, about mothering, and about love over the next few years cannot be forgotten, or repaid, or duplicated. And I believe that there is no love on earth more complete, more transforming, more self-sacrificing than the love a mother has for her child. Mother-love’s reputation for primal power and single-mindedness is deserved. But you don’t have to be female, or present at the birth, to feel it. Fathers and aunts and cousins can also know mother-love.

But that love pales before the love of God. Because mother-love can fail. And much as we hype motherhood on this day, we can pluck hundreds of examples of inadequate or deficient or destructive mother-love from our newspapers. Our abortion culture makes mother-love an option subject to our convenience. Child abuse and neglect are rampant. And at the other extreme, some mothers smother their children with over-protection or emotional demands. And even good mothers - the best mothers - mothers who love their children with patience and wisdom and kindness - have been known to get tired or lose their tempers or just plain make a mistake. And even good mothers - the best mothers - can raise children who turn their backs on them, who reject all their good upbringing and choose a path of self-destruction. And those mothers - and fathers - may eventually come to the point of saying, “No more. I have wept enough, I have no child.”