Are You a Mother?
Q: Are You a Mother?
A: Not in any traditional sense, no. When people ask me if I want to have children, I’ve always had the same answer… “God Willing”. I am not compelled to have kids. I don’t feel the need to be a mother to fulfill any sort of destiny and I don’t have the deep-rooted longing that I witness in many of my sisters. Throughout different chapters of my life I have experienced the role of Mother. I’ve led communities and sat in the seat of a matriarch. I have spent endless hours upon hours taking care of students, their families, and friends as if they were my very own. Maternal instincts come naturally to me and I have more love to give than I even know.
Society paints a picture where a woman must bear children to be fulfilled. I have witnessed many women struggle with the pressure of this notion. Sometimes they and their partners don’t feel ready or maybe they don’t have a partner and are receiving pressure on that front too. Whatever the reason, why can’t each woman simply live her life as her intuition guides her, which may be different than her sister or her mother thinks it should be? Thankfully, I haven’t felt this pressure.
Talking to a friend about having kids last night, he shared the perspective of Rachel Held Evans (a Christian journalist and radical progressive who recently passed this month) who was challenging the idea that motherhood is the highest calling for a woman, a common refrain amongst Christians. She was a mother, yet saw how many women who have lost children or are infertile would experience the isolation in the above notion. What truly moved me was her response…
A Christian woman’s highest calling is not motherhood; a Christian woman’s highest calling is to follow Christ.
Christian or Buddhist, Muslim or Jewish…whatever the genre or word used for the Divine that could be used here, I can relate to this personally. I know my highest calling in life is completely interwoven with my relationship with God, whether I am single, married, have 3 kids or none, my calling is deeply personal and exists within a larger context than my current expression of life.
When I was “married”, especially in the beginning, we often spoke of children. I had become a step-mother to his kids, which is never a popular role, yet I took it on with all the courage I could muster. Now, having left that marriage and all the weighted circumstances that encompassed said chapter of my life, I also left being a mother to my community, a step-mother to some wily young adults, and the false hopes of starting a family of my own. And I must say that I am grateful every day that I never had his children, have never been pregnant, and yet, I am still open, if one day that door was presented to me.
Until then, I am the mother to creative projects that wake me up at night for attention, a company I lovingly refer to as Joan that requires my constant care and love, and perhaps one day another being to raise, only God knows, and I am at ease with that.
I feel confident, and wish the same for all women, that my path is just as powerful, embodied, nurturing, loving, relatable, and blessed as any woman, mother, sister, etc. I have an incredible mother who has always encouraged the very best in me, regardless of roles or timelines and for this, I am so grateful. And to all the mothers in my life, who have mothered me, to my sisters who are now living into some of the most beautiful expressions of a mothers love I have witnessed, and to all women who are walking their courageous and unique empowered path, I honor you, admire you, witness you and support you. Happy Mother’s Day and may each and every one of us touch into the Divine Mother within our own heart and give thanks to the miraculous gift that is our very life.
