and how much we love and appreciate our mothers will likely be abundant. My mother knows already how much I love and cherish her as I tell her every day. My daughter tells me regularly that she loves me and shows it in a thousand beautiful little ways.
This post is, in a round-about way about Mother’s Day, and yet along a different vein altogether.
While for many, even those who have lost their mothers to death, Mother’s Day weekend is a time of tearful celebration. It is a time to reflect on family, on love, on life itself.
But the celebratory spirit doesn’t reach everyone.
My heart is heavy tonight for those that I both know personally and those I simply know of, who have been unable to conceive a child. A child that would be cherished above all else. A child to complete the circle of life as far as they are concerned.
Imagine a day where children are celebrating their mothers, mothers are celebrating their children and yet, for so many, there is no child to celebrate.
No hand print cards.
No artwork on the refrigerator.
No smells of talcum powder and baby shampoo.
Only an emptiness that threatens to consume them; mind, body and spirit. A brokenness that soon leads to feelings of failure and inadequacy that fill each waking hour of every single day. Knowing that they would give the last drop of blood in their body for a single moment of holding that tiny life, born of themselves, in their arms.
Imagine the anger and frustration, the anxiety, depression and psychological pain that comes from the anticipation followed by disappointment, month after year after decade until there is nothing left but a hopelessness that destroys everything good and pure in their lives.
It would, I imagine, be all-consuming and destructive on many levels.
Mother’s day, for them, must be like pouring salt in a wound, shattering an already broken heart.
Yes, my heart goes out to them and I am, even as I write this, crying openly for the hopes and fears that they harbor inside themselves.
I wish I could encourage them, hold them against my breast and tell them that everything will be ok. But in their minds and hearts, everything is not ok.
So I will do the only thing I know to do … I will pray for peace, for hope, for the fulfillment of their dreams and the for the courage to face whatever tomorrow may bring. I believe, with everything in me, in the love of a faithful Heavenly Father and while I don’t always understand His ways, I trust him.
I know that such prayers are answered, for I have seen it with my own eyes, felt it with my own heart and rejoiced in the glory of it with my own spirit.
1John 14-15 ~ 14 And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: 15 And if we know that he hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
Hope is a good thing … and no good thing every dies.
