Happy Mother's Day? It's Complicated

Get the PDF of Amy Young's The Wide Spectrum of Mothering

How do you feel about Mother's Day?

I have always been part of churches that sought to celebrate mothers. Honoring the women in our midst for the brave and difficult work of mothering is right and beautiful! 

But it’s not that simple. 

Mother’s Day has been a complicated holiday for many women. So much so, that they stay home from church on that day.  

This year, I read a piece by Amy Young at the beginning of our service—words that acknowledged both the joy and the ache this day can carry. It resonated deeply with so many women, I decided to share it on the podcast.

Whether you love Mother’s Day or find it painful (or somewhere in between), I pray you’ll find today’s episode encouraging and insightful.

Chapters

• 0:00 Mother's Day Complexities
• 5:15 My Personal Infertility Journey
• 9:15 Miraculous Adoption Story
• 12:58 From Infertility to Five Children
• 17:18 The Reality of Motherhood Struggles
• 19:09 Honoring All Women's Stories

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This past Sunday was Mother's Day. Now, I've been a part of churches that traditionally sought to celebrate and honor mothers, which is a beautiful thing to do. Honoring the women in our midst for the brave and difficult work of mothering is right and beautiful. But it's not that simple. Mother's Day has been a complicated holiday for many women, so much so I've known them to stay home from church on that day. This year I read a beautiful piece written by Amy Young at the beginning of our service. It resonated with so many women that I decided to talk about it here on the podcast. Whether you love Mother's Day or loathe it, I think you'll find today's episode encouraging and insightful, no matter what your mothering journey looks like. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:52

To say Mother's Day is complicated is an understatement. I'm a word person. I love to write and speak, I love to read and do research, and I know our words are powerful. So when I hear sayings like happy Mother's Day being spoken to those who are in very painful situations, something in me just kind of squirms Like we're being disingenuous or inadvertently pouring salt into wounds that we don't even know exist. And it's not just Mother's Day. I feel the same way when birthdays roll around when I know someone is in a season of suffering, and then we just shoot them a happy birthday text or post it on their Facebook page. And maybe I'm being overly sensitive or dramatic, but I want to let that person know that they are seen and celebrated. At the same time, I don't want to minimize their experience with a trite happy birthday. So I've begun to send out a birthday prayer. I'll send a text that says something like I pray this year. You feel the nearness of Jesus, you experience his hope, peace, joy and love in new and beautiful ways. You are loved, or I love you, depending on my relationship with that person. But I find it hard to say happy birthday when I know somebody is in a really painful season, and you might think that's just semantics, but I want my people to know that they are seen and celebrated, even if their life is anything but happy. In a similar way, mother's Day seems to be one of those holidays which brings our wounds to the surface.

Speaker 1: 3:35

For a culture that seems to devalue motherhood in favor of all the other things that women can be doing, motherhood remains a core longing for most women. We feel it in our bodies. Like every month, we have a reminder that we were created to bear life, and for so many who cannot conceive or who have experienced loss through miscarriage or stillbirth, or for those who've never married and never been given the opportunity to bear children, mother's Day can feel like a painful reminder of unfulfilled longings. In scripture we see so many stories of women who desperately long for children Sarah, whose barrenness, even after God promised a child, led her to force her slave to sleep with her husband and that didn't turn out real well. Rebecca, isaac's wife, rachel and Leah, whose rivalry revolved around who could produce more sons for Jacob. Hannah, who was tormented by her husband's second wife, who was able to bear children and rubbed it in her face that she was not. Elizabeth, whose barrenness was a source of shame and reproach. We see in these women the longing that is reflected in our hearts In other episodes.

Speaker 1: 4:56

I've talked here and there about my own motherhood journey and I've told my story before, but I think sometimes when I tell my story it can almost sound like a and they lived happily ever after tale. But becoming a mother was just the beginning of my story. Some of you might be familiar with it, but even if you are, I'd like to share a little bit more about what motherhood has looked like for me. When Greg and I got married in 1994, we decided we were going to wait a year before trying to get pregnant. We assumed it would be really simple, because the women in my family don't seem to have any trouble producing babies. But that was not our story.

Speaker 1: 5:40

We tried for several years, and when I say tried, I mean we tracked ovulation, we did the temperature charts, we scheduled sex. We went to a specialist who diagnosed us with unexplained infertility. We looked around at everyone else who seemed to make pregnancy look so easy. We're like what's wrong with us? It was at that time when I began to realize how painful Mother's Day can actually be. We looked at our options. We could not afford infertility treatments and we honestly, just for us personally, didn't feel like that was the right route to go.

Speaker 1: 6:18

We really believed that God was leading us to begin our family through adoption, but we couldn't afford that either. Step one was always fill out this application and send us $2,000, $5,000, $10,000. We didn't have that. And then God brought us to a church in Florida where our lead pastor told us about an agency in New Hampshire that had a heart for helping pastors or people in ministry with adoption. So Greg called them and a month later they called him back. Now, mind you, we had not given the agency any money, we had not filled out an application, we hadn't done a home study. To this day I have never spoken to anyone at that agency.

Speaker 1: 7:05

But when they called Greg back, they said we have these twins. They were adopted from Romania and they're living with a family who had begun the adoption process but came to the conclusion that God brought these kids over to the US for somebody else, and preferably a pastor's family. Now I have since learned that this is called disruption and it's actually a really common occurrence with adoptions. But the way God lined everything up was nothing short of miraculous. That family with those twins. They were living in New Jersey, right by my parents' house. I was able to fly up there and meet them and bring them to my parents' home. Let me just give you a timeline so you can understand how crazy our story is. We moved to Florida in February. We called an adoption agency in March. They called us back in April. I flew up to New Jersey in May and we brought the kids home in June While I was in New Jersey is when we actually filled out the application. It's an amazing story, but it's really just the beginning. I was 25 years old.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Isabella and Alex, our twins, had spent the first 18 months of their life in a Romanian orphanage. We later learned a lot about their family of origin. They are actually the youngest of nine children, one of whom was also adopted out into the United States. Their father was a shepherd, but he was not a good man. Their birth mother's pregnancy was fraught with abuse and she died shortly after giving birth. They were in a Romanian orphanage from the time they were born until they were 18 months old. Then they were brought to the US by another family who they lived with for eight months, who had four children of their own under the age of six, and then they came to us. So, by the age of two, their little lives had been riddled with trauma and I'll remind you, I was 25 years old. I knew nothing about trauma or parenting or much of anything for that matter, but we took them home and we loved them the best that we could. I had finally become a mother, and still there was this deep longing in my heart to give birth.

Speaker 1: 9:36

So about a year later, greg and I went to an iridologist, which is kind of like reflexology for the eyes. The theory is that all of the nerve endings in your body are connected to your iris and so they can look at different parts of your eye and they can tell you what's wrong. Look at different parts of your eye and they can tell you what's wrong. Well, they told us that we had a weak reproductive system and they put us on a bunch of herbs and they told us no white bread, no red meat, no processed foods. We were only to eat real food and organic when possible. And Greg said I will do this for six months. Greg, by the way, is the king of Oreos and ice cream, but he said I'll try this for six months. And the doctor the iridologist said you'll know in three to four months if this is going to work for you. And in three and a half months I was pregnant with Brie. Now, ultimately, I believe God opened my womb, but I think he used some of those things to help with that process.

Speaker 1: 10:39

When Bree was eight months old, I was nursing her and I felt like my milk was drying up and I was like what's wrong. And I found out I was pregnant. Now I had had Bree at a birthing center and so I was going back there for this pregnancy and I had told the midwife about halfway into the pregnancy. I'm like sitting on the couch one night. I'm like I feel like there's two heads in here. I called my midwife and she's like oh no, she's like the baby's just lying sideways. You're feeling their head and their butt. It's not two babies. So I was like, okay, I just believed her and we went away on vacation and we kept postponing our ultrasound. We were just in no rush. So at 28 weeks I had my first ultrasound and Greg had come with me and the first thing the tech said was did she hear two heartbeats? And we just looked at each other and started laughing. We're like you have got to be getting me. And she's like well, I see two babies in there, and that was Caleb and Gabrielle. So we went from undiagnosed infertility to adoption to five children in three and a half years.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Overwhelm was my new MO. The old ladies at our church would walk by me and be like, oh, you're so sweet, look at your precious family. And I was like, um, no, I need help. And somebody around here is going to get hurt. Did I love being a mother? Yes, was I thrilled to have children, of course, and also I had turned into someone I didn't recognize. I was always overwhelmed, I was angry. I would scream at these precious little people that were all around me all the time. I would say things like no more questions, you have reached your question limit for the day, or I'd say I just want everyone to stop touching me.

Speaker 1: 12:45

I loved my kids. I really did, and I did the best I could. But, as every mom knows, we don't know what we're doing. We're figuring it out as we go, and so our kids grew and they are now amazing adults and they have struggles of their own. And do I wish I could go back and do a million things differently? Yes, because motherhood wasn't all snuggles on the couch and popsicles and beach days and bedtime stories Though it was those things. It was also exhaustion and rage and out-of-body experiences where I looked at myself and wondered who is this monster and where did she come from and what is wrong with her. The parenting books we had were limited, but I latched onto them. I was like somebody tell me what to do. There were some really good things that we learned and some really terrible things, and now my kids have to work through their own childhood issues and wounds.

Speaker 1: 13:45

This week, we've had one of my daughters in town and we were talking about mothering. She's not a mother yet, but she was expressing appreciation for me and also letting me know that it's time for me to let go. Incidentally, greg was just telling me the same thing. He's like Teresa you need to open your hands, pry your fingers open and let your adult kids be the adults that they are. And you know what that's hard. Mothering is hard because you love your kids with every fiber of your being and they have the capacity to break your heart into a million pieces. We had one of our kids cut us completely out of their life for an entire year. We've had another one of our kids tell us all the things we did wrong as parents Granted. That child has also come back and thanked us for all the things we did right.

Speaker 1: 14:42

But motherhood, like everything else in this broken world, is always a combination of joy and sorrow, of highs and lows, of beauty and pain. And this is unavoidable because, as I say often on this podcast, we live after the fall. In Genesis 3, 16, god is speaking to the woman. This is just after they sinned and he said he's pronouncing a curse and he says I will make your pains and childbearing very severe. With painful labor, you will give birth to children. Now there were two major consequences for the woman after the fall. One is pain and childbearing and the other is your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you, because when God created man and woman in Genesis 1, he issued a command to both of them to have dominion over the earth, and I really believe that that co-rulership was distorted during the fall. I think the oppression of women was a direct result of the curse, but that is a podcast for another day.

Speaker 1: 15:55

I want to go back to that first consequence, pain and childbearing, because I think sometimes we kind of relegate that to labor pain. We're like, oh, it's Eve's fault that we have pain when we give birth. But that word pain is so much more nuanced. It literally means sorrow or worrisomeness. It's relational pain, it's familial pain. You know, yeah, we can get an epidural. We can think, oh, we have outsmarted God. But every mother knows that the pain of mothering extends way beyond labor.

Speaker 1: 16:32

And then I have so many friends whose stories have turned out nothing like mine, friends who desperately long to become mothers but haven't been able to, some because they could never conceive, some after losing multiple babies through miscarriage, some who wanted to marry and raise a family but didn't. For these friends and so many others, they have to wrestle with the definition of womanhood that is celebrated on Mother's Day, and I don't want to diminish the good, beautiful, noble work of mothering. I think it needs to be celebrated, celebrated. And also I don't want to make the women who haven't had that opportunity ever feel like they're less than or that they can't measure up to the idealized image of what it means to be a woman. And to my friends who have experienced the loss of children, the rejection of children, the death of children, I want to acknowledge the grief of those painful realities.

Speaker 1: 17:35

Typically in churches we honor mothers on Mother's Day, which can be a beautiful, lovely gesture, but the well-meaning stand if you have one child, stand if you have two children, stand if you have the oldest child, if you have the youngest child have inadvertently left the women seated beside us feeling alienated and wounded. I have known many friends who have not come to church on Mother's Day for this reason. So this year we wanted to do something different. We want to honor mothers, but we also want to acknowledge the wide spectrum of mothering. So I read this beautiful piece that I found on Amy Young's website, called the Messy Middle, and you know I would love a blog with a title like that. This piece resonated with so many women because I think it said to every woman present we see you, we acknowledge you, we honor your story. So, whether your relationship to Mother's Day is filled with joy or pain, whether it brings laughter or tears, whether you feel satisfaction or longing today, and honestly, most of us, no matter what our story is, are holding all of those things at the same time, but by God's grace, he is holding us, no matter what season we're in. So I'm going to close by reading Amy's beautiful words. I have attached a link to Amy's original post and also a PDF of what I'm reading, because I added a few extra lines which were not in her original post. Oh, if you're on my email list, I've already sent you the PDF and the link to the original post, and if you're not on my email list and you want to get an email that you actually love to open each week, you can sign up for that in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 19:33

And now the Wide Spectrum of Mothering by Amy Young. To those who gave birth this year we celebrate with you. To those who lost a child. We mourn with you To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day and wear the badge of food stains. We appreciate you. To those who experienced loss through miscarriage, failed adoptions or running away. We mourn with you To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears and disappointment. We walk with you. Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don't mean to make this harder than it is. To those who are adoptive moms we champion you. To those who are foster moms, mentor moms and spiritual moms we need you. To those who have warm and close relationships with your children we celebrate with you To those who have warm and close relationships with your children. We celebrate with you To those who have disappointment, heartache and distance with your children. We sit with you. To those who are raising your children's children we support you.

Speaker 1: 20:50

To those who lost their mothers this year. We grieve with you. To those who experienced abuse at the hand of your mother. We acknowledge your pain. To those who have aborted children we remember them and you on this day. To those who are waiting for a prodigal to return, we pray with you. To those who are single and long to be married and mothering your own children. We mourn that life has not turned out the way you longed for it to be. To those who step-parent we walk with you on these complex paths. To those who envisioned lavishing love on your grandchildren, yet that dream is not to be. We grieve with you. To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year, we grieve and rejoice with you. And to those who are pregnant with new life, both expected and surprising. We anticipate with you this Mother's Day. We walk with you. Mothering is not for the faint of heart and we have real warriors in our midst. We remember you, lord.

Speaker 1: 22:04

I want to lift up all of my sisters right now those who are grieving and those who are rejoicing, those who have experienced the joy of giving birth and those who have experienced the pain of not being able to bear children. I pray that your grace would cover it all, that you would hold us, keep us together, make us sensitive to one another, help us to love and support each other, no matter our stories. Lord, we thank you that you are a good God, that you are sovereign and working all things according to your purposes, even when we don't understand them. I pray that each woman listening would feel seen and loved by you In Jesus' name amen. Thanks for hanging out with me today on Find Hope here.

Speaker 1: 22:59

To find anything I mentioned on the episode, go to TeresaWhitingcom slash listen, which is where you can find the show notes. One last thing If you know a woman who would appreciate today's episode, would you take just a second and share it with her? That's one way you can partner with me to spread hope. In closing, I want to leave you with this prayer from Romans 15, 13. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope.