MOTHER'S DAY

MOTHER’S DAY

            I’ve always had an ambivalent feeling about Mother’s Day.  Our culture has used it to sell products, to trivialize and sentimentalize women, and to indicate that a woman is unfulfilled unless she has children.  On the other hand, I was raised by two women, my mother Mary Stroupe, and my great-great aunt, Bernice Higgins, whom I called “Gran.”  Gran helped my mother raise me – I never knew my great-grandmother or even my grandmother, but in a strange twist, I knew my great-grandmother’s sister, Bernice Higgins, with whom we lived.   For all intents and purposes, she was my grandmother.  My father abandoned my family when I was a baby, and I never saw him again until I was in my 20’s.  So, if I have ambivalent feelings about Mother’s Day, just wait for Father’s Day in June!

            My mother was a single, working mom who dedicated her life to me, or so it seems as I look back over my life.  She was a beauty operator for most of her adult life, but she was also valedictorian of her high school class of 1937.  Since her family was poor – and it was in the Great Depression – there as no money for college.  She worked 6 days a week for a long while, but she always seemed to have time to play ball with me after walking home from a long day at work.  We also were always in church on Sunday, and I often thought about that in my pastorate, as white women went to work outside their homes (black women had already been doing it for a couple of centuries). In the last ten years of her working career, she taught cosmetology at the local community college, and there she brought her fierce love to the mostly poor women who came there, urging them to see themselves as daughters of God rather than as objects for men.  On election days, she would not allow her students to come to class without a sticker saying that they had voted.

            So, as I think about Mother’s Day, I give thanks to my mother, who invested so much in me and sustained me in difficult days, when I agonized over why my father never came to see me.  I give thanks for my spouse, Caroline Leach, who is mother to our two children, David and Susan.  I also give thanks to all those women (and men) who invested in me – “Gran, “ Caroline, aunts and uncles, teachers, coaches, friends, who taught me the power and the necessity of loving.

             The legitimate power of Mother’s Day is that it reminds us of the necessity of this kind of fierce loving.  Not all of us are mothers, and I’m not a mother, but we, women and men, are all asked to be that kind of presence in the lives of others.  When the feminist and womanist movements came back around in the 1970’s, I had no trouble moving towards feminine language for God, because that was what I had experienced – God as a woman in my mother and in Gran.  A demanding but ever-present love that would not desert me or give up on me.  Who is allowed to do that in my life, and indeed, in American culture?  It’s mothers, not fathers.  Not all of us are mothers, and not all of us had great mothers, but if we know what love is in our lives, it is because we have experienced “motherly” love. 

            Mother’s Day gives us an opportunity to celebrate the women who’ve loved us, but it is also an opportunity to go deeper inside ourselves to discover the power of love and to begin to develop that kind of loving in our own lives, so that we all can become those kinds of lovers, mothers one to the other.  The helpful emphasis of Mother’s Day is not whether we’ve had children come out of our wombs but whether we will allow ourselves to become bound to one another in love, so that we can share motherly love with one another.  So, give thanks for those who have “mothered” you, and then go and do likewise.