Introductory Words

A mother's love for her children, even her inability to let them be, reflects a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep them safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise, for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

The Measure of My Days (excerpt)

Spoken Meditation

(By Sharon Olds)

Brushing out my daughter's dark silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head, 
the silver-haired servant behind her.
Why is it - just as we begin to go - they begin to arrive,
the fold in my neck clarifying as the fine bones of her hips sharpen?
As my skin shows its dry pitting,
she opens like a small pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child are falling through my body,
the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and firm as hard boiled yolks,
is about to snap its clasp.
I brush her tangled fragrant hair at bedtime.
It's an old story - the oldest we have on our planet -
the story of replacement.

I begin this morning with a passage from Mary Field Belenky et al's book Women's Ways of Knowing:

For Ann, becoming a mother - rather than having had a mother - provided the first profound experience of human connection. She said, "My life was really, really dull. The only thing that really stands out is the birth of my children. That's the only important thing that has happened to me ever. So that is about it." Many women, like Ann, experience giving birth to their children as a major turning point in their lives. Often, parenthood initiates an epistemological revolution. In response to our question, "What was the most important learning experience you have ever had?" many mothers selected childbirth. It is as if this act of creation ushers in a whole new view of one's creative capacities[1].

We Unitarian Universalists, inspired by John Dewey, are enthusiasts for experiential learning. I think of motherhood as first and foremost, experiential learning. One can read all the books available in the drugstores on parenting. One can constantly milk family and friends for their experience and advice. But once the baby arrives, many of the major decisions fall on mom's shoulders as the baby is screaming in the middle of the night and the husband is lost in a deep sleep.

Becoming a mother is often the first major change in identity for a woman. I know this is especially true today as women defer child bearing until they have finished college or are established in a line of work or profession. Becoming a mother means putting the child first. For those who grew up first or second born in a large family, this comes naturally if reluctantly. For the only or youngest child, this is quite an emotional shock.

However prepared, few women are ready to experience the depth of the biological forces taking over their actions and emotions. We inherit an extremely long line of successful reproduction that links us back to the primordial pond of amino acids we were talking about last week. Like a wave gathering power as it moves toward the beach, we inherit millions of years of conditioning focused into the present moment. The rhythms and cycles of a woman's existence are not her choice but are imposed by the tiny DNA strands in her cells.

This, for me, is what makes motherhood so wondrous while also so mysterious. The intensity of concern I hear in Philomena's voice for Andy's cry, the immediacy of her response to his pain, comes from a reservoir of connection known only to mothers.

The wisdom, mystery and love of mothers is thought to have been the basis of primitive society. There is a great deal of evidence that the first agricultural civilizations evolved with women at their center, not men. It is perhaps only the last three to four thousand years that men have even figured out that they had anything to do with conception at all. In matriarchal primitive societies studied in the last several hundred years, a great degree of casual sexuality has been revealed. Thus, if a woman had many partners, it would be hard to figure out if sex had anything to do with conception. Trobriand Islanders attributed pregnancy to spirits, not sex. Chukchi female shamans said they made their children by their sacred stones. Australian aborigines thought women became pregnant by eating some special foods, or by embracing a sacred tree hung with umbilical cords from previous births[2]

Egyptian men were awed by maternal behavior patterns, wondering why women did what they did to maintain the race. Maxims written about 1500 B.C. said:

Thou shalt never forget thy mother and what she has done for thee... For She carried thee long beneath her heart as a heavy burden, and after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her shoulder and gave thee her breast to thy mouth, and as thy size increased her heart never once allowed her to say, "Why should I do this?"[3]

A primitive Ethiopian woman expresses ... the basic psychological attitude of primitive mothers:

How can a man know what a woman's life is?...The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person from the woman without child. She carries the fruit of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. All this the man does not know; he knows nothing. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. He can know nothing. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. That is why we won't be told what to do by our husbands.[4]

I feel more than a little uncomfortable speaking on Mother's day because of this absence of personal experience so well articulated by the Ethiopian mother. I can sing a romantic song of praise to mothers and motherhood (without which none of us would be here) yet I cannot dive deep into the wisdom of motherhood winnowed from my own experience and speak from my own knowing.

So my clever solution this year was to call a few mothers and find out what they had to say on the subject. I'm going to relate what I heard in first person (with a little embellishment to be sure) as an ode of appreciation. As you hear these pearls of wisdom, I encourage you to be thinking of your own pearls to share during the conversational response. Motherhood is a wonder and a mystery which language can capture but not contain. When we speak our truth, there is a moment of meeting, a fleeting glimpse of recognition, a touching of soul.

I had no preparation for motherhood even though I did baby-sitting. It was a loss of innocence. Before I had my children, I thought I knew so much. Now I know how ignorant I was.

If anyone told me how much strength and resolve it took to be a parent, I'm not sure I would have gone through with it. My strength has grown over the years. The experience of motherhood shapes the mother. There is always unexpected delight and sorrow. You start out with so much love and want to hold on to them. They are always wanting more freedom and independence than you are ready to give them. The quality I've gained in greatest measure, though, is patience and understanding. You learn this (if you're going to learn it at all) while they are teenagers - the time when they think you know nothing.

A memorable moment for me of growing into being a mother was when my daughter was 5 months old and wouldn't stop crying. I was rushing to clean the house while trying to figure out what she wanted. I was at the end of my rope (which I was considering tying around her neck) and ran out into the backyard sobbing. My neighbor heard me and came over to comfort me. She said to me, "Forget the housework - attend to and enjoy your babies." She gave me permission to let go. It's a moment that stays with me when the tough times come.

I'm so pleased with the way my children have turned out. We have a good relationship and they are doing wonderful things with their lives. To me the art of motherhood is giving freedom and setting limits. It's a very delicate balancing act deciding when to draw the reins in and when to let them out. Children will push you to your limit. You have to know how to let them develop their free will and in a nice way draw them back.

And once they're adults, let go of the reins. I've learned to hold my tongue when the grandchildren do things I disapprove of. My children have great appreciation and respect for us and part of maintaining that is knowing when to speak and when to be silent.

Being a mother taught me to be kind. And to be humble. Not all women are motherhood material and I'm not sure I was formed in that mold. I have a great deal of guilt for some of the things I did, often when I wasn't in control of myself. I've tried to make amends as best I can but the feelings remain. I'm grateful my children turned out as well as they did.

I remember my kids watching me bake some cookies and an ad came on the television suggesting good mothers should bake up a wonderful memory for a child by making a cookie in the shape of his or her hand. Well, the kids insisted I do this for our youngest so I grabbed the boy and put his hand down on the cookie dough to cut around it. The dough was sticky and came off on his hand, which disturbed him and started him screaming, "Get it off! Get it off!" Just then the bell went off for the oven to take some cookies out. Try as I might, I couldn't get all the cookie dough off fast enough to make him happy, the dough being greasy. All in all, it was quite a scene. The comedian in our family smirked, "She really baked up a memory for him!"

What moved me deeply and was completely unexpected about becoming a mother was discovering how much love I felt for this little person. I had never experienced such depth of love for another person. It was such a wonderful feeling to find this love within my heart. I was a little afraid with the second child that my heart wouldn't be up to loving another as well as the first. I was pleased to discover even more love.

I had been a very responsible child, as my mother was ill while I was growing up, but the responsibility of having a new life to mold was overwhelming. It is as if you have been given this person to mold, to sculpt. There is no training to prepare one for this moment.

"Motherhood is the hardest job in the world!", I would always tell the parents of the students in my classes. The second most difficult job after motherhood is teaching. I raised my children in the days when mothers did everything. I figure I spent a total of two years of my life driving children from here to there. When you are a mother, you give up your own time all the time. We stopped going out when my kids were in their teenage years so we could keep an eye on them. I think this made a big difference in our relationship in those years.

You want some philosophy for your sermon? Here are two maxims handed down to me which have served me well. First, "If they know enough to do it then they know enough not to do it" - catch it early. Second, "From birth a child is on its road to independence."

Two things helped me be a better parent. I joined a parenting group, who we still have as friends after all these years. The group was a place to not feel so alone as you faced each crisis or decision as well as work on one's parenting philosophy. The second was returning to teaching when my children went to school. I sort of wish I had done it a few years earlier - teaching taught me a lot about being a parent.

One of the most important things I've learned from being a mother (twins age 30+ and one age 26+) is P A T I E N C E: important for toddlers and teenagers and harried moms and creaky elders....

Another thing is NOT to judge a person by his/her teen behavior (i.e., as an absolute determinant of adult personhood): my son was [awful] at 15...at 30, he is sweet, considerate, hardworking.....

[Here are] My four basic words of wisdom...
Live by these and you'll be worth all the love in the world:
HONESTY balanced by COMPASSION,
RESPONSIBILITY balanced by COURAGE.

That's what I decided I want for my kids.

Wonderful words of wisdom. These don't come from a textbook, a sacred scroll, a learned treatise or a scientific report. These come out of a life lived with awareness and reflection.

I'm grateful for and touched by these words and appreciative of the mothers who have given of themselves to bring us this wonder of life. May they find the reward and satisfaction they richly deserve.

Happy mother's day!

Closing Words

Amy Tan, in The Joy Luck Club writes of listening to her mother's pearls of wisdom:

She said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.

May we listen to the wisdom of motherhood.

Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore, All Rights Reserved.