10 May 2015

The Mothers We Are

So its Mother’s Day and most mothers are getting flowers, a spa day, and breakfast in bed. Usually when we are mothers ourselves, we get a dose of reality on this day and an even larger dose when our mothers have been called to glory.

There are so many types of mothers to be honored on a day like today. There are the birth mothers, adoptive mothers, aunts, grandmothers, Godmothers, and the list goes on. I’d like to recognize mothers like me. I am the mother that has longed for a child for quite a while. God blessed me once with the miracle of life and shortly there after, He had different plans for my husband and me. I won’t get into the story, but you can read it here.

This experience made me realize a lot of things about Mother’s Day as a holiday. I’d always had heartfelt feelings for those who’s mom had been called to glory, because they would be surrounded by everyone else celebrating their mom and I’d imagine that had to be quite the task to deal with.  What I didn’t realize is that Mother’s Day would also be a task for me. Year after year I would be reminded that I’d lost a baby and was not pregnant again. I hid behind being grateful for my mom and mourning my bestfriends mom. Not that these feelings for our moms wasn’t real, but it erased my feelings of failure, emptiness and expectation for a few moments.

For a few years, waking up on Mother’s Day was dreadful. I felt that I deserved to be called mom. After all, I had been pregnant. I also knew there was something not quite right with my pregnancy, and I loved for my child with out limit. That’s what mother’s do, right? In general, they have these experiences and feelings about their children. My mother has always known when there was something not quite right with me, she gave birth to me, and she truly loves me without a limit. I see other mother’s follow this same model, but somehow I was left out of the equation because my child was not physically present to anyone except for me.

Last year I decided to acknowledge that I was a mom. I realized that hiding my pain was no longer an option for me. I’d suppressed my feelings for far too long and I no longer desired the discomfort that I had on Mother’s Days following my loss. Despite the fear of judgment, I acknowledged that God had made me a mother and there are others like myself. We were mothers and no one knew it. Or counted us. We deserved to be counted.

I told my husband “I am a mother!” I saluted others and myself like me because we deserved it just as much as the mothers with physically present children. Our love is not any less deep than those mothers. We felt the same guilt that other mothers feel when things didn’t go as planned for our children. We still lost sleep at night concerning ourselves with our children. We missed our children when they’d left the nest. Yes. We are mothers.

Since then, God has blessed with and many others with children after a tragic loss. We still love our angel babies and will never forget the experience of loving and losing in this way.


If you know someone that has lost a baby at any point during gestation or after, please let her know she’s not invisible, that you see her and love her. Give her the Mother’s Day she’s dreamed of. After all, all she wants is to hear the words Happy Mother’s Day.


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