Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did – that everything involving our children was painful in some way. Debra Ginsberg
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. Margaret Atwood
Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together. Anne Frank
It’s come at last, she thought, the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. Betty Smith
Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life. Jodi Picoult
Mothers today cannot just respond to their kids’ needs, they must predict them–and with the telepathic accuracy of Houdini. Susan Douglas
It is a chilly and blustery Mother’s Day morning in New York – more like late March than mid-May. It is also another day when legions must stay physically distanced from their mothers who, if you are not still young enough to live at home, remain beyond the reach of direct contact regardless of their health or other life circumstances. For some especially unfortunate souls, this Mother’s Day is destined to be their last, leaving this life in perhaps a more fearful and discouraging manner than could ever have been imagined – without those loved ones alongside whom they have stood for many long years now unable to stand by them at this time of their passing.
I have been in many such homes and hospital rooms in a prior life, and I can barely manage a more heartbreaking thought.
Of course not all that heartbreak, not all of that emotional uncertainty and longing, is confined to the edges of a mother’s resting place. The virus has adjusted some of what “mother” means, including injecting positive new opportunities for some to bond with children still at home, allowing them to witness to changes in their children’s lives that they might otherwise have been too busy to appreciate. But for many others it ushers in an intensifying fear that the children they have borne will now fall further out of the loop, fall further behind their peers, will forever be watching their backs while others have their eyes on what little still exists in their purses and wallets. It is not clear yet what “opportunity” will mean for these children in the coming phase – for employment, for schooling, for access to public spaces without the threat of violence or discrimination. And for too many mothers, it is not at all clear what they should do – what it is even possible to do – to ensure the safety and well-being of children when there are now so many viral and political forces allied against those interests, so many invisible threats poised for a dangerous incarnation.
In various parts of this country and others, some mothers today have decided to join a lengthening chorus line – egged on by preachers and politicians – deciding to roll the dice on their own and their children’s future, hoping that the virus will degrade before their family fortunes do, betting on behalf of their children that efforts to reconvene “normalcy” and recover livelihoods will spare them the loss of a parent.
These are choices that, in the overly-sentimentalized mother’s days of past years, would have been inconceivable. Those days were about flowers, “I love you mommy” cards, and dinners outside the home. And while we all recognized that such ceremonial expressions were often better for business than they were for mothers, we did them anyway, collapsing too-often the sentiments that might well have been more beneficially distributed over longer periods into one Sunday in May.
Indeed, during such times, we collectively indulged a caricature of “mother,” the self-less, stay-at-home force with a seemingly uncanny ability to predict the needs of children before the demanding and whining could commence, a self-serving, taken-for-granted “fabrication” of a parent that, in too many aspects, didn’t always hit whatever mark was intended by our scribbled cards and floral arrangements.
This caricature needs immediate amending. In policy spaces like the UN, our primary focus is on “women” rather than mothers, acknowledging skills too-long undervalued and ensuring spaces for participation that are (hopefully) part of a larger project of engagement which recognizes the large number of voices of all races, cultures, religions, genders and social classes who remain on the outside of political and peace processes at a time when they should already be finding themselves much closer to the center.
But among those mis-positioned voices are many mothers. Within the UN system, it is the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) that retains a laser focus on mostly newer mothers and the even newer lives they are bringing into the world. For many, the obstacles that must be overcome in order to ensure healthy births and equally healthy mothers to care for them are formidable indeed. From food insecurity to limited hygiene, the challenges for new and expectant mothers in many global regions remain heart-wrenching despite the best efforts of UNFPA, UNICEF and partner NGOs. And with the complicating factor of COVID-19, invisible bonds of misery are likely to be extended across the seas, connecting the fears of young mothers with those older mothers gasping for their final breaths.
All around the world, it seems, the lives of mothers are becoming more complex in their physical and emotional circumstances. All around the world, the needs of mothers to have their voices registered in community and political life remain largely unmet. All around the world, women continue to endure in relative obscurity the pain and struggle which so often accompany the gift of new life which they bear. All around the world, those who nurture at least part of our common future must work too hard to offer their testimony on what that future should look like, and to have that testimony respected.
I entitled this post “Mamma Mia” because I was advised by colleagues of the many emotions that this phrase has come to embrace, especially for persons of Italian descent. From fear and exasperation to joy and surprise, the phrase captures better than most the range of emotions – deep and real – that characterizes the lives of so many mothers, especially in this time of viral challenge. Many mothers know the heartache that life seems poised to inflict on their children, and understand as well the limitations of their ability to protect them from it. And many mothers continue to bear at least portions of this heartache in private as the world swirls around them in all of its anxiety, greed and self-importance, oblivious in the main to what the current, pervasive and often cruel mis-applications of our human condition mean for the lives of the children who are just getting started walking their long and uncertain path:
Oblivious as well to the emotional and physical needs of mothers devoted — this day and every day — to accompanying such children while they walk.
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