So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I’m not sure. That’s my answer: I’m not sure. Anne Lamott
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
She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink. Barbara Kingsolver
Mothers are all slightly insane. J. D. Salinger
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant and let the air out of the tires. Dorothy Parker
(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that’s the only shift they offer. Jodi Picoult
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
Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen? Three. It takes one to say “what light” and two more to say “I didn’t turn it on.” Erma Bombeck
Guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine. Fay Weldon
Taking care of myself doesn’t mean ‘me first.’ It means ‘me, too.’ L.R. Knost
If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother. Kate Atkinson
I spent part of Thursday at the Post Office where I was on a line behind two men with Mother’s Day cards trying desperately to get some commitment from the postal workers that a 78-cent stamp would ensure delivery two days hence.
Such a small and untimely investment wouldn’t ensure any such thing of course and you have to wonder about folks who felt that they had to do SOMETHING for Mother’s Day but didn’t have the resourcefulness to mail on time nor were they apparently inclined to resort to the fancy bouquets, jeweled necklaces and other material indulgences which literally dominate the airwaves during this season.
The quotations above are intended to serve as a partial antidote to the excessive rituals which often punctuate this “holiday,” a day when “remembering” mom is incarnated, not enough in thoughtful questions and familial solidarity but in gifts which often show as much care and recognition as those tardy Mother’s Day card holders in the postal line. Some of the quotations will be familiar. Some offer humor and a bit of insight into the worry and uncertainty experienced by so many mothers I know, the knowledge that we have collectively made a world too dangerous for humans and other life forms, including the life forms better known as human children. We have indulged and normalized behavior that need not be so and that we do not need to be so. We have misused the inheritance of our children – grown and not – inheritance less about trust funds and more about a world which is running out of trust more generically, a world in which we don’t honor promises and then create conditions where promises can barely be met even if we were inclined to do so.
And yet, despite all, so many women, so many mothers in waiting have decided to bring new life into the world anyway.
It is this cloud of global uncertainty affecting motherhood, even influencing the decision to be a mother, in the first instance which I want to briefly explore here.
I have articles on my feed daily outlining some of the internal pressures on mothers – from partners inattentive to child rearing responsibilities and children addicted to screens and their messaging, to struggles with access to health care, child care and formal schooling which might actually prepare children to take on an increasingly challenging world.
At the same time, mothers face a climate increasingly hostile to women’s full and equal (as we say at the UN) participation in civic and political life. The rollback of women’s rights and freedoms, including the disrespect of their professional skills and accomplishments, unimaginable threats to their political franchise and the apparent re-normalization of sexual predation, all this and more has a dramatic impact on mothers hoping to raise respectful sons and empowered daughters. It is painful for some I know to watch as children struggle to adjust to a world which, in several significant aspects, we older folks dared to think we had left behind.
On top of this, as many mothers I know recognize, threats and challenges to children extend much further afield – to rising sea levels and biodiversity losses, to wars of choice and the inevitable displacements and deprivations they cause, to pandemics and other medical emergencies which we don’t seem to have any timely plan to recognize or address, to the pervasiveness of criminality on a massive scale which literally opens spaces for traffickers and corrupt officials as it closes spaces for those seeking to hold criminal elements to account.
You who have indulged these posts over several years have also shared our window into an international order which seems to be fraying at the edges and which the growth of artificial intelligence is most likely to accelerate. From climate change to nuclear weapons, the institutions where we do our work are increasingly unable to ensure that we will not eventually perish at our own foolish hands. “Bombs, blockades and bluster” are terms which represent too much of our current policy discourse and practice, speeches and actions much more likely, it seems, to turn up the heat rather than tone it down.
For mothers, this is yet another dimension of a painfully recognized inability to shield children from the worst of adult follies. Long before these posts were launched, I was part of a UNICEF Committee on the Rights of the Child, committed to “making the world fit for children.” I have worked over the years alongside many women – many mothers – who have contributed much of themselves towards this same end, a goal as essential to the continuation of our human family as it has been elusive. And it has remained very much elusive over the course of my adult life.
And yet, knowing what they know, feeling as they feel, worrying as they might, women choose to have and raise children anyway. They take a stand for lives that they can nurture if not always protect, extending the hope and potential that every child brought into this world embodies, at least in part. As Anne Frank noted above, amidst her own era of war and holocaust, there is courage at the center of this choice, the courage which we should honor this day and all days, the courage which binds so many mothers amidst the joys and travails of motherhood, even those for whom having children remains simply the only natural life path.
We see you and your courage. We see what you have chosen to do, have chosen to embrace, to bring children and the possibility they represent into this world. We have no cards or jewels to offer, but you have our deep respect. Take a bow.
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