Reflections on standing up for mothers.

I have always had a problem with the platitude spouted by everyone from Oprah to the president to principals and pastors, that motherhood is the toughest job in the world. I mean, don't get me wrong, motherhood is hard. It demands a near-constant turning from what the self wants to a much louder, needier, and more demanding self. And it's relentless--even if you try to get a break from it, something can come up--the school nurse calls, or worse, the police, and you have to leave your cup of coffee, or your massage therapist, or your life's work, to deal with one of the jobs of motherhood. But it's not the hardest job in the world. You know how I can tell? Here is a list of jobs I would never want to take on because of the hard work and living sacrifice they would require: President of the United States, firefighter, brain surgeon, prostitute. I would rather be a mother than any of those things. It is not a complete list.

In a lot of places, the church takes this sentiment, and puts a painful twist on it, telling women that God's highest calling for their lives is motherhood. Fortunately, I don't have a ton of direct experience with this evil load of facile crap. The idea is just so extremely wrong that I think I would laugh out loud if I ever heard it from the pulpit. I mean, being a mother definitely enriches my life, and hopefully, if I do it right, the world, but I'd like to think that the work I've done before and during my time as a mother has made an impact beyond that of my family. I'm amused by the idea that the work done by Madeline L'Engle, Dorothy Day, Sojourer Truth, Cady Stanton, Julain of Norwich, Hilary Clinton and Gloria Steinham could be somehow secondary to their roles (or lack of roles) as mothers.

So I was sympathetic when a friend shared a blog post on Mother's Day and church. It's an open letter to pastors by Amy Young. You can read it here.  In the article, Young points out that Mother's Day can be hard for some people in the church. When women are asked to stand, there are some who can't stand, even though they want to. And, while I sympathize with women who are struggling with trying to have children, whose children are dead or dying, and everyone else for whom the issue of motherhood is painful for some reason, I think this letter tries to do the worst thing possible to deal with the problem.

This letter is a version of a new genre of essay born of our blog-all-about-it environment: It's the blog post that effectively says, "There's something about me that makes me special and sad. And I'm not alone. Here's how I think you should change your behavior in order to make me feel better." The great thing about these pieces is that they give people a window into pain, hurt, and struggles that are inaccessible to us. They give us an idea of what others dealing with issue X have gone through so that when our friends tell us they are dealing with issue X, we have a bit of a head start on knowing what they need.

Of course, the big problem with these essays is a societal one. It can seem like everyone who is encountering a difficulty now feels they have a right to delineate all the ways that insensitive people have inadvertently rubbed salt into their wounds, and to demand that we start considering that the person in line with us at the grocery store might deserve special kid-glove treatment because she Has It Rough. If I read enough of these articles, I start fantasizing about staging virtual cage matches, where I pit New Family in Town against Mother of a Kid with Acne. A series of elimination rounds  would give us all a definitive order of deference to show the acquaintances in our lives (eg., peanut allergy trumps concussion victim, but aspergers beats them both).

The bigger problem with these articles is the same as their strength: they make us feel like we have a head start on knowing what people need. Most of the time, our friends need to have the chance to tell us themselves about how they feel about their particular pain. They need it because telling our stories is a big part of how we heal. We all need people who will sit and listen for as long as it takes, people who will hear our hurt and tell us that we're right, it's not fair, to cry and mourn with us, and then ask us what we're going to do about it.

Another reason that our friends need to be the ones to tell us what it's like to be them is that they aren't just feeling hurt. Friends who have lost children, struggled with infertility, given children up for adoption, are feeling a lot more than hurt when they keep their butts in the pews on Mother's Day. Some are feeling guilty, some are feeling grief, some are feeling jealous or angry or bitter or resentful, and they need to be able to tell someone about all of that. Confession is a sacrament for a reason.

Young says that in her thirties, there was a Mother's Day when it got personal for her.

I don’t know how others saw me, but I felt dehumanized, gutted as a woman. Real women stood, empty shells sat. I do not normally feel this way. I do not like feeling this way. I want no woman to ever feel this way in church again.

I certainly don't want people to feel dehumanized at church, but I don't agree with this sentiment at all. Church is exactly the place where people should feel like gutted, empty shells. Because ultimately, that is what we all are--every single one of us feels broken and empty and useless. So where but church should we to go to confront by all the ways that God has let us down in our lives? Isn't church exactly the place we should be when we're naming our pain and stuggling to make sense of it?
 I'm not saying that we should go out of our ways to make people feel worthless. I'm just saying that if asking a group of people to stand up can bring that out in a person, the feelings were already there to begin with. The situation just brought them to light. And just because that's a painful thing does not mean it's a bad thing. Pain is very useful for showing people the places that need healing. In my experience, church is excellent for excavating the painful places that need healing, on pretty much every Sunday.

I don't think removing the annual "can all mothers stand" for the sake of those who have pain around the issue of motherhood is any more appropriate than not honoring veterans on Veterans Day for the sake of war widows in the congregation.
 
You know who can't stand on Mother's Day? My mother. She had polio when she was a girl, and now she's in a wheelchair. (If my brother-in-law ever found himself at a gathering asking the fathers to stand, he wouldn't be able to either. He's a quadriplegic.) I haven't asked them, so I don't know, but I suspect that every time people are asked to stand, they are reminded of their otherness. Should we all stop standing for the pledge or kneeling in prayer during church because it reminds the wheelchair-bound that they're not like everyone else?

In the second part of the article, Young suggests that we honor all the ways women interact with the issue of motherhood. Even if pastors do manage to get through her exhaustive list there are still people who will end up marginalized: women who have had abortions, transgendered women who don't even have the option to get pregnant, and single fathers, who have had to do much of their families' mothering are still left sitting in the pews with their own particular pains and sorrows. I had serious issues with post-partum depression and an emergency C-section in which I'm told I was in danger of dying. She didn't even mention those issues. And even if they were added now that I've brought them to light, the list still couldn't be exhaustive. As much as we try to break the world down into affinity groups and awareness days, the world insists on being populated by individuals with individual stories to tell. No matter how hard we try, someone is always going to be reminded of her brokenness, poked in the sore spot of her heart.

This is a good thing.

It is part of the burden we bear from being alive. We all have these burdens, some of us more intensely than others. It's not a reason to stop celebrating people for the wonderful things they do--if anything, it's a reason to continue. If all we did was pussyfoot around, trying to avoid everyone's psychic burns and bruises, nobody could ever get anywhere.

The solution to the church's problem of the women who secretly grieve on Mother's Day is to know who those women are. Not the types of women who suffer, but the individuals.

If we are living our mission in the world, we will have relationships with the people we sit next to at church. We will know them and their stories well enough that we squeeze their arms while the mothers are standing. We will take a moment during the peace to say we have been thinking about them, hoping that this time of year isn't too difficult. We will reach out to them during the week and make them feel cared for and loved. We will take the time to help them feel like God is completing his good work in them, as they are, right now--and we can do that no matter who is standing up and who is sitting down.