Mother’s Day and the Great Mystery of Motherhood.

Photo by Liv Bruce on Unsplash

Mother’s Day is a time of great sentiment and not without reason. Our mothers occupy an enormous space in our lives.

My grandmothers, Hazel and Bertie, were loving, cooking, cuddling forces of nature.

My own mother Sharon was kind, encouraging and ever doting.

My mother-in-law Carma has never treated me as less than her own dear son.

Jan, my wife, is a wonder to behold. She loves me, our children, our parents and everyone in her sphere with a fierce, persistent love unimpeded by time or difficulty.

I am from West Virginia, the Motherland of Mother’s Day. It was first recognized here, in Grafton, WV, in 1908. https://wvtourism.com/mothers-day/

Mother’s Day has spawned a vast industry including flowers and cards, jewelry and other gifts. It has als led to more recently requisite oceans of social media posts and touching photos on Instagram.

It has also served as an impressive source of externally and self-imposed guilt as most of us feel that we can never really do justice to our mothers, especially when we see the high bar set by others all around us.

But maybe we think not too much of Mother’s Day but too little. I was recently stricken by while considering this passage from Genesis:

“Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.” Genesis 4:1

I have gotten a man. Mother’s day, a late addition to human history, celebrates the power and relevance of that first moment.

Whatever one believes about Genesis, whether a young earth fundamentalist or a Darwinian evolutionary biologist, the ancient story in that ancient book tells us something powerful.

What Eve expressed with the birth of her first-born was a recognition of something numinous. Maybe it was because she was the literally first human, to produce another human from her own body and she recognized the divinity of that event.

Or maybe her story is the first recognition of sentient hominids that this was more than a mindless biological process. That this event was breathtaking and unimaginable. A human from within another human.

We men are important to the process, but we can never, ever know what it means for life to develop inside us, from cell to cell to tissue to organ to function to birth to breath to open eyes and cry.

From there, from that moment when a woman says ‘I have gotten a child,’ she becomes something different. She is initiated into a sisterhood of power and propogation. Her body moves humanity forward by providing the next in an unbroken line of human back to Eve…however one conceives her. From then a bit of her lives and thrives or is wounded and dies with the success and struggle of that child. A woman who has become a mother is changed forever, and is both harder and more resolute and softer and more filled with love, than she ever was before.

This is the source, the bedrock of the flowery sentiments and saccharine poetry on greeting cards. This is the source of the wound when a mother is unrecognized. Indeed, this power is the source of the pain felt by those who suffer from wounded, dysfunctional mothers. Motherhood is ancient and profound and foundational. Something that powerful is as dangerous as it is life giving.

Given that, we do owe a debt to our mothers and the mothers of our children.

I suspect it should be less than worship.

But a kind of adoration is appropriate for those who, on the day of our birth, heard in their own ancient hearts “with the Lord’s help I have gotten this child.”

Only they can understand the mystery.

Happy Mother’s Day all!

Edwin