Post Script | May 15, 2023

A link to my motherhood essay

I had a short, good cry yesterday on Mother’s Day. I suppose there are all kinds of reasons: that I was missing my older children, who couldn’t be home to celebrate; that I am watching my mother cognitively decline; that together, our family has marked a year of immense change.

Last week, I was feeling the weight of the year’s losses as I watched the dates on the calendar signal anniversaries. On the morning of my birthday last year, May 12^th, my mother called to tell me that her husband had died in the hour before dawn. I cancelled lunch plans with friends and flew to Columbus to be with her and to help plan the arrangements.

Providentially, that week I spent with my mom was the same week that we were due to close on our house in Cincinnati. Mid-week, Ryan flew to meet me for the closing, then drove back with me from Cincinnati to Columbus for my stepfather’s funeral. Our five capable children managed to drive across an international border—by themselves—to attend. A month after the funeral, my older son and I packed up my mother’s apartment. A mother after her move, our family left our eleven-year history in Toronto and returned to make a new life in the States, to care for my mother.

In the past year, God has provided in ordinary and miraculous ways. I am grateful. And, as a poem I read last week put it, I am also “tired of traveling.”

So yesterday, I cried—and remembered the good words about lament spoken by my spiritual director the previous week. She said lament is the way we name what’s broken; that lament is the way we “unburden” ourselves before God; that lament is searching for the right words for the right emotion; that lament is expressing that emotion to God and believing he listens and bears compassionate witness. I had written a whole section on lament in Surprised by Paradox—but still needed all these reminders.

I needed to remember it was okay to say this is hard, and I’m not doing as well as I might appear.

Mother’s Day is a funny holiday, and I’m glad our church yesterday made room for lament. It’s certainly the mood I brought into the day. However, in the article I wrote for Christianity Today last week about motherhood, lament wasn’t the spirit; celebration was. I wanted to celebrate being a mother and challenge some of the cultural notions that children are a burden. Here’s a link to that piece, if you’re interested to read.

Wherever you find yourself this Monday morning, with heart heavy or heart full, may you sense God’s compassionate witness and presence that carries you into the week ahead.