on being seen

Sometimes, you can remember the simplest things someone says to you for the rest of your life.

I remember two sentences my dad said to me at lunch several years ago.

And I will remember them for the rest of my life.

At that time, My Beloved and I, having undergone past failed fertility treatments, began a brand new series, certain that these finally would work. They did not. Each month felt like a death that kept on dying. Hope and crushing, hope and crushing. I don’t even know the person I was then. I felt utterly lost to myself. My family never spoke of it because there are things considered too shameful to mention, and this fell under that heading. So they simply didn’t speak of it. MB and I wandered, shattered, on the fringes of normal life. And the heavy, lingering sorrow that had stolen my hopes seemed to have taken my voice with it, too. I was mute. I could not give voice to the shame, breathe out what was being carefully ignored. MB and I were bereft and broken and hopeless.

In the midst of our failed treatments, my sister got pregnant. She had two boys and had always longed for a girl. So had I, secretly.

And … a girl it was.

I remember the day my sister called to tell me she was having a girl. I heard her voice on the answering machine and somehow knew exactly why she was calling, exactly what she was going to say, and I could not bring myself to pick up the phone. I stood inches from it, my hand outstretched but paused in midair. From where I was, far from her, I could see her joy; I could see it. The very air swirled pink and perfect with the news of a girl. And I, with my selfish sorrow and small heart, sank to the floor and cried and cried, the ugly cry that no one but God ever sees you cry.

Around this time, my longtime bachelor brother finally got engaged. There were echoing choruses of “Hallelujah!” all around at this news. Even I could manage that one. My family fairly exploded with the sheer elation of it all. A new baby girl, a wedding in the works. It was like having a whole year of Christmas where every gift is perfect; a whole year of parties with everyone you like and no one you don’t.

But My Beloved and I still went, quietly, to our treatments. And still, quietly, they failed. I was breaking in two from the overwhelming weight of joy and sorrow.

One day that year, my dad called to invite me to lunch. We met at Marie Callendar’s because he likes Marie Callendar’s and when he’s at Marie Callendar’s, he likes to order soup, which he did.

As we chitchatted about this and that, I was growing more and more nervous. He was working up to say something, I could tell, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what it would be. He’s not the demonstrative type. Emotions are private, you see.

He cleared his throat several times, in that compulsive way he has. I knew then he was nervous, too. Finally, he looked at me with those dark blue-grey eyes and said:

“I know your brother’s and sister’s happiness must be breaking your heart.”

I couldn’t breathe. I had ordered soup, too, in silent solidarity, and saw my tears dropping onto its surface. Then with a choked voice I’d never quite heard before, he whispered:

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

And I was gone. I began to shake. Tears streamed onto the table; heads around us turned. I was quiet, but I was just gone. My father, who had never, ever spoken to me about it, understood.

He understood.

And he had said all he would. He mentioned it once and never again. Still, in that singular moment, I no longer felt invisible. I was seen. I was seen. I felt warm and alive and understood by someone I'd been sure did not, could not, understand.

I know they were just two sentences spoken softly over bowls of steaming soup, but they were among the best things my dad has ever said to me.

I was less broken for hearing them.

mother's day and the church

Last year during Mother’s Day week, I found a blog post about Mother’s Day and the church and what the church should do about this day. There were over 1,000 comments and there’s no way I could read them all, but as a childless woman who finds this day hard and who avoids church every year on this day, I was struck by a recurring theme in a fair portion of the comments I skimmed:

The childless women’s comments were frequently countered with “Well, yeah, you’re sad on this day but you’re supposed to rejoice with those who rejoice, the Bible says.”

You know, I love it when people use only half a verse to make their point or take a verse out of context entirely because, yes, we are supposed to rejoice with those who rejoice but – as the verse goes on to say – we are to mourn with those who mourn.

As it relates to the childless, when does the church do that, publicly? When does it mourn with other mourners – publicly? If the church is going to publicly rejoice with moms, then by extension, as a counterbalance, and if it’s going to live out this verse, it should publicly mourn with the mourners, the non-moms, but it doesn’t, or at least I’ve never seen a church that does. To be fair, I think it doesn’t because it just doesn’t know how.

The church acknowledges moms a lot.  They’re certainly not forgotten. It’s not hard to find support and friends with that common bond, is it? Mothers are everywhere in the church, so they can't possibly feel ignored, as a group, by the church. There are lots of programs, lots of women walking a similar road, lots of moms with whom to commiserate, so to my eyes, there's no lack of company. I'm not saying that moms can't feel alone sometimes.  I'm saying the state of motherhood is certainly not ignored in the church at large.

But, frankly, I don’t think it’s the church’s job to celebrate moms. It’s the job of the individual families to celebrate their own moms. The founder of Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, deliberately intended it to be Mother's Day, not Mothers' Day -- a celebration of one's own mother, not a celebration of all mothers.  She died feeling a failure because Mother's Day lost its way, lost its meaning, and became a massive commercial venture and not a day of respect for individual moms.

My personal opinion?  I think the church should keep this manmade Hallmark holiday out of the church entirely. Enough with the mom sermons on Mother’s Day.  (And enough with the dad sermons on Father’s Day). Enough with the flowers it gives just to moms one year and enough with the flowers it gives to all women the next year so no one feels left out. I’m not stupid. I know I’m not a mom. A flower doesn’t fix that and it’s just awkward and pandering. In the past, I've  said "no, thank you" to those flowers.

But back to the post I mentioned at the beginning of my little tirade here.

So many of the Christian moms on that thread commented that they want to be asked to stand in church on Mother’s Day and that they want to be acknowledged and applauded by the entire church. Why? Why are moms entitled to acknowledgement from the entire church? I understand intellectually that many moms may feel perpetually under appreciated, but I'm now sure how standing for 5 seconds in front of the church one day a year fills the appreciation void of the other 364 days.  Several women even gave the rationale that mothers standing in church on Mother's Day is no different from veterans standing in church on Veteran’s Day.

But that's not an apt analogy.  It’s not like Veteran’s Day at all. When veterans are asked to stand on their day, they've served everyone in that church in their role as soldier, sailor, or marine, and they stand and get acknowledgment from everyone they've served.  But moms don’t serve the entire church. They serve on a much smaller but no less vital front: in their own home, in their own family. However large or small her family, a mom hasn't served the entire church in her role as mother.  She may serve the entire church in another way, but she serves only a limited number of people as their mother. Expecting honor from people you don’t serve in your capacity as mom is expecting honor that you’re not entitled to.  If I were a mom, I’d care much more about things like a scribbled homemade card that says “I love you, mommy,” burnt toast and runny eggs, a sloppy mani-pedi, or a bouquet of random flowers from my yard than any polite applause from people in church who don’t even know what kind of mom I am. Who cares about that? And if a person does care about that, I think they have to ask themselves why.

Maybe moms want to feel like heroes for a little while. I can understand that, but, again, they’re heroes to the family they serve, not the church at large. No, it's not on the same scale size-wise, but isn't it much more meaningful?

About that standing acknowledgement, can I be blunt – or more blunt? The only thing that separates a mom from a non-mom is that all the male-female parts worked correctly and in a timely fashion. The “standing mom” acknowledgement that some churches employ is for the physical fact of being a mom. It's neither a judgment nor an endorsement. It's not Good Mother's Day nor is it Bad Mother's Day.  It's just Mother's Day.   The name of the holiday isn't saying “these women are all great moms."  It’s just saying “these women are all moms.”

Please note, too, that the name is Mother'S Day not MotherS' Day.  (What?  Punctuation makes a difference in meaning?  You've got to be kidding!  But I'm not.)  The holiday was intended by its creator, Anna Jarvis, to be a day to honor your mother, not a day to honor all mothers. That's why the name is the singular possessive Mother's Day -- a day to celebrate a mother -- not the plural possessive Mothers' Day -- a day to celebrate all mothers.   It's meant to be an individual celebration, not a collective school-wide, church-wide, nationwide celebration of all mothers.  Yes, that's what it's become but that wasn't the holiday's intent.  The intent was to celebrate your own mother and be celebrated as a mother yourself without expecting everyone else to celebrate you.  That's the very important distinction the placement of that single apostrophe makes. 

Lastly, at its core, it's really a physiological difference that separates a mom from a non-mom, but the church doesn’t do other such acknowledgements and celebrations based on physiological differences, does it? You don’t hear “Stand up if you're non-diabetic.” “Stand up if you can see.” “Stand up if you can get an erection.” “Stand up if you can stand up.”  Absurd, right?

So why do some churches still insist on having women stand to be acknowledged for simply being biologically luckier than others?  

I stay away from church on Mother’s Day. I have for years and I don’t see that ever changing for the rest of my life. I won’t go. In my house, it’s called “Tracey Day” and I get spoiled rotten. That’s how I cope and how I will always cope with this manufactured, exclusionary day.

But would Mother’s Day really be diminished for Christian moms if the church didn’t acknowledge it? Would the Christian mom feel gypped if there weren’t flowers passed out, sermons preached, applause offered? There are plenty of secular moms who don’t get applauded by a roomful of people on that day, so are their Mother’s Days qualitatively worse for the lack of it? I rather doubt it.

I just looked this up: Mother’s Day was established as a holiday 100 years ago – in 1914.

So I’m just wondering.

If this were 1913, what would Christian moms do?