Mother’s Day is coming – and the cards, usually pink with a calla lily on them, and lunching or brunching or picnicking, ribbons and packages and bows, telephone calls criss-crossing the country, the onset of full summer sliding ever closer and babies – either new ones, grown ones, missed ones, the ones we once were and the women who raised us, or the ones we ourselves are raising.
And amid the late spring grass, bud roses, and celebration there will be women standing for a moment at the edge of the lawn, deep in thought, far away.
But then they will turn, to ensure everyone else’s comfort, and rejoin the party.
Child-loss and child-yearn doesn’t show like a broken leg.
Infertility doesn’t show. Miscarriage doesn’t show. The death of a child doesn’t show.
Women and men who live these things walk around looking just like the rest of us. Even their hair is combed and proper. They do lunch, talk on cell-phones, pull out their debit card to buy lettuce and bread.
And though none of us really knows how our lives will play out, young people tend to trust the inevitableness of some things. Young women tend to trust they can have children should they want them; they assume the choice. They assume tomorrow their bodies will be as they are today.
There are uncertainties in everyone’s life – anything could happen at any moment. Yet, and still, when you are handed a “can’t” a “won’t” a deep loss, the flip from how-you-thought-it-would-be to how-it-is-turning-out can literally bring you to your knees.
If you do have a child, the packages of yellow and green flannel blankets begin to arrive. You swaddle him cooing like a hungry dove, a small perfect bird. And people sometimes say: “you were blessed” and “you did something right” and “your child was a gift from God.”
But, no.
We were not specially blessed, we did nothing particularly right, and babes-in-arms are rarely an exclusive gift.
Because if one of us was blessed, did things just right, and received special gifts what does that say about families, about women, who can’t get pregnant or whose babies die before birth or die after birth?
God picked me? God picked you? I doubt it.
He doesn’t pass out favors like jelly-beans. He doesn’t play “an ink, a blink, a bottle of ink” to choose who gets a baby, and he doesn’t keep a bad-deeds list either. I don’t believe we have to rack up enough points to earn a child. God is not a leprechaun, nor is he Santa Claus, nor is he mean.
So, how’d I get lucky?For one, I was lucky. Plain and simple. Two: still lucky. Three, I don’t know.
Luck is easy, but just about everything else about God and desire and what we need and what we want and what we end up living is not.
I don’t know why some people have more pain and more loss than others. I do know that it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, their fault.
They’ve done nothing wrong and God did not choose to leave them bless-less. They shine.
Let’s be careful of each other this Mother’s day. Motherhood doesn’t always show on the outside and there are many ways to be a mother and to mother. We don’t know each others hidden stories.
If you are sad and carry the pit of a deep loss invisible, God did not give that loss to you; rather God carries the loss with you.
God does not hover over you like a giant Mount Rushmore rock declaring that you don’t get what you want, what you need, what you ache for.
God’s power rains down on us in interesting, sometimes puzzling, never simple ways. And it is this power you can swing from next time around, next chance, next try, next what-will-happen shot at it, whatever “it” is, whatever your gut draws you toward.
And that is not a simple thing, I don’t know exactly why we don’t each get the things we think we deeply need now. But I do know that the God I fathom doesn’t play favorites, but helps us play the game as best we can, each turn we take, lucky or not this time around.
