Mothers Day has always been an incredibly difficult day for me.
Filled as it is with mixed emotions but not for the reasons you might think.
It’s not a difficult day for me because I have a son with Autism or a daughter on the spectrum.
In many ways their presence here helps to counteract the whirlpool of emotions that this day normally stirs up in me.
Mother’s day is hard for me because I am, or at least I would have been, had everything gone to plan, the mother of seven children.
You see, four of my lovely ones never made it kicking and screaming into the light of this world.
So every Mothers Day I sit and I think about the babies that I never go to hold.
The faces I was never allowed to touch and love.
And I wonder what they would have looked like now as strapping young adults.
I wonder what their personalities would have been like and who they might now have been.
Would they have been artists or writers?
Would they have had that same broad grin that my middle son wears like a badge of honor?
Or those same amazing amber eyes as their sister?
Would they have been as tall as my living eldest son or more on the shorter side of life like me?
I guess it’s normal for mother’s like me to wonder and occasionally let ourselves dwell in the mystical land of ‘what could have been’.
I guess some would even say that I’m still grieving their loss and I yes, in a lot of ways I probably am and always will be.
I know that it has gotten easier with time.
Yet I will always remember that the awfulness, of breathing my way through every single Mother’s Day that left me unmarked and unacknowledged as a mother, during those years of enduring loss, were some of the most pain filled days I have ever known.
During those days I often used to wonder what to call myself.
After all what do you call a childless mother?
Common sense would say that there can be no such being as a childless mother and yet, there I was, every single Mothers Day for four years, struck numb by being exactly that which logic dictated I should not be.
A childless mother.
Despite that I knew, that even though I was a childless mother, I was still a mother.
Though my arms may have been empty, my heart was always full.
So to all the childless Mothers everywhere, I honor you, I recognize you and I declare with all my heart that;
You are now,
And you will always be,
Mothers,
Worth celebrating.
Related articles
- Be gentle with the childless on Mother’s Day (oursecretthoughts.wordpress.com)
- How many more mothers are childless today because our Congress isn’t brave enough to act? (momsrising.org)
- For the motherless and childless on Mother’s Day (hippiecahier.com)
- Mothers’ Day mourning (mymilkspilt.wordpress.com)
