If you know me at all, you know that I love being a mother.
I have known I wanted to be a mother for most of my life, an experience not unique to me. But unlike most women I know who also felt this way, it’s not because I’m a natural caregiver. I’m not a warm and fuzzy, bake you cookies and a homemade meal kind of mom. It’s because I’m a natural advocate. I’m a make space for you on my couch, tell you the truth, don’t mess with my people kind of mom.
Although I think of myself as someone much larger than and not wholly defined by my motherhood, I am also aware that my motherhood permeates every facet of my being - in a way that will last long past the time my children are dependent upon me and live under my roof. Perhaps it would be this way no matter what. But I believe that being the mother to a child who doesn’t walk this earth planted this seemingly inexhaustible desire to mother inside of me.
I love being a mom to Max, Lachlan, and Meryn. But I also love being a bonus mom to all of my friends’ kids and all of my kids’ friends. I frequently find myself telling the younger moms in MomCo that there is nothing wrong with deciding to stop having kids before you’ve reached your capacity. I have two kids in my home, but room for a lot more in my heart and in my suburban. Need someone to take your kids home from school for an hour or two? I’m your girl. Heading to the emergency room with the youngest? I’ll meet you there to pick the others up. I want my home to be known as a safe and inviting place for everyone. And I’m finding that “everyone” really does mean everyone.
I love the books and writing of Shannon K Evans, a Catholic writer who often dwells on the holy and messy work of motherhood. She recently wrote a sentence on her substack that I have not been able to shake. She wrote, “ I do not recognize a motherhood that ends at my own children.”
Becoming a mom broke my heart wide open. A fact I do not entirely appreciate as an enneagram eight whose natural tendencies lean towards self-protection and keeping my circle small.
In her book Rewilding Motherhood, Evans writes, “Motherhood teaches us the radical generosity of offering what we can for another. And if we are responsive to the expansion within us, the slowly - often quite unexpectedly - we find that the boundary lines of what constitutes family gradually widens.”
I’ve found that bringing children into the world often does one of two things in a woman – it highlights all of the things to fear and makes her circle the wagons, or it highlights all of the joy and beauty and life worth celebrating and makes her fling her arms open to the whole of humanity.
For me, that looks like going deeper and deeper with the friends I’ve spent over a decade entwining my life with - the women who have witnessed my greatest joys and my most shattering heartbreaks. It looks like investing in and embracing the women I’m surrounded by in MomCo - especially the younger moms who need to be bolstered and empowered. It looks like becoming an advocate and stronghold for women in unsafe marriages. It looks like spending my Sunday mornings with a gaggle of first graders who never cease to give me hope. It looks like speaking out against the homophobia, racism, and nativism that seems to have become acceptable and even embraced in recent months.
In short, it looks like loving my neighbor. Specifically, loving my neighbor the way their mother would. Wholly and with abandon. Without qualification or a way to opt out.
It looks like true and radical hospitality. An openness to love, to curiosity, and to acceptance. When I became a mother, I threw my arms wide open to my children and unwittingly, the world. Because as Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail says in her book of devotions titled God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, “Love that comes from God is abundant not subtractive.”
Oh God of Abundant and Unfailing Love,
may we find that in being fully loved by you,
we have unlimited access to the love that flows from you.
Enough love for the lovely and loveable,
and still more for the stranger, the immigrant, the other.
For in you, there is no other.
Only beloved. Brother. Sister. Child.
Created in the image of and bearing the mark of a
God who loves all and calls us good.
May we never fear that we may reach the end of our love,
for the source of love is abundant and inexhaustible.
Yet when we find ourselves exhausted,
when the weight of loving the world is more than we can bear,
remind us that you can bear all things,
even and especially when we cannot.
May we,
being rooted and established in love,
together, as the Lord’s holy people,
have minds and hearts opened so to grasp,
how wide and long and high and deep
is your love for us. All of us.
Amen.
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