by Rev Janet Onnie
May 11, 2025
I have mixed feelings about preaching on Mothers Day – balancing terror and wonder. Terror because I know that no matter what I say at best I’m going to leave someone out. At worst I’ll going to engender painful memories. I worry about the responses of women who have – by chance or by choice — not had children. Or have buried their children. Or given them up. Or lost them to circumstances way, way beyond their control. Or simply don’t like them. I worry about the men – left out of this mythology – who are raising children alone or in partner with another man. Or the men who have unknowingly fathered children. I worry about non-binary combination of parents not acknowledged by this day. I worry about causing you pain by bringing up memories you may have of your mother.
But I also view Mother’s Day with a wonder that has been repressed for quite some time. For many of us it is our mother who is the first divinity for us: she is literally our life-giver, our nurturer. The bad thing about the perfect mother myth perpetuated by the greeting card people is that children believe it and demand it of their mother. Our mother was our God from which all blessings – nourishment, comfort, and care – flowed. There is a story of Egyptian men who were awed by maternal behavior patterns, wondering why women did what they did to maintain the race. Maxims written about 1500 BCE said: “Thou shalt never forget thy mother and what she has done for thee….For she carried thee long beneath her heart as a heavy burden, and after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her shoulder and gave thee her breast to thy mouth, and as thy size increased her heart never once allowed her to say, “Why should I do this?”!
Managing the transition from God to fallible human being requires a child to face a crisis of faith! Few of us manage this faith crisis well. This is compounded by our culture blaming mothers for whatever goes wrong. Beginning with Freud many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have been more than happy to lay the blame for their patient’s problems on their mothers. The folklore of the mental health profession seem to be, If you want to understand a patient’s pathology, invite the mother in for a visit. I marvel that that any of us is an intact as we apparently are.
In fact each of us has certain circumstances that will make this day a powerful one; for either joy or sorrow, praise or forgiveness. Is there anyone here who is completely neutral about Mother’s Day? I’m not. And that’s why I decided to finally address this power.
I have had two experiences that made me think about some aspects of mothering not normally found in the Hallmark pantheon of greeting cards. The first was traveling to meet my 5-month-old grand-nephew. Mother Nature was at her most glorious– the lilacs and the flowering crabtrees and the tender green of the grass and trees. It was in this delirium of mellowness that Gabe and I met and bonded in the caldron of family. His mommies were tired, but not too tired to disabuse me of any notion that the Hallmark Mothers Day bore any resemblance to the reality of their lives.
After dinner on my last night my niece sent me an article written by Sarah Liss. It describes the phenomenon of “lesbian dad syndrome”—the condition of feeling like an impostor, a fake, experienced by the non-gestational half of a two-mom couple.” The article went on to say, “Some of the feelings …were rooted in the deep anxiety that I’d have no real place as a parent; that in the absence of a biological connection, I wouldn’t know how to love my kid; that without that innate tie, our bond would be brittle and fraught. More than anything else I’ve experienced, motherhood has made me feel profoundly alienated from straight people and straight culture. I’ve been forced to confront the depressing reality that, when babies and mommy culture are involved, heterocentricity is almost always the rule.”
My niece, who was NOT the birth partner, experienced what Liss writes: “The realm of parenting is alarmingly gendered, alarmingly binary. It’s tricky to navigate a zone where a mom is not only assumed to come as part of a matched set with a dad, but is, without fail, the person who carried and birthed her kid.”
So here were two women in my family who were lost in the wonder of bringing a child into the world, nurturing him, and watching him grow. Here were two people surrounded by a loving family who were lost in the terror of a legal system that did not recognize the legitimacy of one of my grand-nephew’s mommies. Under local and state mandates my niece could not legally sign a permission slip for her son to go on a field trip. It made me weep with rage and frustration. I can’t find a greeting card for this.
The second experience that made me think about mothering was an article in The Sun, a marvelous magazine for people who like the written word, minus cartoons or advertisements. Heather Kirn Lanier put her experience of parenting a child with disabilities in the context of language. The article is entitled “The R-Word”. She says, “Even as the 1977 President’s Committee on Mental Retardation confirms that all people have the right to “a share in the ever-expanding American dream,” it describes them in terms we use for products we’d like to send back: Retarded, defective, slow in mind, deformed and misshapen, spastic, epileptic.” Lanier continues, “We have come a long way since [1977], but not far enough. I read again and again in contemporary reportage the words birth defect. Some kids receive stuffed bears in the bassinets on their first day of life outside the womb. Others get medical labels of rejection. When I call my daughter’s pulmonary-valve stenosis a “heart condition” rather than a “heart defect,”, I don’t care what some Ivy League linguists say: my term creates a cushion around her, like a plush blanket. Her body is cradled in acceptance. The word Defect is a dagger.”
Consider parenting a child where the language the world uses to describe your child is a dagger rather than a plush blanket. Even the wordsmiths in the greeting card industry have gone silent in the face of these mothers.
Mother’s Day is no time to romanticize parenthood. Parenting is a down-to-earth process if ever there was one. I’m with Bruno Bettelheim, who advocated for ‘good enough’ parenting. He felt that perfection is a dangerous and destructive ideal and one that is particularly corrosive as a centerpiece around which to build family life. One of the most important gifts that mothers give (or fathers, too, for that matter) is the gift of modeling how to love and care and stay connected to others in spite of human flaws and frailties that crop up in our relationships.
A scene sticks in my memory of me visiting my mother when she first received the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. My mom was an RN, and a head nurse at that. She wasn’t given to much sentimentality, but was as susceptible to societal expectations as the rest of us. When I arrived in her room she burst into tears and asked if I could ever forgive her. “For what?”, I asked. “For abandoning you” she replied and she told me the story of my early childhood: how her younger brother Bill had been killed during WWII, which devastated her mother, my grandmother. Here was this new baby (ME) and my mother needed to work to augment my dad’s on-again-off-again employment. So she shipped me off to her mother – my grandmother — figuring that she’d solved the problem of childcare and grief all in one fell swoop. If nothing else, my mother was a pragmatist. Except one of her colleagues told her she would live to regret abandoning her child. And apparently she did.
For me… well, I have an old photo showing me at about 3 years old. I’m in a starched dress at the front of the farmhouse looking as sad and confused as I’ve ever seen on a person’s face. It still unsettles me to see that photograph. So I guess that I did know that my mother left me for what seemed like long stretches of time. But before this gets too maudlin, let me say that these were the same grandparents who loved me and gave me the passion for community I have today. They encouraged and modeled self-reliance. And they gave me the freedom to develop what creativity and imagination I bring to the table. Not a bad trade-off, except for my poor mother’s guilt for not living up to the mythology of what a mother should be. My mother did exactly what poet Netta Gillespie described: “I hurl you into the universe and pray.” And for that I will be always grateful.
In her book titled, “Mother, Warrior, Pilgrim”, Jain Sherrard confesses that when she became a mother, she found herself ‘in the midst of a war…I felt like a foot soldier,” she writes, “…untrained and unarmed, whose only weapons were a pleathora of useless mythologies regarding what it meant to mother.”
Mothers are, indeed, warriors, in the sense that Don Juan defined the word: someone who “balances both terror and wonder.” And then Sherrad contends that what mothers really are, are Pilgrims – in that they embark on motherhood with no maps. They must cover long and hazardous distances. Their final destination is always in doubt. And the journey is for the rest of their lives.
It is in this sense of pilgrimage that it struck me that all Unitarian Universalists – regardless of gender identity – are mothers. Some of us have birthed children; some of us have mothered other people’s children. Perhaps we have birthed a book or a painting, a garden or a song. Somewhere, sometime, we all have sown seeds of gladness. Even now we are nurturing ideas birthed long ago. But unlike other religions that are frozen in time, we believe that revelation is not sealed. Process theology teaches that we are in a constant state of change. Translated into maternal terms, I quote Florida Scott-Maxwell: “No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore.”
Isn’t that what we’re doing here? I believe that’s why we’re in this community of the Living Tradition. We are looking at these ideals – these children – and helping develop them. We are trying to improve them, making them ready and relevant to the times we live in. And in doing this nurturing, we are carrying the weight of hope for the fruition of our ideals of justice and compassion in human relations? There is a Unitarian Universalist slogan, “Nurture Your Spirits, Help Heal the World.” On this Mother’s Day I would encourage us to flip that slogan: to heal our own spirits of unrealistic expectations of perfection, concentrating instead on nurturing the world. Let us hurl ourselves and our children and grandchildren and our Unitarian Universalist ideals into the universe – and pray. Amen.