I am a mother…

Today is Mother’s Day in the UK, or ‘Mothering Sunday’ in Christian circles (a name which, for some reason I can’t explain, I hate…) I have been a mother on Mother’s Day for 5 years now – my first one was in 2009, and DD was only a few weeks old. It is a strange and wonderful celebration. Of course it goes without saying that we should be celebrating mothers far more often than once a year, but what are we actually celebrating on this day? Are we celebrating what our mothers have done for us? Are we celebrating what we ourselves do and have sacrificed as mothers? Are we celebrating the importance of mothers in the family and the way that they often hold families together and do so much that is never recognised? Are we also celebrating that in many ways we can give mums a day off today – Mums overwhelmingly being the ones who cook, clean, organise, negotiate, ferry-about, plan, entertain and discipline in the family – but tomorrow it will be back to the normal way of things? I find most of the Mother’s Day rhetoric sickening – all flowers and pinkiness – nothing about how we should be talking about what it really means to be a mother/father and a parent, or the sharing roles and responsibilities more fairly between mothers and fathers.

Personally, while I love being a mother and I adore my children passionately and fiercely, I have also struggled at certain points with my motherhood (and my wife-hood too for that matter!) I don’t think that I went into parenthood as prepared as I could have been. Of course DH and I considered very carefully when and whether we wanted to have children but I don’t think that I was prepared for how all-consuming it would be, and how constant and demanding it is. Nothing can prepare you for the complete re-orientation towards your children that happens once you have your first small, noisy, dependent little bundle in your arms. You quickly realise of course but even then you think that once they are a little bigger, once you’re not breastfeeding, once they are a year, or two, then it’ll get easier, and it kind of does… once you’re out of that white heat of the early weeks of motherhood you are a bit less bewildered, a bit less numb with sleep deprivation, but really the challenges just change. Playing in the background is the overture of love, a devotion and desire to do the absolute best that you can for these beautiful, amazing creatures that you have somehow made and borne from your body. But at the same time that I am trying to figure out how to bring up my children, I am trying to figure out how not to lose myself in the midst of that.

Before I had children, my time was my own and I decided how I wanted to use it. But after children that changed. My time became mostly theirs and I tried to snatch moments in the day or hours in the evening that I could call my own. Even then, much more time is spent on cleaning up after them, keeping our home in a reasonable state for them to play, learn and grow in, than I needed to spend before. (DH is a messy eater, but most of his dinner still usually stayed in the vicinity of the table/kitchen) Now that we are home educating that is going to continue for much longer than I had first anticipated. (Having imagined that I would happily pack them off to nursery aged 3!) I had never imagined that I would be home educating and I still have days that I think that I’m crazy to be going down this path, but I think that helping my children have as much of a childhood as they can, letting them learn and discover the world around them as well as themselves is one of the most important things about being a parent.

But I am not just a parent, I am a wife, I am a friend, I am a pastor, I am a part of my community, I am me. I want all of the different parts of me to have the space, time and energy to grow and develop. I want to be an awesome mum, but I also want to be a brilliant wife, reliable friend, faithful pastor, active citizen, and more me-like me. If most of my time is spent on only one of my many roles, then how can the other parts of me grow and develop? Fortunately for me, my motherhood is not done in isolation, I am a parent as much as I am mother and so it is for DH and I to figure out together how we share roles and responsibilities in our family. Up until now I would say that we have fallen into mostly the traditional roles of men and women in marriage and parenthood – with the addition that I also work part-time. DH does much to facilitate me being able to work, but I also think that we need to work a bit more on how we share some of the other things that need done in the home and family.

So this Mother’s Day I want to celebrate mothers everywhere – for everything that they do, for the things that are seen and not seen, for the ways that they fight for their families, for the sacrifices that they make, for who they are. And I want to say thank you to my children for making me a mum, definitely the best thing I have ever done. But I also want to ask mothers everywhere to think about our motherhood much more than perhaps we currently are. We are not just mothers, we are people in our own right… we have voices to use, we have power and we are needed in our society as well as in our families. We need to think of ways that we can both bring up our children and spend our time with them but not be excluded from engaging with wider issues in our society and our world. It is too easy for people to think that mothers are always too busy to do something because of their children, or that we couldn’t do something because of our children, but if that happens consistently then our voices will not be heard. We need to talk honestly and fairly about motherhood as well as fatherhood and how we share roles and responsibilities in our families. I would love to see Christian communities thinking through these questions and begin trying out different ways of being family and community in our world today.