As it is May, and tomorrow is Mother's Day, I have been giving a lot of thought about mothers. My own mother, myself as a mother, mothers in general. Tomorrow, many of us will gets cards that proclaim we are kind, nurturing, patient, loving, or supportive. Nice words, nice cards. Moms are generally all of those things. But the words I think best describes moms is brave.
It is brave to grow another human inside your body. Weird, weird things happen and you have to be brave to get up each day as your body changes and protests and grows. There is bravery in being nauseous and functional, in stretch marks and varicose veins, swollen ankles, etc. It is brave to eat the right foods and give up wine in order to grow this other human. And it is really, really brave to take those disgusting prenatal vitamins.
It is beyond brave to expel another human from your body in front of strangers who are all crouched down around your lower half and watching. It is violent. It is bloody. It is beautiful. And it is so, so brave.
It is brave to be handed a tiny newborn life to take care of while your own body is sore and beaten from the battle of birth. It is humbling to hold this precious thing that you have grown and know you have never loved like this before. It is then you realize that you will do absolutely anything and everything to make the world better for this tiny human.
It is absolute bravery to send this small person to school. You pin your heart to your sleeve and pray the kids, the adults, the people at this school see how amazing your small person is. You have to be brave to hear that someone made your child sad or doesn't like them. You bravely tell them how amazing they are while your own heart aches and you don't cry until later.
As they get older, it is brave to say no, brave to say yes, brave to say "Let me think about it". It takes battle-strength armor to face the anger of a sullen teen and it takes heroic levels of patience and fortitude to teach this same person to drive. It takes all you have to not lay down in the fetal position and sob when they walk the stage at graduation. The day they leave for college or the world, your heart shatters into a million pieces while you smile and tell them they they have this, that they can do all things, that they are never mediocre. You face life without them there every day and it is quiet and it is weird and it can be lonely and you face it, bravely.
It takes bravery to let your relationship with your child grow to where you learn things from them and are not the teacher. It takes bravery to watch them date, and drive, and live apart. It takes giant understanding and love to watch them live their lives without you at the center of it anymore. All this while you work your job, love your partner, remain a good friend, maintain your home, take care of your own parents; exhausting and still so brave.
I think it takes supreme bravery to want children and not be able to have them and go out into the world full of children each day. Brave to have had a child, and lost a child, and go out into that world of children. Brave to be frustrated by babies and small children, or teens and adult children, but to still be there for them. So while we are kind and loving and patient and nurturing and present, we are, I think, above all, brave. And I hope just one of us gets a card that thanks us for being a kick-ass warrior of womanhood in someone's life.
