In Honor of Childless Mothers May 14,2023 Dr. Roger Ray
(It is Mother’s Day) click here to see the video
An Ode to Childless Mothers by Natasha Sanders
Understand. We are all the same and we are all different all at the same time. We are journeying through life and making the best of the circumstances we have been offered. We may choose to accept. Or not. We have dreams, aspirations, hopes and plans. We cheer for one another in triumph and we challenge one another in trials; all with the goal of becoming the best version of ourselves. We have resolved in a deep corner of our soul that our wombs will remain empty. Empty, but not dry! We are childless mothers.
Auntie.
Godmother.
Cousin.
Niece.
Sister.
Friend.
Daughter.
Wife.
Childless Mothers.
We are fierce.
We are engineer, electrician, soldier, scientist and senator, accountant and attorney, pilot, professor and preacher. We everyone else too.
We are warrior.
We pray and we fast and we do not. We read the Torah. We read the Qu’ran. We read the Holy Bible. We study the teachings of Buddha. We dance for rain. We protest for peace. And we do not. We are made to be mothers that we will not become. We are childless mothers. We commune with our Creator. We are co-creator.
Mothers are made; not by giving birth but by giving life.
We speak life over circumstances that would not exist without the creative touch of our hand.
We nurture beings from the womb of others.
We place life in situations that would remain dark without the light we bring.
Our light; we are radiant.
We declare life in regions overdosed on rejection. Soul exposed childless. No protection.
You, yes Mother. Not nature, still natural. Woman.
Giver of life.
You were called.
We are called.
Chosen indeed, but not to bear children; we have a right to remain childless. (And some of us have no choice). We have a responsibility to be mothers.
Though we are childless, we are mothers.
As my mother got older, the filter between her brain and her mouth became more and more porous. We had been a family that kept secrets. If anyone had ever done anything that was even slightly embarrassing, it was never mentioned. And I don’t want to sound like Prince Harry writing a “tell-all” narrative about my mother, especially now that she has been dead for 20 years, but, as my mom got older, that lifetime of stored away skeletons in the closet started to come out… most of which I really never wanted to know.
I didn’t want to know that my favorite uncle had gotten a cousin’s wife pregnant. I didn’t want to know that the uncle who stayed on the family farm had made a pass at my mother, long after she was married to my dad. But the stories just came out, out of context, out of the clear blue, and landed on the living room carpet, sort of the way you view a warm pile of cat vomit.
But her penchant for telling truths that no one asked her about got personal on the Christmas visit my then wife and I paid them in 1988 when we told them that we were going to be adopting a baby girl from Korea. My wife and I were arguing about a name for our daughter. Most female names were on the rejection list for my ex who had been a schoolteacher for many years and most girl’s names had an unpleasant association with a student she had disliked in past years. In fact, she had evidently never had a Valerie in class and that became the only name that she could stand.
I can only hope that this is not a common trait among schoolteachers, but I will not chase that rabbit into the psychological brush.
As she overheard us discussing names, mom volunteered that when I was born, she and my father were so depressed that they were having another baby that they had not even been able to discuss what name that they would give me. She said that Dr. Star walked into her hospital room and said, “I am ready to dismiss you, but I can’t until you give this child a name so that I can fill out the birth certificate.” So, they just gave me the first name that came to mind. And I replied, “Merry Christmas to you too mom.”
It honestly wasn’t a big deal. I had advanced degrees in counseling. I understand family dynamics pretty well and I knew that I was not only an unwanted child but that I was, in fact, their second unwanted child. They had a boy and a girl in the 1940’s and that was the family they wanted, their two accidents in the 1950’s were born because abortion wasn’t legal back then…. And yet we are both decidedly pro-choice, ironic as that may seem.
I don’t let this awareness haunt me. I am pretty well convinced that if you took all of the unplanned pregnancies out of the world there wouldn’t be enough people left to have ever built a civilization or bothered to pave roads. Only those of us who are parents by adoption can raise children who absolutely know how much they were wanted.
Still, for the past 45 years it has left me a little bit handicapped when Mothers’ Day rolls around and I am supposed to deliver some solipsistic saccharin sermon in praise of mothers…. I just don’t have that kind of material in my experience to fall back on. . . at least not in a biological, Hallmark sort of way.
My supervisors in my counseling grad school program often tried to hammer me about the classic issue of “my mother didn’t love me” but that never got much traction out of me because my life has been adorned by wonderful mother figures who loved me very much. Many, if not most of these women, never had children of their own but they had a lot of love to give and they gave me a very full life.
Most of us had schoolteachers that we would even slip up and call “mom.” At times. My third-grade teacher was a large woman who never married and who gave her entire life to other people’s children. She was not just my third-grade teacher, she was also my Sunday School teacher and later she was my high school church youth group sponsor. You would think that spending Monday through Friday with a room packed full of eight year old children would be enough for anyone but, Beula, yes, that was her real name, had boundless affection to give to children and though I never felt that I was her favorite or that she had favorites, I also don’t think that she would have stricken any boy or girl off of her potential name list because she seemed to have a heart for all of us.
She did choose me to be the preacher on Youth Sunday when I was a senior in High School, allowing me to deliver my first sermon at the age of 17. I don’t know if I was the best choice, it may just have been that I needed to be chosen the most.
I remember hearing of the mother of seven children who was asked if she had managed to love all of her children the same and she replied, “I never loved them all the same. I gave the most love to the one who, at that time, needed it the most.” I think that a childless woman like Ms. Grooms, who had contact with at least 60 children every week, was wise enough to give the time and attention to the one who maybe wasn’t getting it anywhere else, the ones who needed to be put in the spotlight for a minute, or to receive an extra word of encouragement or praise.
I suspect that I am not alone in having had a wise childless mother in your life who made your childhood much better than it might have been without her. The public schools are full of them. Not all teachers, I don’t want to be Pollyannish about this. Some of my teachers were simple minded to the point of being almost illiterate. More than one was, sadly, rather sadistic back in the days when being allowed to beat the children in your care was something like an employee benefit for under paid and frustrated teachers, but there were saints who walked among them, mentors, for whom we owe a debt of gratitude for how they helped us along.
I have looked back at my high school annuals where my former teachers wrote notes to me when I was graduating. I was shocked, as an adult, to see how poorly my teachers spelled and how corrupt their grammar was. But that was life in rural Kentucky. In the hillbilly land of Kentucky, we had our own language, it bore only slight resemblance to English and though we understood one another, my professors in graduate school were not much impressed.
Vanderbilt is in Tennessee, so you would think that the professors would recognize the educational deficits of their 20-something students who had grown up in what might have been a foreign country if it had not been just 50 or 60 miles away. They mostly corrected us through humiliation, which is, I suspect, why so many of my classmates dropped out in the first year of seminary.
But I had the good fortune of having an elderly widow in my student church, Ms. Meme Lamb, who was a retired professor of elocution from a women’s college. She had married a young doctor after the “great war” but they never had children. I think that I was Meme’s favorite.
Every Sunday, after church, when I would have delivered my enthusiastic grad student sermon to my county seat congregation, Meme would wait until I had shaken hands and greeted everyone at the door and then I would see her, back in the corner, motioning me into a classroom for a private conversation. Her technique of teaching grammar was the opposite of my famous professors’ public humiliation. Ms. Meme would say to me softly, in her deep southern accent, “Roger, you are almost perfect, and I want to help you to be absolutely perfect,” and then would come a brief lesson about subject/object agreement or the proper placement adjectives in a sentence, and over my five years of seminary and doctoral studies, Meme taught me to speak English.
My early grad school papers came back to me with red marks all over them and with exasperated remarks from professors who clearly believed that I did not deserve to be at Vanderbilt. My last paper, my doctoral dissertation, was turned in after my years of being tutored by Mrs. Lamb, and if you have ever been through the meat grinder that is the process of earning a doctoral degree, you know that you have a committee of professors who read your dissertation, one at a time, and they write notes on a separate piece of paper that they tuck into the dissertation before passing it to the next reader.
By accident, the chair of my committee returned my copy of the dissertation to me without removing the notes written by my professors who had read it. One of them had been especially hard on me in my early years of grad school but Professor Beisswenger wrote, “I regard this work to be a modern miracle. I never would have dreamed that this student could do this level of work.”
I did not have either the humility or the self-awareness at the time to give credit where credit was due. When I showed up at Vanderbilt, I wasn’t capable of doing that level of work but what had made the difference for me over the next few years was the undeserved affection, time, and attention of a childless mother who believed that she could help me and she found a way to do that without having to humiliate me or to make herself seem to be just too smart to tolerate my native hillbilly language.
Meme should get a credit in every book that I have published and every lecture I have delivered to international audiences because she is the reason that I was able to get to that point. You may not be horribly impressed with who I have become but, trust me, you wouldn’t have liked who I was before some of these childless women in my life decided that, deserving or not, I was worth their affection.
I suspect that if you allow yourself to think about it, you could come up with your own list of saints. It may have been your grandmother, but it also could have been a neighbor, someone you know from church or even a librarian who noticed that you always checked out the thickest books you could find on the shelf who realized that you had potential that your parents and siblings had not noticed.
I don’t say these things today to take away from Mothers who richly deserve our praise and every handmade card or bunch of flowers lovingly picked from the lawn, but all of us didn’t have that mom and not everyone who wanted desperately to be a mom ever got the chance to have children of their own. But many of us were mentored, encouraged, loved, reassured, even healed by women with whom we shared no DNA and I cannot say enough in praise of those women nor can I say enough to encourage everyone who hears these words to do everything you can to give a hand to someone who just isn’t going to reach their potential without your help.
Previous generations typically grew up within a rooted extended family so that there were grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and farm hands who all took part in the education and training of children. I didn’t have any of that. My daughter didn’t have any of that. The world is different now. Families are smaller and relatives are often hundreds of miles away.
In spite of all of our fear of being misunderstood or accused of having improper motives, there are children and young adults around you who have empty places in their hearts that you can fill.
I am 66 years old and I just lost a childless mother who has, through the fog of her Alzheimer’s, still been a friend and a mother to me and I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for her.
I don’t blame my parents for not being better at being parents. God knows they were better at it than their own parents were! But I want to ask for us all to pause for a moment to be grateful for the people who had a little extra love to give when we needed it the most and to be inspired by that awareness to love someone you did not give birth to but who may need you in very profound ways.
Don’t spend your whole life trying to get ahead, to promote your own well-being, to feather your own nest. Pause for a moment to look around and see who might do more, go farther, be more accomplished that you ever will be, who just needs for someone to believe in them and to be taught that “irregardless” is not a word… they mean irrespective, and you didn’t give a gift to Valerie and I, you gave a gift to Valerie and me. Because, sometimes, it is the little things.
