A message on International Bereaved Mother’s Day.
Today, and every day, let’s remember all the mothers in our lives — especially those who don’t have a child to hold.
I wept when I saw the flowers on my doorstep. My mom had sent them to celebrate my very first Mother’s Day, although I hadn’t been pregnant for very long. I’m not the kind of girl who expects to receive flowers on holidays, and when I do they make me feel a bit shy. But not this time. This time, I was proud to realize that I was a mother, that this day was for me — that I deserved to be recognized for the immense love I already felt for the little girl I carried inside of me.
Fast forward to August, and another flower arrangement arrived on our doorstep. Instead of a colorful bouquet bursting with the colors of a new season, these were pale and long-stemmed, solemn and mournful. I cried at this delivery too, but not for the same reason. Now I was receiving flowers in sympathy for the loss of the same pregnancy that had made me a mother just a few short months before.
“I don’t want these,” I wailed to my husband. “I just got flowers for my first Mother’s Day, and now I’m not a mother anymore.”
Mother’s Day is approaching again, 3 years later. I am “officially” a mother now, since I have a bright and healthy 19 month old son. But what was I before, in the gap between my daughter and my son? What am I now — the mother of one, or two children?
Today is International Bereaved Mother’s Day, when we celebrate those mothers who don’t have their children here on Earth to hold. I’m glad we have such an occasion, because I can’t help but notice how, as the “real” Mother’s Day approaches, everything from the commercials on TV to the advertisements in stores are affirmations of those women who were able to bring a child into the world alive. We are swarmed with pictures of happy, smiling children, who in turn bring smiles to the faces of their proud mothers. All this sends the message that what makes a mother a mother is the end product, the “something to show” for her pregnancy.
For today, all women that have loved and lost a child are mothers, even if no one else ever met their child. But questions about our status will still plague us tomorrow, when we wake up and put our feet on the floor, ready to face another long stretch of grief and sorrow humming along beneath the current of our normal daily lives.
In my interviews, I’ve learned that women who experience pregnancy loss equivocate about their grief because they don’t feel like they deserve to feel so much of it. They feel less than those mothers whose children were further along in gestation or age than their own, and they question their own claim to motherhood. As Ariel Levy, who lost her son at 19 weeks, poignantly describes it:
I was not supposed to say the baby. I wasn’t supposed to even think it. He was not someone who slept and played; we did not have routines; he not established preferences or facial expressions. But the statement I had a miscarriage did not feel like the truth. Euripides wrote, “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?” That was more like it.
But grief should never be a matter of comparison. So for today, if you know a mother who has lost her child, please acknowledge her motherhood. Tell her that you’re thinking of her and her baby today, and that you won’t soon forget the love she will always carry for her child. She deserves to feel what I felt the first time I received flowers on Mother’s Day, and not just today, but every day.
