Mother's Day

Mother's Day is often a reflective time for me. Usually that is because I think of all the people who find Mother's Day difficult.  Today I find myself reflecting on a different aspect of this unusual day.

I had the wonderful 0700 am wake-up with a showering of hugs and kisses and presents dropped on my sleeping face.  I had excited kids wanting to show me the crafts they made at school.  This year's selections were especially wonderful and heartwarming.

I struggle to be honoured on Mother's Day as I find the rhetoric around motherhood and womanhood in today's political climate very limiting.  In a world that has such an incredible diversity of amazing women I feel that the ideas around motherhood more confining than celebrating.

Mothers are a diverse group of people with a variety of circumstances and interests most of which cannot be held within the confines of a Hallmark greeting card. My children are small and their love is pure and innocent.  My hope is as they grow that they will see Mother's Day as a call to examine how they view mothers in the world and how they can ultimately support them whether they choose to be parents or not.

Speaking from my own experience of being a doctor mom I am often confronted by people's misguided ideas that my children and I are always mourning the fact that I work.  That could not be further from the truth.  My children have no other frame of reference for their experience and are therefore happy they have a mother that loves them and has a cool job full of "operations and delivering babies".  I know from my friends who are stay-at-home moms that they also have people say insensitive things about the choices they have made that works for their families.

Truly supporting mothers is what I would like to see Mother's Day be about.  I think it's completely reasonable to shower mothers with hugs, kisses, cards and flowers.  But is there also the possibility of widening that love of mothers to include a stronger network of support? My mother and her mother before her and the community of mothers that raised me (my aunts, my mother's friends, my teachers, my community mothers) had similar hopes and fears to what I think a lot of us feel now. They wanted us as their children to have safety and security, health, autonomy, access to education and to grow and flourish as people.

In the current global political landscape I think we have lost sight of some of the above values that mothers often think about as they watch their children grow.

We want our children to be safe and secure and yet there are still people and more importantly public policies that don't support the FACTS of climate change and the small changes that we could make to vastly decrease our effects on the earth that sustains us.

There are thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women in this country and as I sit here with my coffee, homemade crafts and cuddles I am keenly aware that there are children that long to hug their moms and moms that long to hug their daughters.

To our fellow mothers in the United States I read about what is happening to your country and I ache for you as a woman and as a mother.  How policies can be made (by groups of overwhelmingly white men) that consider rape a pre-existing condition, that constantly battle easy access to contraception and the work of Planned Parenthood.  That an overwhelmingly more qualified candidate who won the popular vote lost the election because she is a woman and how that secretly sits in the dark places of every woman.  I think of the mothers watching the president make thoughtless choices that may culminate in war.  War that will be decided by affluent white men.  War, which disproportionately will take the lives of poor people of colour and permanently separate mothers from their children.

If you love a mother perhaps instead of (or in addition to) platitudes and cards you can examine your own inherent entrenched ideas of motherhood.  Learn what the mothers in your life worry about or hope for and learn how you can rise up and help them.  Perhaps you call out a colleague for a misogynistic statement about a working mom.  Or you listen to someone's experience of sexual harassment or assault before brushing them off as "too sensitive".  Could you take a minute to open your mind and heart when you look at a mother in a hijab before you support stereotypical thoughts on what she is teaching her children?  Or a mother who is poor who feeds her children something that you wouldn't.  Rally for easy access to contraception so that girls don't have to be mothers before they are ready. Rally for equal and universal access to education so that our future generations can make better decisions for the world.  Rally for everyone's right to health care and for the rights of the poor because it's right and because there is no one who wants a mother to be taken from her children too soon or for children to be lost because of preventable diseases.  Take the love you have for your own mother, the mother of your children, another mother you love or perhaps the love you wished you had for your mother if your relationship is strained, and work to make the world a better place for mothers, for women, for all of us.  Let us mother the world this Mother's Day.