To the Almost-But-Also Moms

There’s a running cliche that says we should all be asking single people when they’re getting married, asking newlyweds when they’re thinking about having kids, and asking parents what they see their child becoming in the future. It’s a lot of pressure, being expected to know how everything is gonna work out or not, to know when you’ll finally settle down and become some version of normal in the eyes of civil society. But there are hundreds of thousands of “almost” normals out there who never quite find love, but get pretty close, “almost” normals who never become parents, but either try and can’t, succeed and lose, or decide it’s not the right path, and then there are the “almost” normals with kids who simply don’t want to worry about their child’s forever future because they just want to enjoy their child’s forever present.

For just a minute, I was hoping to talk about the “almost” moms in the world, with one in particular that I wake up to every morning. Because I think it has to be a pretty heartbreaking emotion, on weekends like this, especially for the “almosts” in the world who’ve lost a child at any stage of pregnancy or infancy, to feel like they don’t count if their grief kept them from having another, or for those “almosts” in the world who, for any number of reasons, have tried and tried and tried to the point of discouragement, believing they would be really great at motherhood without having a chance to experience it. Or, by the same token, for those women in the world who have decided, as is their right, to live a different kind of life, without children at home, while they care for other causes and other people and other living things in other ways.

Over the last several decades, the definition of motherhood has blown up, far beyond the womb itself, somewhat similar to teachers who rarely get defined by the literal act of their profession. Mothers are, in the strictest sense, the source of all human life, giving to each of us the chance to be here and be loved. And there’s no question that this far stricter sense of the word deserves to be on its own pedestal, recognized not merely for the day of a child’s birth, but the years and decades of labor that follow, hoping that child will turn out okay, and maybe pass on that love/labor to yet another family and another child. For these kinds of moms, the ones who raised us and made us, it’s pretty fair to say they deserve more than one super busy day of flowers and Sunday brunch. Maybe sometime in the future there’ll be a “Mother’s Month” or even a “Mother’s Year” instead of a “Mother’s Day.”

But I say all this because the rolodex in my brain includes a small percentage of women who don’t meet this standard definition, even though they care for people and families at times without any thought of themselves. My wife, for example, has two aunts who never became mothers, one who gave her life to teaching, the other who gave her life to kids from every corner of the globe, giving up her home and her personal space for decades so that anyone and everyone going through hardship would have a place to go. I also know several colleagues whose choice not to have children is replaced by the hours they work overtime to ensure the children in their classrooms feel safe and loved. For some of these women, they are content to enjoy Mother’s Day celebrating their own moms, but for others, those much older, there is no longer a mom to celebrate, so the day simply passes with a knot in their stomach.

For my wife, the oldest of four kids, she was the first to get married, but ultimately watched each of her three siblings add to the family flock without adding to the numbers herself. She now has six nephews and a step-niece, most of whom she toils over when it comes to birthday gifts and Christmas presents, and all of whom I hear her speak about often enough to know how much she loves them in whatever fashion and to whatever degree time and space allows. But there’s already a day set aside for Aunts and Uncles in July, so I’m not sharing the aunt-gig as a pseudo-motherhood. It’s not even close and no one pretends that it is.

No. The reason I bring my wife up isn’t because of any biological mold she is or isn’t supposed to fit. I bring her up because my wife, Melissa, is the tireless and brilliant caretaker of our little family. Like every cliched husband, I get caught up in my own stuff sometimes, and sometimes a lot of the time, to the point of letting the house go, or the bills go, or the chores go, or the things we need to take care of for other people. Like a mother, my wife doesn’t forget a thing that needs to be done to ensure our family keeps running on all cylinders, and she almost always does it to the detriment of her own physical, emotional, or spiritual well-being, even looking out for people in the family and people in her orbit who have their own stuff.

Every morning, she wakes up our little Lucy, a teenage bird whose maturity level will never excel beyond the “pet me” and “feed me” stage, so they can dance together, be silly together, and open up the windows to the house and bring in the sunlight, together. Every morning, my wife checks the bird seed in the feeder out back, to make sure the birds in our neighborhood know they’re still welcome. And every morning of late, she’s gone out to check on a nest of doves, so she can talk sweetly to the mother and father who take turns caring for their chicks.

So to the almost-but-also moms, please know on this special weekend that you are seen, that you count, and that you are loved for all that you are, all that you do.