Just a few years ago, mother’s day for me meant breakfast in bed, big sloppy kisses, and hand-made cards proclaiming “I love you mommy.”  Now, with a house full of teenagers, I might get a meal with them and maybe, if I’m lucky, a mumbled “happy mother’s day.”

What a tangle of emotional yarn lurks below the surface of ‘mother’s day’.  There is the garden variety feeling of loss that I experience with my own children as they enter their teen years.  But I am also keenly aware of the heartbreaking pain of other women: women who’ve given up children for adoption; women who’ve tragically outlived a child; women desperate to become mothers and women who are desperately tired of mothering.

Meanwhile, I am also aware of the men and women who have buried their mothers, of those who never quite got what they needed from their mothers, and those who have spent a lifetime resenting their mothers.  Where are the greeting cards that reflect this vast complexity of emotional possibility?

And where does that leave us?  With one universal truth – that we all came from the body of a woman.  She was mother, our gateway to earth.  No matter who we are, we can use this day to explore our deepest spiritual potential:  forgiveness for human frailties and gratitude for the gift of life.

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