Mother's Day Redeemed

The dress was gauzy and springy, covered in flowers and every pastel color you could imagine. She'd bought it from Belk, the one we frequented in late August to pick out new school clothes, and it was the last Easter dress I ever remember buying as a child.

Less than three months later I'd wear that dress and sit on the same burgundy covered pew that I'd perched on the edge of Easter Sunday but this time it would be for my mother's funeral.

My heart was breaking into a thousand pieces. The choir sang of going home and I dreaded the walls of what was my home and the emptiness of it all. The joy-filled face of my mama noticeably gone from the choir loft. Forever gone from my world as I knew it.

Eighteen years have passed between my mother and I since then. I've been haunted by her absence and when everyone else only occasionally thinks of her, less and less as time goes by, I have found myself thinking of her, wishing for her, missing her something fierce with each passing year.

All this unexpected grief circling back around to blindside me at the strangest times. 

I've missed her at the kitchen with dishes piled high in front of me. I've missed her in the quiet of a thousand midnights while wrestling the questions that life can hand us unexpectedly. I've missed her when I've printed pictures of our daughter for the rest of the family- knowing she would have made a gallery wall out of her grandchildren. I've missed her on those nights I need to sink into the couch and watch Dirty Dancing- because of course we would.

I've missed all the growing up and getting to know the mama you don't know as a child. For me I grew up but my mother never got to in my mind and that aches in the deep places. It aches to not know my mama the way other women get to know their mamas.

Some of you are motherless daughters too. You've lost mamas to cancer. You've lost mothers to the bottle. You've lost moms in long battles and quick as a flash moments. You've lost mothers who still live in the flesh but have left you without.

Mother's Day can feel like it isn't for us. The day can feel like a cruel joke meant to remind us of her absence.

I wish there was a band-aid big enough or a cup of tea large enough to make it right. I wish that I had words, but after eighteen years this girl who loves words still can't find the right ones to make the hurt of it all go away. 

What I have come to believe is that those of us who have lost mamas are a rare breed. We are the women who know the full value of motherhood. The worth of a mama who loves well and the richness of that relationship isn't lost on us.

When I think of my motherless sisters I think of brave. I look at you and I know that not one ounce of you doubts that motherhood is a gift. I see your determination to mother well. I want to link arms tight and believe with a full heart that we can be the mamas who shout it from the highest hills that motherhood is the highest of callings. 

A pity that one day a year we'd feel the weigh of it all. I stole a mountain bike and rode the most ridiculously hard trail one Mother's Day to hush the hurt. That is okay if that is where you are at, but I've got this crazy idea that God can redeem it all.

I've got a crazy idea that we can make Mother's Day a celebration of motherhood in spite of our own losses and seeming inadequacies.

Seriously. All of it. God rejoices to redeem all of it. Every bit of the feeling left out and the wishing she were here.

Go find the pictures of her from her senior prom. Dig out the scrapbook with the newspaper clipping chronicling your parent's romance. Gather your kiddos close and teach them all you know about her.

Will there be tears? Yes. Will our voices catch in our throats at some point? Yes. Don't hold back from the grief or it will hold you back from a life lived wholeheartedly.

Mine is a life come full circle. My daughter, there is just something about her, the way she looks back over her shoulder at me and her eyes flash. That's the years being redeemed by God and I'm finding it looks a whole lot like my mama. 

Leave me a line in the comments about your mama. I'd love to get to know you and her a bit. 

{Looking for another way to celebrate your mother and this Mother's Day? Why not throw a tea party in her honor? Might I also suggest picking up a copy of Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom by Lisa-Jo Baker. Reading Lisa-Jo's journey through being a motherless daughter was like talking with a friend who just gets it. I know it will touch you in the deepest places of the ache.}

Your Story Isn't Over {Surprised by Motherhood Launch Day!}

I've been a birth doula for 5 years now and in that time I have held hands and hair through the wilds of labor, but today I'm calling myself a book doula because there is no book that I have cheered on more than this piece of beauty from Lisa-Jo Baker.

Mama friends, this book is for us. It is for all of us who share the story of having our hearts and lives wrung dry and filled full from raising littles. It is the gift you should put in every baby shower bag from here to eternity.

Here is a snapshot of my own motherhood journey and why I think Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom is a life-line of truth and hope to every woman who has ever mama-ed.           
When another car crossed the center line and slammed head on into my mother on a humid Carolina June evening I thought the story was over. I thought that my days of being a daughter had ended as abruptly as her life.

A little over three years before that night my father's heart had given up it's lifelong fight. I'd clung to my mother for the tether a child's heart needs. She had been my anchor when the storm had tossed all of us hard on the rocks. When my Dad's heart gave up my Mom's heart beat stronger and it found her on her knees in the wee small hours prayers, on beyond early morning drives to work to put food on the table, her journals full of Scripture and hope that kept us afloat when the world wanted to drown us.

There I was un-anchored and uncertain in the worst sort of way at the age of twelve. 

My untethered teen years found me wondering what it was like to be normal, to be like all the other girls butting hormones with their own mothers. I wish that someone would have warned me about how the grief would find it's way out through the cracks of a broken life in the most unexpected of places.

Fast forward a decade...It was early fall and I was piecing together handmade decorations for our tighter than tight wedding budget. I remember telling my sister-in-law over the phone, a motherless daughter herself, that I felt lost. That was one of the first times that grief snuck up on me. It blindsided me with the force of how much I missed her and the way it found me floundering and gasping for air.

Six years later and an ocean away from home in West Africa I found myself stretched body and soul and pregnant with our daughter. I was in total denial. Not here. Not now. I was the epitome of "surprised by motherhood".

It wasn't that I didn't want to have children. No, I never quite felt that way. I was convinced that I had been disqualified. By the time my first daughter was born I had been twenty years an orphan. Twenty years of being an outsider to the parent-child relationship.

Every question I ever had about my mom and mothering flooded my mind. I knew the mechanics of pregnancy and birth. I'd labored with women through the night as a birth doula holding hands, rubbing feet and nodding "Yes, you can!" to mamas exhausted and nearing the finish. It was everything after which terrified me. It was the knowing that birth is never the end and only just the beginning of the weary-wonderful ride of motherhood.

In the wee smalls of a January morning I bared down and my girl entered the world superwoman style with one hand over her head- a certain prophecy over this girl.This time I didn't pack my doula bag and get back in the car to make the drive home and collapse in my bed. This girl was my own flesh woven with DNA as thick as the Southern accents that run back a dozen generations in my family. She is a part of me and has rarely been a part from me since that day.

The surprises of motherhood began in a cement room where roosters crowed outside of our lappa curtained slat windows and nuns sang across the yard every morning, and they have continued every single day since.

Millie was born wide-eyed and got sent back from the nursery her first night for "disturbing the peace". She never slept. All the books and methods ever preached fell flat when tried out on Miss Millie. Her disregard for schedules and sleep brought me near the edge of lunacy. I've still not recovered entirely.

All the while God was breaking me and remaking me, teaching me what I had forgotten because I was so long an orphan. He places the orphans in families. We're programmed to think that means we get one as a child, but for me I've been placed in a family that is my own and I am the mother. Mine is a life come full circle.

Millie has dirty blond hair with a hint of curl at the back and brown eyes that take up half her head. At first glance she looks nothing like my mother. My mama had a mop of dark brown unbelievably tight curls and light blue eyes. But some days when Millie twirls and whirls around the room the light refracts and I catch a glimpse of my mama. I see her there and I know that eternity really is forever and that my mama's life and her story didn't end on the side of a road on a summer evening.

Whatever it is you think disqualifies you from motherhood- be it a failure, a loss, a shame, a grief so big it has seeped into every corner of life- let me say with your beautiful face cupped in my hands and with eyes locked, "Your story isn't over."

I'm so blessed to share bits of my story with you and my friend Lisa-Jo has written a book that is her story and battle cry of truth over the harder than hard moments of motherhood. I love this book like I love chocolate. <------{Click to tweet} Seriously ya'll, that means a whole lot coming from me. Says the girl that just polished off some brownies while writing this.

She wrote it for herself. She wrote it for us.

She wrote it to be the one to say our stories make us into mothers and even if motherhood doesn't initially fit like our favorite pair of jeans (even worse makes our favorite jeans obsolete) we can find our way to better, fuller, realer versions of ourselves.

Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected About Being a Mom is a gem and that is why I want to invite you all to cheer Lisa-Jo on today by grabbing a copy of her book as it launches. She has labored long over this new baby of a book and today we all get to join with her in the joy of it all.

If you want a book that will wrap you in a superhero cape of courage to keep going in this motherhood journey then this is the one. It is filled with the Word and her own story from a woman who has such a gift with words and weaves stories like a cherished blanket. If you're like me your leisurely days of reading are gone, but I promise this book is not to be missed.

You can download a few chapters by going here, but I promise you'll want to read the whole thing. 

Watch the trailer with a box of tissues. Seriously, get the tissues.