Roses and more roses -- red and white. This is my earliest memory of Mother's Day. We did not go to the flower shop to get our roses as children. We went outside to the nearest rose bush growing in someone's yard or along the train tracks that ran through our community. Our mothers, aunts, other-mothers, grandmothers, and the neighborhood ladies taught us what to look for in the perfect rose -- red if your mother was living, white if she had passed over to the other side. It could not be in full bloom, but it had to look just about ready to do so -- not too closed, mind you. We sniffed the air surrounding the roses and noted the different fragrances, but we did not know that they represented different varieties of roses; it was only as we grew older that we realized the subtle differences in shapes, thorns (or lack thereof), stems, and forms of the bushes that the roses grew on. Our real task, as we saw it, was to get the best red roses to honor our mothers, and the best white roses to honor the memory of our grandmothers if they were no longer living.
My home church, Asbury Temple United Methodist Church (that little church by the side of the road where everybody is somebody and Christ is the Lord), was a small Black mission church. We had the occasional White visitor and sometimes the occasional White seminarian from Duke Divinity School who would do his field education with us, but mostly we were a typical, small, transclass church where the adults were lawyers, doctors, day laborers, jobless people, professors from North Carolina Central University (my parents), NCCU students, dentists, tobacco factory workers, schoolteachers, women on welfare, etc. -- the list went on depending on how effective the church's evangelism was. (It varied greatly over the years, but that is the stuff of another blog.)
Mother's Day was a high holy day for us when I was growing up. We arrived at church proudly wearing our roses, and the entire service was designed to honor the mothers in the congregation. Although many of the older women in the congregation, not all of whom were married or had children, had white roses pinned to their dresses or suit jackets, the service was a celebration of the living, and there was very little emphasis on the memory of those who had passed on. I can't say that this stuck me as insensitive as a child. It was only as I entered my teen years and some of my friends who were the youngest of very large families lost their mothers that Mother's Day as a celebration of the living became uncomfortable. Some of those friends began to avoid church on Mother's Day because there was not space to celebrate the memories of their mothers, so rather than shift their young mourning to a hopelessly morose pretense of joy, they stayed away. Some were able to make that shift, and their now-white roses were a sign of having experienced something that most of us could not fathom -- the loss of our mothers from the world of the living.
Today, Mother's Day in many African American churches is still a high holy day, but the rituals have often changed a bit. One will still find Black churches filled with roses, corsages, carnations, and plants -- we give them, we wear them, we adorn our sanctuaries with them. In some churches, food has replaced the roses (but do not bring in store-bought food!): we make breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner. Restaurants do a brisk business for lunch and dinner as mothers get a day off from cooking -- perhaps not quite a great relief for those who love to cook or who find that restaurant food can't compare to the food that comes from seasoned pots in familiar kitchens. We honor the oldest mothers of the church, the youngest, the mother with the most children, and other-mothers and sometimes aunts who have raised or are raising the child or children of someone else who is not able to do so. We light candles and say prayers for the dead.
In many ways, any time we stop to say "thank you" to those who have helped and guided us along the way is a good thing in the life of the church. We don't do it often enough. Churches are better known for being zones of contentiousness than welcoming spaces of thanksgiving. As much as I love being in the company of good women and men, the pervading sexism found in many Black churches (and indeed in churches of all racial ethnic groups) makes me shift uncomfortably in the pew, even more so on the day when Black churches lift motherhood to near-divine status. Is this overcompensating for the ways in which many churches refuse to acknowledge the gifts of leadership and ministry planted in some of the women in their congregations? Perhaps so, perhaps not. But it is worth asking why, if this is the case, Father's Day continues to be a lesser celebration in most churches despite the attempts of many to correct this imbalance?
And there are more questions: How do we hold the living and the dead in equal esteem on Mother's Day so that we invite all to the welcome table? How do we reclaim mothering as more than biological? How should we question the trend toward celebrating the nuclear family, which stands in contrast to our history of extended-family kinship bonds that sustained us along a very stony road in our nation? How do we show honor and respect for Black women in a society that often casts us as mammies, Aunt Jemimas, Sapphires, Jezebels, Matriarchs, and Welfare Queens and our girl children as pickaninnies? I believe in celebrating our is-ness, and if Black churches can do that year-round in the fullness of who Black females are and hope to become, then we will do our communities a tremendous service. However, if the rest of the year is a dismal swamp of sexism, sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and misogyny, then one day will not be able to wipe away these gross transgressions against humanity.
Most of all, what I seek on Mother's Day is not hymns to the virtuous woman, narrow views of mothering, or salutes to the nobility of mothers. What I seek, as I do every time I go to church, is the truth found in the Gospel, and discovering how to live that truth. If we can achieve that through receiving a rich service and message about what we can learn from mothering -- the good, the bad, the deadly, the life-giving -- and how we can use this to live more faithful lives, all to the good. When and where we fail to do so, however, there is still much more work to do to.
Serene Jones: Worst Expectations: Motherhood Lost
In the midst of your Mother's Day celebrations, take some time to remember your cousin in Houston whose fertility treatments are failing, your next-door neighbor who had a stillbirth three years ago, or your grandmother who lost a child but could never bring herself to tell anyone.
Brad Hirschfield: A Truly Pro-Family Mother's Day Greeting
A truly pro-family approach, as opposed to those who use that term and simply want all families to look like theirs, would embrace the opportunity to honor and celebrate all forms of motherhood that sustain loving relationships in which kids are raised.
Cathleen Falsani: Mommyhood in Six Words or Less
Imagine writing your memoir -- a story that encapsulates all of who you are and what you've experienced, wrestled with, and loved -- in six words.
Happy Mother's Day republican t partiers!
There cant be a child on this earth without a mother. I lived inside her for ten months and she is the first person who introduced this world to me. My mother did everything she could to make me smile, now its my turn to keep her smiling happily.
No matter how rich we become its impossible to pay back to our mom for her sophisticated assistance on our growth as an infant in her womb. She is the one and only god I have ever known!
Thank you mom for being my mom! I'm indeed a blessed child because of you.
As a result, he crawled inside of a pill bottle and never came out.
In the time after his death, my mom and I reconnected and we have a relationship that never would've existed had my father still be alive. We "cleaned the wounds" out of our relationship and she is definitely not the same woman today that put up with SO. . .MUCH. . . CRAP while my father was alive.
As a result, she serves as the wonderful example which to aspire while my father served as the horrible warning which to avoid. Hell of thing for a man to come to grips with.
So, since everyone on Earth has two chances to have a wonderful family (the first one is one in which you have no choice -- the second one is the one in which you have a lot of the power), I have made the choice where my wife will never have to go through what my mom went through and my son will never have witness what I saw.
Thanks mom. . .you made me who I am today.
J. O'Barr
"The Crow"
And again, I'm terribly sorry--no child should grow up with a parent who was alcoholic, though it is not always fair to blame that parent either. The legacy continues, through your anger, so I hope one day you can find peace with how you came to be.
children for the rest of their lives, and who act to make that expectation reality,
do not deserve gratitude or anything else except avoidance. I married into a family
whose mother owns her children. It is the most alien thing I have ever encountered,
yet to them it is normal. Playing the mother card in such a way is so very deceitful.
http://thefiresidepost.com/2010/05/09/do-mothers-day-cards-really-describe-your-mother/
By the by, NYT Kristof's "Celebrate: Save a Moter" is worth reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/opinion/09kristof.html?hp
Best,
--TC
God bless every mother for doing an incredibly important job!
Oh and waaaa this isn't some anti feminist comment, I'm a single mother.
What Jesus actually taught and modeled with his life-is not what is being preached in many US churches, for JC's last words to the community was "Put down the sword!"
THAT message is being expressed on You Tube by The Center for Christian Nonviolence, which understands that "compassionate nonviolence toward all people is the only way to transcendental meaning and an authentic human life."
See it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzXgKcs6-lQ
You all deserve the BEST!
First of all, this is a very unhealthy model for women. This was mine - and I assumed that I was destined for misery because I was a woman and a christian. And this is what I got, until I slowly moved past it. It does not embrace the human-ness of women, but only their roles as maid and mother. Also, many people had mothers who were not nurturing at all, but were abusive. How do these sermons make them feel? Or women who have lost children and are not mothers anymore.
Mother's day sermons are a way to keep women in their place. It is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It appears to be honoring women, but really it is only honoring women who "know their place".