As the calendar barrels towards mother’s day, my mind jumps all over the place to locate feelings to land on this day. I enter this Mother’s day sobered, humbled, and awed. The day can be filled with nice cards and beautiful flowers and can also bare stories of deep heartache, loss, longing, and betrayal. I struggle to scream out HAPPY!!….Mother’s Day this year as the complexity of that choice of adjectives strikes me as more complicated. I find myself contemplating my entry to motherhood, my motherless new life, and my witnessing mothering of a birthmom.

Nine or 10 years ago, I was walking out of church on Mother’s day and greeters were handing out flowers to all the moms. My heart dropped and the barrenness of my belly was screaming loud as I tried to get out the door. Our longing was already written all over our faces every Sunday as we navigated through worship and small talk with the new news that we wouldn’t be able to have children on our own. Everywhere I looked were swollen bellies or tiny hands hanging out of slings. It was hard to feel so alien at the very place designed to build community. And on this day, to walk around flowerless felt like a scarlet letter of its on; I did not want this infertility mark.

Almost exactly a year ago this time on a Thursday afternoon, I was hustling around the house getting dinner ready after work when I received a call from our adoption agency that a birth mom with a 10 month old son had seen our book and wanted to meet. My head was literally spinning. A boy, 10 months, us, why us, now, why now, how, can this be? Over the next 5 weeks we would go through some of the most emotionally stretching days of my life. Accepting and hoping for this little baby boy also meant accepting a death for someone else. A death of dreams, hopes, expectations, and efforts of his valiant birth mom all the while being an answer to our five year long prayers and dreams of another child, a sibling. It’s unspeakably complicated to remember all the meetings and to know what I saw on her face and then felt in my heart. How could two mothers coexist in this way? How we survived the literal transfer of a beautiful 16lb blue-eyed boy from the hands of one woman of dense courage and grit to another woman terrified to the bone but bull strong as well is miraculous in itself. I remember her uttering through her tears as she stretched her arms out to hand Mateo to me, “I chose this family for you Mateo and I love you.” Such tangible death and life witnessed.

I stared as the pea size tears collected on the ground below me. A few months after Mateo's placement with us, I entered my parents condo and I saw my mother resting in the chair facing the windows. The dosage of pain meds was increasing and we were getting less and less “time” with her. For a woman of such determination, wisdom and tender kindness to be stationary and speechless felt so cruel. And now I wish the cruelty had stopped there but it seemed relentless to steal and change her in the months that followed through the ravenous cancer. I missed her so much. I found myself shortly after entering sitting on the floor beside her and just leaning my 37 year old body against her legs on the chair. My head was resting on her knees and i longed to talk to her. After a few minutes I felt her hand on my head and the gentle loving way she ran her fingers through my hair spoke volumes, I could feel her humungous love for me through the kindness of her hands. Only six days later she was laying in a hospice bed loudly weeping as I said goodbye for the day, and I think was the last time I received care from her before the cancer took her away.

And now I try to receive a day where an infertile woman celebrates the two miraculous beautiful children gifted to her while still carrying close the pain of longing and loss around bearing children with her community and friends. And I carry the unthinkable ache of a birth mom who spent last Mother’s Day with her new baby boy and spends this day likely cherishing memories with deep love for her son without having him to hold and play. And I sit with the grief that while spending decades of mother’s day rattling off long cards of gratitude and getting pedicures, this year the absence of my mother is so pronounced all that can be held are memories of her words and face. I’m surprised really all that a day can hold, and humbled to imagine if I have all this to weed through I am likely not alone.

So instead of shouting HAPPY, I’ll say instead - dear friends, I hope you feel covered and comfort as you set aside a day to reflect on those that have mothered you and around you and how you have participated in mothering as well. May there be space to honor both the difficult memories as well the beautiful ones.