Days of Mourning Turn to Joy

Every year, Mother’s Day always makes me sad, watching families clustered around their matriarchs, strolling across sidewalks, clogging up restaurants, bound by bonds of love and familiarity evident in glances and conversation. It reminds me of everything I don’t have, everything I lost when I chose to live a secular life. “Mother” has been, for a long time, a bad word in my mind, a word that makes me shudder and recoil, if just a little. Which is interesting, because my mother, who rarely speaks of herself, once told me she couldn’t, for years, stand the word “Father” after her father died when she was a child.

On Saturday, we went on a cupcake tour with my brother (‘e pluribus unum’ – the only non-religious one I’ve got) and his fiancé, trying to find the most moist, elegant, delicious cupcakes for their upcoming wholly trief wedding. They handed me a pink envelope – a mother’s day card. My first! It hit me that I am a mother now. This experience of wonder and fear and awe that I have been going through these past few months, MY experience is going to be my new “motherhood”.

On Sunday morning, my husband woke me up with kisses, whispering “Happy Mother’s Day.” There was no breakfast in bed, but when I noticed we were out of soy milk for my cereal, he ran across the street to Starbucks to get me some. At the end of the day, after we had settled in for the night, when I decided I NEEDED to have a burger (my first meat in months and months), he got out of bed, got dressed, and walked across town to get me a free-range grass-fed piece of dead cow. And all day long, every once in a while, I’d feel a little bop on the insides from our child.

As they say about the messiah – days of mourning will become days of joy.