A Mother’s Day Invitation — Let’s Talk

Dear Readers,

The month of May is many things – the craziest, busiest month of the year, with reunions, graduations, galas.  For Catholics, it is the month devoted to Mary.  In the Northeast, it’s the month of planting lettuce and gently guiding peonies into bloom.

May is the month of all nurturing that goes by the name of “Motherhood.”

It’s possible that I have come to value the qualities of mothering so highly because I resisted the actual role for so many years.  Those of you who’ve read my spiritual memoir, A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness, are familiar with the outlines.  I gave birth for the first time at the age of 40.

The spirit of mothering in all its forms continues to deepen for me, well into middle age.

We are at a fraught time in history.  Mothers, children, nurturing and tenderness of all kinds are in the crosshairs of those who would shatter well-tended relationships in the interests of coercion, cynicism and power.

We women need — as never before — to remind one another of the essential work of continuing to nurture what is most vulnerable.  It takes time, imagination, faith, and a willingness to get up and go at it again, day after day.  It is precisely this preseverance and devotion that will help to heal the deeply wounded and despairing places in our communities and in the larger world.

For all these reasons, I want to begin a conversation this month – to pool some of what we know to be true about motherhood that sets it apart from so many other ways we spend our time and our talents…what values does it offer the world today?

What would you “lift up” about motherhood for our common life?

— It might be simply an image.

— A Word.

— A Memory

I hope you will share your insights for others to read in the Comments section of Spirit Work (https://www.kathleenhirsch.com/spirit-work-newsletter/)

By way of encouragement, I have created a Mother’s Day card, a short-list of my own mothering wisdom gathered over the years.  New subscribers and commenters will receive it in time for their breakfast coffee on May 12.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!  We will all be the richer for it!!