Motherhood

Today is no different than any other day of the year...and yet it is.

I've been off birth control for over five years now. My journey has had many ups and downs, but thankfully, the ups have been most frequent in the past couple of years.

I look back sometimes on those first few years, in the moments where I thought getting pregnant would be "easy", and I smile at that naive version of myself. Of course the possibility of it being hard was in my mind, but not in the forefront. I figured I would have a baby in my arms within a year or two of trying.

But even though I'm past the days of obsessing over getting pregnant and trying to figure out when I'm ovulating, Mother's Day is still a hard day. And this year, I don't even feel like it's so much a hard day for me...it's a hard day for some people I love very much (and for some people I don't even know).

Someone very dear to me experienced an incredibly difficult loss last year. She carried a baby for nine months that she was only able to hold for a few minutes while she was alive.

A sweet friend's sister is never going to be able to carry her own children, because the cancer took that ability away from her.

A woman I only "know" from the blogging world and on Instagram lost her son in such a tragic way a little over a week ago.

Mother's Day can be incredibly painful.

So today, I not only honor the mothers in my life who have physical children here on this earth, who have raised amazing men and women, who struggle to keep their homes clean in the midst of dropping kids off at soccer practice, who lose hours upon hours of sleep every week getting up to feed their sweet babies, who get on their knees every night and every morning and pray that God brings their son or daughter back to Himself, who love their kids so much they would do anything for them, who cry over photo albums and remember when their babies were little...I honor all mothers. Even the ones who don't have "children" of their own.

A friend shared this quote with me this week from a Bible study she is doing and I loved it so much, I wanted to share it here as well:

You do not have to have physical children to do some effective parenting. Recall how often the apostle Paul referred to Timothy as his "son," though their only blood relationship was in Christ.

I take great comfort in this, and I hope you do as well. God has brought many "children" into my life over the years that I have been able to "parent" and love in such a way as if they were my own. And my friends and family have some incredible kids that I've been able to love on and learn a lot from. I also have a beautiful goddaughter that I love with all of my heart. I may not be a momma in the traditional sense, but I promise you that my quiver is full of a lot of arrows.

May you reading this, wherever you find yourself today, remember how much you are loved by an incredible Father. May you remember that He sees you, that He collects your tears, and that He has an amazing plan for your life. It may not always look the way you want it to, but your life is beautiful. It may be messy and full of heartache at times, but it's not always going to be that way. This is a season and someday a new one will arrive...and it will bring it's fair share of good and bad...but it will still be beautiful.

And someday, you will look back on today, and whether it was a happy or sad day, you will smile, knowing that God loved you and was right there with you, even if it didn't feel like He was.

Happy Mother's Day, to all the amazing women I know, who are currently mothers, soon-to-be, or still waiting for a miracle. You are incredible and I am so very blessed to have you in my life.