It’s MOTHER’S Day!

Oh Mother’s Day. This is a day that comes with so many mixed emotions for me and other women out there too. This is the first year that the world recognizes me as a Mom. The truth for my heart is that I have been a mother for years. Long before I ever had a title with Mom in it, I felt like a Mom.

This is a title that I never thought would be so hard to come by. I always imagined as a little girl that I would grow up, get married and have children. Sounded pretty easy to me, but that was not the path my life took. I didn’t know if I would ever become a REAL Mom.

I had always been that girl who loved babies and children. I had a love for helping children learn and grow. I began volunteering in the church nursery, teaching in children’s church, and leading Sunday school classes as a young teenager. The thought of becoming a mother someday seemed like a given!

I then took that love for helping children grow and learn into my career. I studied to become a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I knew my focus would be on children and family mental health. As I began working with children and their families my career became focused on helping children heal from trauma. How I got to that point will be a different post! I can’t wait to share that journey with you. I took that a step further and focused in on 0-5 mental health. Children of all ages I love but helping children ages 0-5 grow is my passion. The more I worked with children suffering from trauma and other mental health concerns the more I learned that a mother comes in all different forms. I worked with Mothers who had the title of foster Mom or kinship caregiver or Grandmother or Aunt or…the list can go on. As a therapist I also saw that my role and relationship with that child had an influence on who they were becoming as a human being.

I can start going on and on about how a person can be influential on a child’s life and therefore motherly like. The truth is I have read those types of posts and they are inspiring and have their place, but they have also made me mad and sad. Before I gave birth to my daughter I was not acknowledged as a real mother. Even though I had been a therapist for years, I had the title Step-Mom, and I had miscarried a child. All those things still didn’t give me the title of a REAL Mom. To be honest it infuriated me that I was not acknowledged for the roles that I felt were mother like and above all that I continually asked, “why can’t I just be a real mom?” I spent so many days crying about this. I would see parents who didn’t even want to be parents and yet here I was wanting just one child and it was looking like it wasn’t going to happen for me.

On this day, Mother’s Day, I’m not going to tell you how you should or shouldn’t feel. What I will say is don’t get stuck in mad or sad thinking today! Focus on what’s positive and continue to pray for the desires of your heart. If the time has passed for you to become a biological mother then pray for God to fulfill this desire in some way. I have heard many women say that after the grieving process of not becoming a biological mother they found fulfillment in other ways. For some it has meant becoming a foster parent, adoptive parent, or helping children grow and learn in some other way. And if you need to cry, well then CRY. That’s okay and normal. You may even say it’s so easy for me to write this now that I am a REAL Mom. That may be true but my journey to motherhood in this sense has been extremely hard and until my baby girl was born I wasn’t sure it was a reality. I believe God plants desires in our heart and will fulfill them. The fulfillment may not look like what we planned originally but I trust that he will help a heart find peace. He has helped my heart and my journey to motherhood was nothing like I had originally planned.

I recently saw this quote and LOVE it! “As Aunts, sisters, friends, teachers, mothers – as women, we are called to connect; we are called to love. And if “mother” equals love, then by the transitive property, our call to love means we are ALL mothers.” Dr. Christina Hibbert.

Happy Mother’s Day to all women who have a special influence over the life of a child!

-Tracy @mommytracerq