Lady Of Silences (plus, A Giveaway!)

To all you mothers, I wish you a very happy mother’s day.

To all you women who long to be mothers, I also wish you happiness this day, a day that surely must be painful for you, and I pray that God would grant you the desires of your heart.

I believe there is something of the mother in every woman’s heart. There is a certain tenderness, a desire to comfort, nurture and sustain, that is unique to women. For me, this was not brought out until some time after the birth of my first child, but I’ve met many women for whom motherhood is not a vocation, yet who still show that unique spirit of the mother.

It is only recently, though, that I’ve begun to explore exactly what it means to be a mother. Since I began this blog and entered into this community of bloggers, I’ve come to understand that there is a profound mystery surrounding motherhood. It is a mystery that is at once beautiful and terrifying, and is accompanied by awesome responsibility…the responsibility of forming souls.

I’m so grateful to all of you bloggers out there who have shown me that there is a better way to approach my vocation. I’m equally grateful to all of you who are infertile, for showing me that the proper way to respond to suffering and seeming injustice is with grace and forbearance, not with indignation and self-pity.

I read these words by TS Eliot many times before I understood what it meant to be a mother. Sometimes I skimmed them, sometimes I struggled to make sense of them, sometimes I skipped them altogether, but I always felt at a distance from them. They never struck me the way so many poems do. But now, things have changed. I no longer feel drawn to the images of newspapers in alleys the way I did just a year ago. This is the image the makes sense to me, the image that brings me to tears and to my knees: the image of the torn and most whole Rose of Memory.

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

In many ways, I have all of you to thank for showing me what these words mean. I’ve spent a large part of my life as a mother without my own mother near to teach me and without a community of mothers around to help me. I’m so grateful to you, my online community, for showing me what motherhood looks like. I’d like to offer you a small token of my gratitude. I wish I had the means and the time to make something unique for each one of you, but since I can’t, I thought I would host a small giveaway.

Since I only have one thing to give away (except my children, and you can’t have them), jewelry it is. The winner will be able to choose either a pair of earrings:

Dizzy Miss Lizzy

or a bracelet:

Milk and Honey

I’ll happily customize the winner’s selection according to her preference. I work with copper or silver and have beads and stones of pretty much any color, so the possibilities are many.

To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is a leave a comment below answering this question: which mother figure do you find the most inspirational, and why?

I really don’t want to limit the answers to religious figures, either. Of course, if you’re a Marian type or really think Hannah was the bee’s knees, by all means let us know why. But perhaps, like me, you think that Mae Braddock in Cinderella Man is a pretty amazing woman? Perhaps you whisper prayers at night that God will give you the courage and humor to face your charmed life with the same grace with which Mae faced her empty milk jug during the Great Depression?

If so, I want to hear about it!

Since it’s later in the day than I would have liked, I’ll keep the comment box open until noon tomorrow, Pacific time. (That’s three for you East Coasters, and two for all my pals in Texas) The winner will be selected somehow (I haven’t thought that far ahead) and announced Tuesday morning.

Happy Mother’s Day, my friends! And a special thank you to the woman spent all of the twenty-seven years of my life fighting with me, fighting for me, laughing with me, and loving me.