No Longer Quivering
by Suzanne Titkemeyer
Yesterday this crossed my Facebook feed from a mainstream church I used to attend post-Quiverfull. This is their idea of a good Mother’s Day activity.
This has the virtue of being something I would have never imagined as a Mother’s Day thing in the sea of free-floating gagging it is so silly and sweet Mother’s Day in church celebrations. Though I know the pastor that designated this activity is doing it because his wive is a female jock that loves to play sports.
I know one thing. I will not be attending….
After pulling myself off the floor after a good laugh I did a little Googling I discovered that there are not many instances of this sort of Mother’s Day celebration in most churches. There are a ton of websites suggesting how your church should handle the issue of Mother’s Day – most of them off-putting to anyone that has struggled with having been raised by an indifferent or just sheer awful mother, much less those mothers whose families struggled with things as diverse as infertility, children that are far from perfect or people experiencing the horrors of children or parents with addiction issues. Nothing touching on the difficulties of single motherhood, or divorce, or anything outside of the perfect smiling content momma facade.
Which is unfortunate, because the church is missing an opportunity to be real, to help mothers and families and settling for cheap, fake, manufactured Hallmark sentiment.
The only suggestion on the lists of possible church activities for Mother’s Day that I liked was the idea of bringing a couple of massage therapists and their massage tables or chairs into the church and providing an on site massage for mothers. I’m down with that.
Our old Quiverfull church used to handle the holiday in the falsest and most stomach turning way possible. You could count on the children ushers handing each mother walking in the door with a cheap carnation tagged with a prayer or a Bible verse written on paper and wrapped about the stem. The sermon would be three pre-selected women from the congregation getting up to wax poetic and completely fake about the wonderfulness of their own mothers and their oh so fulfilling journey of motherhood, urging everyone to get busy popping out the babies.
For me then, struggling hard with a fraught with tension relationship with my own mother, with one of my children and knowing the real hard reality of the lives of the speakers being very different from their words make me hate the holiday in church.
I finally had to tell my husband that it was just too hard to go to church on Mother’s Day and listen to cheesy hypocrites and that from now on I would be celebrating Mother’s Day at the beach, either Assateague Island or Virginia Beach. We started a family tradition of surfing and fifty dollar hot dogs at he beach. We still laugh over the fifty dollar hot dogs, because a family meal for all five of us consisting of loaded foot longs, chips, soda and sundaes eaten while wearing damp swimsuits at the picnic table outside cost about what a visit to a steak house might have. I still treasure those days.
But our pastor at Possum Creek caught on after a few years and confronted me over why we never attended on Mother’s Day. I had to tell him it was because it was painful as someone struggling with infertility and a painful childhood to sit there and listen to the disingenuous words and overtly sentimental actions. The pastor was shocked I felt that way and I pointed out that there were others at our church that hated that holiday as much as I did for much the same reasons.
The next year the holiday was handled in a low-key tasteful manner. But it didn’t last, the year after it was back to the Hallmark dishonest holiday.
So my questions are:
- How did your old faith community handle Mother’s day?
- Was it weird or touching?
I don’t know about you but the greatest gift I’ve received ever on the holiday is the gift of time off, a day without having responsibilities to do as you please.
My Mother’s Day this year sadly does not feature a beach trip. My entire family is coming over to help do the last few things before I move out so the house can be rented. I’ll be cooking up a hot dog feast and an ice cream Sundae bar reminiscent of all those fifty dollar hot dog days at the beach. How are you spending the holiday?
Read more by Suzanne Titkemeyer
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Suzanne Titkemeyer is the admin at No Longer Quivering. She’s been out of the Quiverfull Evangelical world for nine years now and lives in the beautiful Piedmont section of Virginia for now with her retired husband and assorted creatures. She blogs at Every Breaking Wave and True Love Doesn’t Rape
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