Welcome to Motherhood Road. This is a highway of both beauty and heartache. You’ll find hairpin turns, rocky terrain, and treacherous hills. But be encouraged. There are straight shots of smooth pavement where you can hear the birds singing and find the sun shining brilliantly. Remain vigilant because the road beneath you is ever-changing. Motherhood Road isn’t for the novice. And oddly enough, this is how all travelers arrive.
Different avenues deposit mothers onto Motherhood Road. Mothers bring their children into the world from their own bodies. Sometimes pregnancies occur easily. Other pregnancies happen without intent.
A mother’s desire for her own knows no bounds so you will see those who go to great, often painstaking, lengths to have a child through IVF, IUI, or OI. Scores of babies are carried by one woman and are gifted into the eager, open arms of another. Babies born on one side of the globe may find their home in a family on the other side of the world.
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There are mothers who wait years to claim and hold these children. Sometimes mothers are made through tragedies, removing one mother from the story and asking another to step into the role.
No matter the conduit for motherhood, each narrative finds a place on Motherhood Road.
You are sure to meet moms whose bodies feel alien to them. They pour out their blood, sweat, and tears for the calling of motherhood. They do not recognize the vessels carrying them down Motherhood Road as they raise their children. And yet those sons and daughters fit in their arms and feel like the truest sense of home.
You will meet women who have no choice but to welcome their baby into the world in the same breath they use to say goodbye. There will be those who have years with a child, only to bury them in a cruelly abrupt end to a story that should’ve been much longer.
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Notice the mothers plodding along Motherhood Road, wearily, as they search for answers for an ill child. Doctors’ offices, specialists, and the accumulating medical bills threaten to overtake her. And yet she continues on as an advocate for the one who cannot stand for themself. She will not give up.
There are mothers marching down this road, birthing baby after baby. They are surrounded by a self-made army of diapered soldiers. Other mothers find their family complete with their one precious gift of a child.
You will meet mothers who leave their jobs to be the face their child sees when he or she steps off the bus after school. You’ll encounter moms who embrace their career because it gives them a different dimension to their role as mom.
Motherhood Road is full of teachers. Mothers teach us how to live this life. Mothers teach us love. Some wear their teacher hat for school days at home with their broods. Other moms walk into a classroom to teach someone else’s children and then come home to tend to their own. Teaching, in whatever form taken, is never finished in the life of a mother.
Motherhood Road is full of mothers rocking their babies, cocooned in a world of sweet cooing and insistent wails. It brims with those who tuck their children in at night, whispering fairy tales, and singing lullabies to little ears. It teems with women who sit on the edge of an adolescent’s bed, listening to the dreams of their once-babies who now teeter on the edge of the adult world.
And Motherhood Road is packed with mothers who pass by an empty bedroom with the knowledge that the old inhabitant is now in a house across town, reading Goodnight Moon to the next generation.
You will find mothers who wish they had said “yes” a little more. Notice the ones who feel they should have said “no.” Everyone on Motherhood Road sinks a little under the weight of things she wished she’d done differently. Conversely, she is bolstered by beautiful memories and the wonderous grace children possess for a mother’s missteps along the way.
Motherhood Road is a beautiful patchwork of women journeying alongside one another. Each individual story is rich in diversity. The love for and devotion to a child is the common, and yet dazzling thread binding us all together.
