Begats, Motherhood, and the Theotokos

The services have been sung, the presents opened, the festive meal consumed, DD (and my wonderful son in law) and I have had our ritual Christmas Skype session (some day, in person, ma chere HB!), and it is now the day after Christmas, when I can take a breath.

Every year on this day, my thoughts turn to motherhood. I think about Christ's mother and her motherhood; my motherhood, my mother's motherhood, my grandmothers' motherhood, my aunties. I think about how the yearning for motherhood shaped me and my marriage, how carrying a living human being within my body, how nurturing her, feeding her from my own body, teaching her, encouraging her changed me. How the sore breasts, the endless diapers, the sleepless nights, the waiting waiting waiting for a good report at the oncology clinic, how all that changed me.

I think the Theotokos was a mother just like me and just like you, but she trusted the path laid before her, even to the point of watching her son die an agonizing death. We sing on Holy Friday: a sword has pierced my heart, but change my weeping into joy. I can't imagine the agony of both mother and child on that day. I looked the death of my toddler in the face, and I am forever changed by it - and my child lived.

Motherhood is made up of lots of little things, and although they are little, and each one is probably insignificant, the totality is what forms us, and is what we tend to pass on to our own children. I am not the best mother. I have made many mistakes, and learned only from some of them, much like my own mother and hers before her. In the end, though, what I have received and am trying to pass on to my own daughter, what is the underpinning and foundation of my life, is love. That's what Christmas is all about, too. Love. When all else is lost or stripped away, when all else fails and everyone lets you down, when you are alone and lonely, love remains.

When I listened to the long genealogy of Christ, read in it's entirety on the Sunday before Christmas in every Orthodox Church, and which ends with the birth of Christ, all those begats made me think of the generations that have gone before me, and now, my daughter, my only child. I have said this many times - I have a vision in my mind that I am holding my daughter's hand on my right, and my mother's hand on my left, who is holding her mother Josie's hand, who is holding her mother Angela's hand, on and on, and somehow, the Theotokos is holding the hands of all us mothers, encouraging us to persevere. So, persevere, mothers! Support each other!

This is what I'm pondering this morning.