We, the Nurturers of the Now and the Future

2025-05-11

I’m a real mother. You can hear the joke in that if you want to. Safe and legal abortion, at one
time in American, meant that I did not become a mother before I had to. Medical care for
miscarriages meant that I did not die from sepsis when pregnancies were not viable. Birthing
classes and birthing units and trained medical staff meant that I am fortunate to be mother to
two grown human beings. My big personality and robust ego—tempered by strong self-
awareness—meant that I never mothered alone. My children’s lives were full with other loving
adults of all varieties—a real family—who nurtured them into awareness of themselves. For all
this thriving life, I am truly grateful, today of all days.

I wonder, were you confused, just a few moment ago when Jean read a reflection about Labor
Day, a national holiday in September. Yes, Labor Day. A national holiday for considering fair
treatment of workers, that treatment needing to be guaranteed by governments since
corporations and businesses can’t be trusted to give us a fair wage and decent benefits on their
own. But it’s not September. It’s another holiday of gigantic proportions. I know, you know, today
is proclaimed Mothers Day. And what is this holiday, who proclaimed it so? Was it the Hallmark
Card Company, uniting with florists and drug stores and restaurants who cater to the tastes of
families, all in a massive effort of blatant commerce? Do cards and flowers come from
sweatshops, per chance? Has that effort also marketed for us Fathers Day, coming up in June,
so that the second parent wouldn’t feel left out of the equation, and the sellers of neckwear and
power tools and gardening gadgets everywhere would get a piece of the parental market as
well?

I know, you know, it’s Mothers Day. Did you also know, however, that Mother’s Day has roots in
the social activism of the late-19 th and early-20 th -century Unitarians? Julia Ward Howe, Unitarian
and writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” wanted a day set aside for mothers to protest
war, specifically the American Civil War and its aftermath. In 1870, she even published “The
Mother’s Day Proclamation,” hoping to spark a world-wide movement for peace led by mothers
who knew first-hand the loss of children’s lives to the devastations of war. And then there is the
story of Anna Jarvis, herself a woman who elected not to have children and who lived to lament
the commercialization of Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis started in 1908 our normalized second-
Sunday-in-May celebration, with a service at her Episcopal church commemorating her mother,
Ann Jarvis. Ann Jarvis was a mother of eleven children, though only four survived infancy.
Mother Ann and daughter Anna well understood the hardships of motherhood. Ann had been
the organizer of work groups of other mothers, working to aid struggling and impoverished
mothers. All these mothers experienced the labor of motherhood, every day a labor day, in the
birthing and the tending and the mourning of children and their lives. These mothers and many
other mothers labored to expose the ways that the world, as it is, is organized to harm rather
than heal our children, children of all ages.

With these efforts of peace and mutual aid, Julia, Ann, Anna, all these women were planting
seeds, creating the world they want to live in, calling together and honoring all sorts of people as a way to make the world better than it is. Did their efforts stop war or end poverty? No. Does it
make an ultimate difference? Yes. Their examples of loving and caring and organizing
demonstrate our interdependence, the call to resist devastation and to cultivate good whenever
and wherever good is possible. We are all frightened at times, especially in such times as these.
We are all longing for reassurance that the world is not only a terrible place. We are all needful
of the grace of companionship. The actions of the Julias and the Anns and the Annas of the
world, knowing this history of action, provide just such a small reminder of needed reassurance
and companionship.

But just as with the shape of our world, Mothering, and Fathering for that matter, is full of
complications. The binariness of days past, of the labels to define who we are, such language
excludes those who would not name themselves as female or male, as mother or father. And
then there are the complications of bringing children into the world, into established
relationships. The so-called nuclear family,” even a “multi-generational family,” does not begin to
describe “A family is a family is a family.” No children are imaginary children, all children are real
and live and grow with a variety of mothers and fathers and parents and grandparents and
strangers-who-become-family and chosen family and called-to-be-family out of need and love. If
there are no cards and flowers and gardening tools for all these people, are they any less
relevant to children and their thriving? “Today, let us honor those who fill in for the missing
mothers—fathers, grandparents, foster parents, aunts and uncles and more.” They, too, are
cause for celebration.

But may we acknowledge today as well, as always, that “Joy and Woe are Woven Fine” in all
things, including in the lives of those who wish for children in their lives and all of us who have
been children once upon a time.

“Today, let us honor the grief of those who have lost children,
through miscarriage, stillbirth, death, those who long for children, and those for whatever reason
cannot be in touch with their children this day. Today, let us honor the grief of those who mourn
for their parents, whether separated by death, dementia, or disconnection. Today, let us honor
those who survived damaging and traumatic”

parenting. Some of us lost our children in painful
ways, simply could not mother and father in good ways. Some of us could not properly
nurture—through our own failings or through mental illness or addiction or through the words
spoken that can never be taken back, which alienate and cause irreparable harm. Some of us
lost our children from neglect, for failing to protect them from harm. So much sadness. “Let us
turn aside from the myths of motherhood on a pedestal and remember each parent is an
imperfect human in need of more support than adulation, in need of our support.” May we feel
mercy and compassion for all the wounding, on this day to also celebrate.

The birth of a child, whether joyful or sorrowful, is a kind of wound, breaking through with blood
and pain, creating a rupture of the fabric of what was. And children enter a broken world, full of
war and neglect, children starving in lands of plenty, lands ravaged by extraction and devastated
by war. All of this is true, even for those of us able to nurture our children, giving them the best
of ourselves and the best of what the material world has to offer. All around their growing and
our living, human-created destruction is always also present, and children know about it—the
suffering through want and through racism and oppression—even when we try to hide it from them, to protect them from it. In his book, Dear Universe: Letters of Affirmation and
Empowerment for All of Us, writer Yolo Akili Robinson, in the words of a reviewer, “does not
separate us from the major issues and problems of our society. He implicates us by reminding
us how powerful we are in a time when our species could get into alignment with the universe or
expire.”

The pain of the world and our role to assuage it appears in one of his letters to the Universe,
where Robinson writes: “Our children did not get their wounds alone. They were created by the
actions of our family, our communities and our world. They were created by the things we
choose to believe in, the causes we chose to champion, and the despair we chose to neglect.”
Forces in the world are trying to destroy our humanity. We participate both willingly and
unwillingly. Humans have always been clannish, tribal, sectarian, grouping off. This is not new.
But it is outdated thinking and behaving. It is most certainly proving to be useless and worse,
destructive. We UUs like to think we have transcended boundaries of class and race and
gender, and in many ways we have even if we have to remind ourselves constantly to keep
transcending, keep reminding ourselves that diversity is the reality of the universe, holy and
sacred, worthy of our reverence because it is true, and so it is beautiful and marvelous. And that
beauty includes all people nurturing and all children living.

Robinson continues,

“We didn’t get the wounds from individuals and we cannot heal them
operating as individuals. This healing work is communal… It needs to be present along with the
ongoing work that the village must do to heal itself. Healing our children means we need to put
love in every possible place we can think of.”

So, let us widen our thinking about Mothers Day or
Fathers Day, about the holy labor of nurturing Children, of healing them, making today a holiday
for the labor of care that any of us can put into caring for each other.

Yes, “think of your parents and caregivers. The parent that fed you, bathed you, nurtured you
and taught the building blocks of how to be in the world.” And widen your gaze. “Now think of
your elders. Who shops for them, goes to the doctors with them, cleans for them and cares for
them when they begin to fail. Now think of those that have physical and mental challenges of
differing degrees. They come in all ages. Who assists them in the daily tasks that make day to
day life easier and sometimes possible at all.” All this work nurtures, and “our society would
collapse without it.” So, widen your gaze further to all the “labor we do to mentor, to educate, to
assist, to advocate, to entertain and enrich the community, the country and the world. Think of
all that we do for our neighbors, our friends, our community, to make life better. Without this
labor our world would be a lonelier and more desperate place.” Let us honor such labor today,
this is labor that honors the wounds of birth and of living and sanctifies our efforts to heal
ourselves and our children.

Our human survival depends upon nurturing our connections and nurturing each other. Our
humanity depends upon it—holding on to what makes us human beings even if the world
explodes tomorrow in a fiery ball we did not see coming. As political systems come unraveled,
as so much of the work of building equity and justice, of ending oppression, is challenged, as all
that destruction happens, we must continue to build our human family, to keep ourselves human. And this means nurturing in all the ways possible, honoring all nurturing, fostering all
children, even the difficult ones, especially those that seem not our own. “Spirit of Life, today, let
us honor all of those who have made this world possible for us. Those who did the hard work of
building a better world for future generations.” “Today, let us honor those who are doing the hard
work of nurturing, striving to meet not only the physical needs, but the many deep and
complicated emotional and spiritual needs of our young ones and of us all.”

Spirit of Life,

“How do we do it? How do we become a whole, a body, each listening to the other,
accepting ideas not our own, building together; wiser and more compassionate than any of us
alone; creating and calling the spirit of life, living the spirit of love.”

How do we do this? In the
age-old way, starting together, as a community, wide and imperfect, nurturing the goodness in
each of us and all of us, “touching the earth, reaching the sky,” for the sake of our children and
for ourselves, now and into the unfolding future we seek to create. For love of all the nurturers,
may it ever be so.

“The Universe Loves You!: Dear Universe: Letters of Affirmation and Empowerment for All of Us
by Yolo Akili. Review by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in The Feminist Wire May 18, 2013

https://thefeministwire.com/2013/05/the-universe-loves-you-dear-universe-letters-of-affirmation-and-empowerment-for-all-of-us-by-yolo-akili/