Choosing wisely.

Today is Mothering Sunday – now more commonly known by the American term, Mothers’ Day. The fourth Sunday in Lent when, from as early as C16th, young servants were allowed home to visit their mothers and their `mother church’ where they’d been baptised. They would traditionally pick flowers along the way to give to their mums – or to lay at the alter of the church. Today it’s become a more secular celebration of mums by their children but flowers are still big on the agenda. Happy Mother’s Day!

But today I’d like to think about those women who, for myriad reasons, aren’t mothers. When today, a day to celebrate motherhood, must feel like rubbing salt into the wound. For many it’s a personal choice not to have kids but for others, it isn’t: their bodies (or their partners’ bodies) simply wouldn’t comply with that basic human instinct to recreate. This is not something that has affected me personally, but I know many women for whom the lack of children feels like a gaping void in their lives. I honestly don’t know how I would have been had I not been able to have kids – I think I would have been devastated. In fact, I can’t imagine a life without my children. I love them to the moon and back.

But life has given me other tragedies to cope with. I lost both my parents, my only brother and my best friend from childhood, all within a few years of each other and all at a relatively young age. At times it seemed as though my grief was bottomless. However, even in this darkest of places I had choices. I couldn’t bring back my family and friend but I could choose how I responded to these losses. I could rail at God/Life/the Universe because my roots had been severed and I felt alone in the world or I could choose to honour their memories and be grateful for everything they’d taught me while they’d been in my life. Eventually, I chose the latter. Although it took me a while to get there!

How many times do you hear people say, `I had no choice.’? What I’d like to suggest is that there is always a choice. We can choose how to be with what Life has given us. Even if there is a gun to our heads, we can still choose how to be, whether to die with dignity or whether to negotiate or whether to give in. We can choose to be scared and resentful or we can choose to forgive the person holding the Smith and Weston to our temple. We can choose to look for the silver lining rather than the rain cloud.

If we choose a career over children: it’s our choice. If we choose to stay with someone who’s not appropriate as the father of our children: it’s our choice. Holding on to resentment is a choice. Being angry is a choice. Embracing whatever Life throws at us is a choice. Being kind to others – and ourselves – is a choice. Being unable to have kids isn’t a choice, but how we deal with it is. Expressing our sadness rather than holding it inside and pretending is a choice.

Anyone who has read books by the Holocaust survivors Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi or Edith Eger will understand that even in the midst of the most appalling evil that was beyond most people’s imagining, there was choice: a choice of attitude. They couldn’t change the horrors around them but they could choose how they responded to them and their captors. Life is about choices.

But make your choices wisely – because every choice has a consequence and our lives are mapped out according to our choices and their results.

So, to mothers and non-mothers alike I say simply: have a happy day. Or not – it’s our choice!