When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, but what if you had the hope of receiving an apple but it was taken away from you. Like a child or a mother?
I am currently writing this blog post due to pregnancy insomnia. There is so much that I want to write about being a mother. The joy of becoming one, and the heartache of not being one. Yet.
There are some beautiful posts being shared on Facebook about remembering mums who have lost children or children losing their mums and my heart is weighed deeply by this because while I will be enjoying Mother’s Day with my two darling girls and the impending birth of my third child, there are others that will be choosing not to celebrate this occasion.
Everyone’s choice is different. Motherhood is worth celebrating because it’s such a privilege and it is hard work. It’s a status that many women in the world will never attain because of a range of different circumstances.
In a perfect world every woman who wanted to be a mum would be one. Our bodies would do what they needed to do in order to create a new life. But we live in an imperfect world and our bodies don’t always work how we want them too. Who’s to blame? Why can a sixteen year old girl fall pregnant unexpectedly from her first sexual experience when a 26 year old young woman who is married and looking forward to becoming a mum, have to look at IVF because her body (or her partner’s) just won’t allow it to happen? Why can a woman have an abortion for a child she doesn’t want to have yet, while another miscarries a child that she really wants?
I ask God why? Why do these injustices happen? And then I am reminded that we live in a fallen world, a world that was created perfect in the beginning, but marred by deceit. We blame God, but he is not the one to be blamed. It’s the deceiver, Satan who takes delight in our pain and enjoys watching our heart harden towards God when we don’t get what we want.
But I know that my God is a good God. A God that can restore. A God of hope.
And it is when I practice hope, that I learn to turn a lemon into lemonade. By practicing faith and having hope, it opens the door for God to restore a body that can’t fall pregnant, or a body that is fighting cancer. Many mums are facing the reality of today being their last Mother’s Day.
And then there are the mums that have lost a child. What would their child look like now? Where is their spirit residing?
I have a firm belief that Heaven is full of children. It’s full of the aborted, the miscarried and the stillborn. It’s full of the children who were taken too soon.
I don’t know if what I believe is theologically correct. Has anyone gone to Heaven and come back to tell the tale and reveal what Heaven is really like?
What I do know is that God has a heart for everyone and every soul is precious to Him. He has a sure understanding of whatever circumstance we are going through. He knows the pain of losing a child and it weighs heavily on His heart when a woman is unable to fall pregnant. Hello new bodies in Heaven!
So you may be facing Mother’s Day with a disappointed heart and a soul burdened with grief, but life is a gift and when you celebrate other’s joys, by not dwelling on your own, it opens the door for remarkable things to happen in your life.
I want to leave you with a very special testimony that I was able to witness through my blog and have chosen to share it with you today this Mother’s Day.
Last year on my blog I ran a Mother’s Day giveaway. It was a gold crane necklace that I loved the design and meaning behind and I wanted to bless a mum or mum-to-be with the gift of a necklace to restore hope in a mum’s life. You can read about Fleur Envy – A Mother’s Day giveaway.
Anyway, I had a few entries and it was hard to choose a winner. I chose my winner and organized for the delivery of the necklace to the winning entry.
There was one entry that didn’t win but really burdened my heart. It was a reader (let’s call her Rose) who had a sister who was finding it hard to stay pregnant and had suffered from miscarriages and had had another one just before my giveaway. The recent miscarriage was another major blow to her dream of becoming a mum. Rose wanted to bless her sister with the necklace to restore her hope that her dream would be a reality.
The gold crane holds so much meaning, That I wish to share, One of hope and better luck, To show my sister I care!
I decided to buy another necklace and have it sent to Rose. Rose was lovely and replied to me saying I would probably have more pressing things to spend my money on. She was right. But I couldn’t ignore my heart so I paid for another necklace to be made and sent to her.
A couple of weeks later I received an email from Rose announcing her sister was pregnant again (around 5 weeks pregnant), but she was petrified that the pregnancy wouldn’t be viable. I knew in my heart that sending that gold necklace was the right decision, hoping that it would bring comfort and restore hope to a broken and fearful heart.
The point of sending the necklace was not to bring good luck to the recipient. The point of the necklace was to restore hope and faith when reality kept knocking it down.
I was delighted to receive an email at the beginning of this year to say that the Rose’s sister had given birth to a healthy baby boy on Boxing Day last year. The necklace did its job of restoring hope in another person’s life. It filled my heart with joy to see that when faith is actioned with a symbolic step, it opens the door for a miracle to occur.
It’s hard celebrating with other mothers when you are yet to be a mother yourself or when you have suffered loss, but the lemonade happens when you use your own grief to be a blessing to others.
Don’t let the Mother’s Day hype bog you down with grief. Acknowledge the grief and then practice hope by being the mother you were meant to be.
Mother the mothers that are finding it hard to be a mother. Mother the mothers that have lost a child. Mother the soon-to-be Mothers who are waiting for their turn to be one.
Life is hard. But when you rise above your own circumstances and look to the needs of others, while it won’t take away the pain of what was lost, it will produce hope. It will open doors of remarkable favour.
Happy Mother’s Day to all my readers. For those readers whom I know are struggling with the reality of becoming a mum or suffering from a life threatening illness, know that your name is never far from my lips when I pray, and that I stand with you in hope and faith.
God Bless.
