Mother's Day

This Mother's Day, lots of my facebook friends changed their profile pictures to a picture of their mothers.  I really enjoyed seeing all the pictures of the moms, and seeing the family resemblances, and sometimes pictures of my friends with their moms at a very young age.

I chose not to do this. Not because I didn't love my mom.  It was because I chose to focus on what I do have, and not on what I don't.  

What I DO have are seven reasons to celebrate mothers day, because it is these seven reasons that I am a mother.  It is after all Mother's Day.  There is nothing that says it has to be all about your mother.  In my house, I am the mother.  For me, Mother's Day is a reason to celebrate why I am a mother in the first place!  This means thanking God, who opened my womb. 

If I were to focus on what I don't have, I would have to focus on losing my mother before she was sixty, knowing that she will never hold this new baby that I am carrying on this earth; it would mean focusing on a miscarriage between number five and number six; it would mean focusing on the loss of two twins in two different pregnancies, one of them this one; it would mean focusing on the fact that we could have ten children now instead of only seven; and these are the only the ones that we are positive of! 

Instead, I chose to focus on what I do have, and that is seven wonderful reasons to celebrate being a mother.  Of those reasons, six of their personalities are known to me, and I love each one of them for who God made them.  They are amazing people, each and every one of them!  I wonder at the possibilities in their lives.  One of those reasons I get to wonder about still; what color of hair he will have, or if he will look like the other two boys.  And what should we name him, this new warrior?

I am a mother because of my children.  Without them, there is no Mother's Day.  Without them, it is just another Sunday, special because of the Sabbath, but not a day to celebrate the life that God gives us when he blesses us with children.