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APA/API Month of Celebrations
- Sharing of Stories:
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May 11, 2003By Rev. Elder Debbie Martin It is so incredibly wonderful to be with you here tonight. It's certainly a privilege for me, and I thank you for the invitation to come and share with you on this special day of Mother's Day. I know that Rev. Nixon is home recuperating from her surgery and I wish her well. I'm sorry she couldn't be here tonight. Our thoughts and prayers are with her. I would just like to speak to you tonight, not as your "regional elder," but maybe as a "mother elder" (or an "elder mother" or however you want to put that). When Penny asked me to speak on Mother's Day, she said "Just come and speak to us about your passion about being a mom." And I thought 'Oh, that's great. That should be really easy.' And then I started to think and pray about all that I wanted to share with you, and I realized that talking about motherhood is a little tricky. It's a little tricky because for some of us, our relationships with our moms are probably the most wonderful and precious and endearing and uplifting and accepting experiences in relationships of our lives. And for others of us, we hold possibly some of our deepest heartaches and deepest wounds. And tonight I want to speak and hold those two truths, and share with you some of my experiences of my mother, some of my experiences of being a mother, and possibly even some experiences of my partner as a mother, and I do this in a spirit of knowing that not all of us here are mothers in a biological sense, but we all have an understanding of what motherhood is. I ask you to pray with me: Loving God, we stand before you and offer you our love and our praise. Thank you for your presence with us. Thank you for blessing us with the experiences of mothers. Thank you, God, for being Mother God, for showing us true unconditional love, for accepting us for who we are. We offer you praise now and ask that you would just pour out your Mother's love on each one here. In your many Names we pray. Amen. I would just like to take a minute and recognize some moms here tonight, and if you relate to any of these, please feel free to, you know, wave; that's fine. For moms, biological moms with children—where are you? Raise your hands, let's honor them right now. We've got a few here. Stepmoms— people that are stepmoms to their partners' children. Well, me....Any mothers to be? I see guys looking around...You don't have to, really; it's okay. But we aren't going to leave you out because we do understand that there are surrogate mothers, we even are mothers to our four-legged children sometimes, and if you identify that way, raise your hand. And I doubt that any of us have not at least been called a "mother" in one way or another...So we honor us all tonight. You know, I tried to think about how I would share motherhood with you, because how do you summarize twenty years, which ages me a little, but my daughter will turn twenty on June second. How do you summarize twenty years in twenty minutes? That's been a real challenge for me. I've thought of some funny stories to share with you and some sad stories, and all the stories in between, and lessons that I've learned, and I realized we'd be here 'til probably tomorrow, so I had to kind of shorten it up a little bit. And what I really came to believe is that I really wanted to share with you something more than that. I wanted to share with you kind of an understanding of what the nature of motherhood is to me, because I think, and I believe with all of my heart that the nature of motherhood is what helps us understand the nature of God, and our relationship with God. And the two, in my opinion, cannot be separated because I believe that motherhood, being a mother, experiencing "mother", has been, for me, an experience of nurturing and acceptance and forgiveness and honesty and tenderness, a little discipline here and there. And all of those things: compassion and unconditional love, I believe is what is revealed to us in the true likeness of God. The heart and soul of Mother Creator, Mother Earth, Mother God is really who we are. And it's who we are since the very beginning of time. I read an article recently from CNN.com's Health section and it had some very interesting information about cells that we hold within our bodies. It says that they've made a discovery of foreign cells that mothers and children carry from each other. These cells are not the ones that slipped from fetus to mom or vice versa during pregnancy but they are descendents of stem cells that transplanted themselves, took root and became active decades later. The article said "so you think your mother is always looking over your shoulder? Well she may be in your shoulder...." I see a few eyes raised and a few nervous moves here.... There is a lot of information about Mother's Day, but I found one article that was very interesting, just a little history about Mother's Day. It said, "The earliest Mother's Day celebrations can be traced back to the Spring celebrations of ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the mother of the gods. During the 1600's, England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday," on the fourth Sunday of Lent, the forty day period leading up to Easter. Mothering Sunday honored the mothers of England. During this time many of England's poor worked as servants for the wealthy. As most jobs were located far from their homes, the servants would live at the houses of their employers. On Mothering Sunday, the servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake called the mothering cake was often brought along to provide a festive touch. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, the celebration changed to honor the mother church, the spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from harm. Over time the church festival blended with the Mothering Sunday celebration. People began honoring their mothers as well as the church. In the United States, Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as a day dedicated to peace. Ms. Howe would hold organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston, Massachusetts every year. In 1907, Anna Jarvis, from Philadelphia, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day. Ms. Jarvis persuaded her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia, to celebrate Mother's Day on the second anniversary of her mother's death, the second Sunday of May. By the next year, Mother's Day was also celebrated in Philadelphia. Ms. Jarvis and her supporters began to write to ministers, businessmen, and politicians in their quest to establish a national Mother's Day. It was successful, as by 1911 Mother's Day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow Wilson, in 1914, made the official announcement, proclaiming Mother's Day as a national holiday that was to be held each year on the second Sunday of May. While many countries of the world celebrate their own Mother's Day at different times throughout the year, there are some countries such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia, and Belgium, which also celebrate Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May." I think that we celebrate Mother's Day not because it's a holiday, but because moms are pretty special. Moms have a lot of power. They know all, see all, hear all, do all and often can create something out of nothing. Moms know how to touch us, heal us, move us, motivate us, love us and even sometimes drive us crazy more than any other human being on earth. We celebrate Mother's Day because, well, let's face it, we can't live with 'em and we can't live without 'em. I wish we could capture that kind of honesty in Mother's Day cards. I wish instead of the usual "Mom, you are perfect," or "Mom, I will never forget," or "Mom, you were always there for me," or "You're my best friend," or "My childhood memories are so wonderful," I'd prefer they had cards that would say something like "Thanks for putting up with me," "I'm not sure I could have done it without you there twisting my arm," or "Your words will ring in my ears forever...literally," "How could I ever forget all you did for me? You remind me constantly." Don't get me wrong, I love my mother dearly and I'm grateful for all that she has done for me. She's been there for me, she's given me support over the years, and as an out lesbian woman and a mother, it's wonderful to have a mom who accepts me, and I honor her this day for that very reason. But our path hasn't always been easy and I know that for many of us in the Gay/ Lesbian/ Bisexual/ Transgendered community, the mother relationship is not an easy one when we come out. There's a period of denial or acceptance or whatever it is that happens that makes you question your relationship, and it shakes the foundation of who we are. But I thank God that after those many months of separation and tears and expressed heartache and disappointment that over the years my mom and I have been able to talk and to share and to be honest with one another and to, over the years, continue to build a mother/daughter relationship and to share a mother/ daughter/ grandmother/ granddaughter relationship, and it's been an incredible journey. I doubt that it was much of a surprise when I came out to my mom. All you have to do is look at my childhood pictures and see the cute tomboy that I was. All of my pictures are either with me with a little cowboy hat on and guns strapped to my side and the chaps, or a baseball glove glued to my hand. You know, all of those typical...I shouldn't generalize, but, you know, I was a little tomboy butch little girl, and it wasn't much of a surprise, I don't think, to her when I came out. But to say the words, to speak my truth, I couldn't do it until I was twenty-six years old. It took me years to build up the courage to do that. And I'm not sure why. I didn't want to disappoint her. I didn't want to see that look of possible rejection. And it was so hard to speak my words of truth to my mom. But I did, and I did it because I thought she deserved to know the truth. She was, after all, the one who came to all of my softball games, after the long days at work. And she was the one that stayed my dad left us—her and my two sisters and I when I was nine years old. She was the one who sacrificed to pay the bills and to buy the clothes and to put food on the table when there wasn't enough to go around. And she was the one who taught me a lot. She taught me a lot about self respect. She taught me that it was more important to be the person that I am than anything that I could ever have. She really taught me the value of work, despite my whining. She taught me a love for music and singing, despite the fact that I learned it to the tunes of Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra. She laughed at all my jokes, even when they weren't funny. She did things that you just don't forget. She gave me a love and a spirit of adventure for traveling. But I think the most important thing she did for me was that, despite where she was in her life, despite how depressed she was and how broken of a woman that she was, despite all of that, she had me at church any time the door was open. I went to every choir practice, every Bible study, every service, every youth group gathering, every potluck, every Friday-night-in-the-gym kind of activity you could possible imagine all of my life. And because of that example, because of that willingness to share with me her understanding of God, I'm able to embrace that into my life as an open lesbian woman minister. It's an incredible gift. I think because of her, because of her love and devotion, I really do have a better understanding of the divine nature of God. So I celebrate Mother's Day today because my mom is special, and I thank her for teaching me lots of important things. My relationship with God and my experience of God has been realized more through the nature of the relationship with Mother than through any other relationship. And being a mom has, once again, been a life teacher for me. It's taught me a lot about miracles, the power of prayer, an incredible gift of patience, and endurance. Being a mom...I can't even begin to explain to you what it feels like to have a baby, to watch your baby be born, to kiss their little cheek for the first time, to hold their little hand, to look into their eyes and give them that hope for a future. Being a mom has given me an incredible understanding of love, unconditional love that I would have never experienced had I not had my daughter, Kelly. I got to kiss away her tears and sing her to sleep at night, and rock her in a rocking chair, and watch her get her little face licked by puppies, and how to learn to lick an ice cream cone; those very things that sometimes we just don't take the time to stop and appreciate the true miracle before us. She's been a gift in my life, and she started out on quite a path at the age of eight months in my tummy, she decided that that was enough, and she was coming out, a month early, premature, ready to go. So while I was sitting at my work—I was a police officer in Santa Rosa at the time, and I was assigned to desk duty—my water broke, and I was quite taken aback by that experience. I hadn't been a mom before. I didn't know all the things that I was going to experience, but it started something inside of me that just tingled, and excited me. It gave me a different perspective on life. And she's been a lesson teacher for me, and she is an incredible kid. She used to knock on my vest, on my bullet-proof vest, to make sure I was wearing it before I'd go to work everyday. As a little girl she'd come up and tap on my chest, and I think that was a way for her to feel safe and secure that Mommy was going to come home from work. And to experience those things...To come home after a long day of work, and you know how it is, stressful and commuting and picking up daycare and all those things, busy, busy, busy, and to come home to a little girl running out the door with her arms outstretched saying, "Mommy, mommy, mommy...." It's an incredible gift. I took her to traffic court with my one day on my day off, and, you know, they say the most incredible things come out of kids' mouths, and that day it did. I was in plain clothes and I had taken her to traffic court, and she was probably five, and there was a gentleman there dressed in his full leather, with a long beard, and tattoos all up and down his arms. He kind of looked like a biker. She tugged on my jacket and she pointed right at him and she said "Mommy, is that a bad guy?" To watch her snow ski at the age of three, to read her poetry....She wrote me little notes when she was a little one: "I love you Mommy, from Kelly Martin." She wanted to make sure that I knew who she was. But I think one of the greatest things she ever gave to me was a poem that I want to share with you. She took the liberty of going into my photo albums, stealing all of my pictures of her and me and cutting them up and very creatively putting them together on this poem: "My Simple Gift of Love" (she was thirteen) There are no words that I can say to tell someone about you. With thirteen long years of loud music, the flu and tears Even when, if I don't treat you right Those kinds of things change you. Those kinds of things let you understand and feel what I believe is God's love, a beautiful, precious, genuine, tender love, and that's the love that God has for each one of us. A love that can't be put into words, and I know that I see that kind of love in an other's eyes. I've seen it in my partner's eyes, when she looks at her son. She has a twelve year old son named Morgan, and I think Michelle's one of the most incredible moms I know, and I just wanted to recognize her today and celebrate Mother's Day with her. Michelle has got the most patience I've ever seen of anybody I've ever known, and she's the most compassionate, tender woman and when you see her with her son, your heart would just melt. And she's been able to show me again what it means to be a mom. That it's more than just the duties, or the responsibilities, but it's about being there day after day after day, about listening, about caring. It's about giving of yourself. It's about opening your heart and letting yourself be connected to all living things, and she has shared that love with me, and I am really blessed So tonight, moms, I just want to say a blessing to you. Thank you for opening your hearts and sharing God's love with us. Amen. |
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