Into each life some rain must fall (reflections on Mothers’ Day)

For the last three days, I have watched TV meteorologists perfect their apologies to mom that this Mothers’ Day would be filled with clouds and rain rather than sun and flowers. But the rain is perfect. Not just because I’ve been acutely aware of the losses I’ve experienced as mother to my first child and daughter of my deceased mother, grandmothers, and mother-in-law, but because motherhood is as much about rain as it is sunshine. What it means to be a mother, a parent, a human, is a mixed bag of so much joy and sadness. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote–and Ella Fitzgerald sang–that “into each life some rain must fall.” Many a writer of our sacred texts and our most profound secular texts remind us that rain is necessary for the harvest. And, Matthew 5:45 reminds us that God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

And so today, Mothers’ Day 2019, is rain-filled. Many a mother is crying for the loss of her child and the children of others ripped out of this life due to gun violence. Others miss the children plucked from their loving arms, for the crime of being undocumented immigrants seeking a better life for their families here in the US. Still others carry the singular pain of mourning children killed in retaliation by former domestic partners. And so many others grieve the losses of children lost to physical and mental illness, addiction, accidents, and prematurity while others cry private tears for miscarriages and even their own lost fertility.

Not everyone is a mother, of course. But on a day like today, some of us nurse fresh wounds of loss or the gnawing of many years missing the mothers we once had or maybe never had. So, let it rain today. Rain with our tears and rain for the harvest to come.