To Mother

Against the Sky by Robert Reid

"Eve was given the identity of “the mother of all living”—years, decades, perhaps centuries before she ever bore a child. It would appear that her motherhood preceded her maternity, just as surely as the perfection of the Garden preceded the struggles of mortality. I believe mother is one of those very carefully chosen words, one of those rich words—with meaning after meaning after meaning. We must not, at all costs, let that word divide us. I believe with all my heart that it is first and foremost a statement about our nature, not a head count of our children."
--Patricia Holland One Thing Needful: Becoming Women with Greater Faith in Christ

This quote sums up for me, in so many ways, what I feel about motherhood. I first discovered it as a student at BYU. I was in my last year of school, student teaching, in fact--teaching budding young folk who were in the process of figuring themselves out. I was the Relief Society President in my singles ward--surrounded by beautiful, talented, independent women. I was working at the MTC--no longer teaching the welfare sisters, as the program had been disintegrated (to my dismay). And I was undergoing a slight identity crisis. No. Crisis is the wrong word. I was fairly sure of my identity as me. Carly Jane. But I wanted, nay, needed, to understand at a deeper doctrinal level just what it meant to be a woman. A Daughter of God. A daughter of the first mother, Eve.

And so I began searching. I scoured my Eternal Marriage manual. I read every talk I could find under every related search word I could think of on lds.org. And in my many readings and ponderings and studies, I came back again and again to this talk/article by Sister Holland. She was not the first, and definitely not the last, to proclaim that our identity as women has everything to do with our abiliy to mother. But for me, it was in reading this talk that the truth sunk in.

I am a mother. I have been and always will be, by virtue of being a woman. It is at the heart of everything that is womanly. As she said, it not a head count of children. It is not so much the ability (or even inability for some) to have children. But mothering, being the Mother of All Living, is something that is deep in the nature of womanhood. It must not be escaped, overlooked, or ignored. We, as women, are to nuture and cherish and foster the inate ability to mother. Which, for me, includes verbs such as: to love, create, care for, console, teach, respect, plant and harvest, guide, discern, and honor--to name a few.

Motherhood is part of who we are, well before we hold a child of our own in our arms. And I am so grateful. The world today would tell women that our identity has to do with anything and everything but mothering. They are wrong. Motherhood is at the very heart of what unifies as women. And I believe, as Sister Holland said, it is a word rich with meaning after meaning after meaning. The greatest insights of our lives will come, I think, as we unlock those meanings one by one.