Thursday, December 7: Childless Women, Motherless Children

Christmas is hard for me, a friend confided. It’s all about babies, babies, babies!  

She had always wanted a child, but circumstances had left her single into her 40s, and she’d never had the resources to adopt on her own.

Another friend, in the same year, confessed to feeling inadequate every Christmas—she and her husband wanted children, but she couldn’t get pregnant. After years of waiting, they still hadn’t been chosen as an adoptive family. “Every year, I wish for my own Angel Gabriel,” she said.

“All of those images of mother and baby looking deeply into each others’ eyes—I just can’t take it,” a third friend told me. Her mother, alive but unloving, doesn’t invite her to Christmas.

A fourth friend: I always feel guilty about my post-partum depression around the holidays.
In image after image, Mary, the perfect mother, holds her perfect son lovingly, even though she’s poor and giving birth as a homeless woman. Nothing more guilt-inducing than that.

And those of us who lost our mothers young, or didn’t have mothers who loved us, long for that gaze. The feeling intensifies around the holidays.

We sentimentalize the gaze between mother and child, the deep love and connection, in image after image.  We forget that Mary was a human being who likely struggled as any mother does—and probably more so. After all, her strange little son was not planned. She was in danger of being killed for having a child out of wedlock. Later, her son felt justified (at age 13!) in telling her smugly she shouldn’t have been worried when he disappeared on a family trip. Any parent who has ever lost a child in a crowded place gets irritated whenever that story comes around in the lectionary.

But, what is the alternative? A woman, legs spread, screaming? A bloody child falling onto the stable floor? A terrified man standing next to her, wondering what he got himself into?

If Christmas is about both birth and incarnation, it is important to remember that the baby was born in a sea of miracles, stars, angels, shepherds, wise men. It is equally important to remember that he was born homeless in a dusty, dirty, waterless place. We must hold both the bloody birth and the light-filled miracle, the awe and the fear.


The birth of Jesus is perhaps our first lesson in paradox. It is also a season when we ought to be more open about our grief, and more open to holding others in their grief. This season of darkness might be a time to allow ourselves to enter grief—particularly old grief we’ve not allowed ourselves to feel—and  sit with it, and find our way through. May we all make space for darkness this holiday season.

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