"This is my body": Some Mother's Day Thoughts

"This is my body, which is for you."

Every week, without fail, we remember Jesus' words, "This is my body, which is for you."

Today, I also note the privilege of those words. This is my body. It is a distinct privilege of a male savior who can utter those words and have no one question them. The self-emptying that follows is also a privilege, to give willingly rather than out of fear or expectation. This is the self-emptying of sacrifice, not one born of abuse and power.

These, these are my Mother's Day thoughts.

The older I get, the more I bristle at Mother's Day. I've failed to be able to name why for the most part. Some of it is the awkward of young adulthood, when holidays that are meant for families become exclusive once you're living away. That same discomfort continues into single adulthood, if that's your journey. In the Church that has mostly learned what to do with families, it's a moment of being a square peg in a round hole.

But it's not that. Not really.

It's about consent.

At the shallow end of things, stop trying to force people to buy gifts for someone. I love giving gifts, but do it out of love and joy. Capitalism aside, it's a little bit gross to not giving people the right to say yes to something.

Mother's Day and being a woman are nicely conflated at this point, and if you can undertake that deconstruction, God bless you. I can't. In the name of not excluding those of us who are mothers, plenty of people conflate the two even more. This week, my dentist's office gave me a carnation in celebration of all women, for example. In truth, me being a woman exists apart from whether or not I'll be a mother. I may end up being a mother or not, but reading that into the gender that I occupy is presuming a great deal. That has been true for many women, plenty of whom have opted out of motherhood for various reasons. I get to exist as a person who is a woman of full worth without being a mother. That should not be a radical statement. Imposing other identities upon me is violating.

Most of all, we are still at a place where we impose motherhood on women. We do not offer comprehensive sex education in our schools, neither in the United States as a whole and most definitely not in the state of Arizona. Contraception costs money, unless it's abstinence, and contrary to plenty of opinions, abstinence is the most ineffective form of sex education. We demonize Planned Parenthood, which offers both of those things for free. Abortion becomes less accessible and more criminalized most every week, because it is not her body.

Let me remind you again of the conflation of mothers and women, because plenty of people think the two should be synonymous.

Even Julia Ward Howe's call for the first Mother's Day was issued in a world where women did not get to choose to be mothers. In a world without contraception, being married meant being a mother more often than not--which also meant dying in childbirth fairly often. The connotations of being a spinster clearly give us an idea about how opting out of marriage and motherhood was received.

And so, in 2019, I am still longing for the right to exist as a woman who is not a mother.

I want to exist without flowers and pink things thrust in to my hands.
I want to live without a question about if I'll be using my uterus.
I want to have the right to make decisions about my body.
I want the right to say yes.
I want the right to say no.
I want to skip celebrating Mother's Day without anyone looking like I kicked a puppy.

I want the privilege of saying, "This is my body," and the choice of if I give it for anyone.

Church, what will we say about women?