Motherhood is a perennially important subject.
Some people glamorize its beauty and joys. Others emphasize its demands and costs to the detriment of its fullness and mystery.
For many women, motherhood can feel both overwhelming and deeply meaningful at the same time.
I remember being in the back of my friend’s SUV one winter, driving on a Saskatchewan highway with white all around: the whole of our fields covered in snow, and every spec of the sky covered in bright, white clouds.
Periodically, I’d see one small farmhouse in the distance, and that image stayed with me over the course of years, because it captured the symbol of strength that the original families that built our humble civilization on the Canadian prairies.
In particular, I thought of the mothers, especially alone in the middle of the night amidst the dangerous cold outside.
I thought about their sacrifice, so completely hidden and unseen in that context. I thought about mothers getting up in the middle of the night to feed their crying child while the wind whistled outside. I thought about these independent and strong women passing many days in common isolation, away from their families before modern transportation. I thought about their exhaustion, and their contemplation, and their necessary abounding love for these tiny, frail, human creatures entrusted to their particular care.
They would have had such a different experience of isolation—not overstimulated, and not falsely connected via our easily accessible online world, driven instead to a deeper place in the heart and gratitude for human relationships available to them out of the stark necessity.
Many—most—of these women were not perfect.
But they were persistent in the face of the demands of motherhood. Because of their common heroism, the world I grew up in, with its many modern conveniences, became possible. They raised the generations that would raise me.
I sit in an interesting place. I am not yet a mother, and yet have had a disproportionate exposure to the actual, lived realities of motherhood in the form of close friendship and family connection to families, many of them with many children.
Motherhood isn’t a gauze-covered aesthetic from a 1950s advertisement. It’s also not some plague-ridden tragedy from the medieval period.
Like anything in life worth value, motherhood appears to me to be both unbelievably more beautiful than we can imagine, and also unbelievably more dramatic and taxing and demanding that one can understanding until living it.
It is consuming, and it is deeply meaningful and valuable.
Although I can only speak to the fullness of motherhood—both its often crushing demands and its exquisite, unutterable joys—in a limited way, I think in the end this symbol, and perhaps the song that grew out of it, captures more than many long-winded think pieces:
Instead of trying to propagandize our way to either encouraging or discouraging motherhood through emphasizing one element or the other, it seems much more fruitful to me to simply underline that we are made for greatness and capable of overcoming immense challenges, and that because of this nature, we are drawn to deeper kind of fulfillment.
This is where joy and sorrow can coexist. Comfort is easily accessible in a modern world, but comfort is not the same as a life lived deeply and well.
Maybe music and stories help us to see the deeper, wise truth underneath like they always have.
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There is more of this.
To all of these deep, real questions of the human heart, my own response throughout my life has been to write and sing. Artistic work and its expression is often how we begin to wrestle through some of the more confusing and painful parts of life.
The whole body of work I’ve built has been a real benefit to many people who are going through a challenging time. I am truly honored by this.
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My music and writing is how I invite people into a deeper, more human, and more grounded place amidst the chaos of modern life.
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