My own relationship with my biological mother was rocky, at best. It was a complex yarn that will probably, this side of the Kingdom, never get unraveled. My mother has been dead for over 8 years now. So that's not a yarn I'm prepared to pry apart in the least. That will always best we left to God.
Instead, the woman I most remember as mothering is a woman who was well beyond her childbearing years when she took me in. And she died when I was just so young. Sarah was my maternal great-grandmother. And she took a complex and complicated Autistic boy, with so many social faults and flaws, and helped to fashion a young man in the ways my own biological mother wasn't prepared to do.
That taught me a lesson about life and about those who care for us.
Women have come and gone through the centuries. Some mothers, grandmothers; others aunts, cousins, sisters; still others, friends; and even still others, wives. These women come from all walks of life. Yet no matter where they come from or what status they hold, these are women who toil the soil of lives all their living years. Women who work for hours, days, weeks, months and years, doing work that we need to be done for their own lives, and for the lives of those who love them and whom they love.
Some of them, like my grandmother, never even seeing the fruit of all that work.
But one thing is clear, they got the job done, because we're here living.
So today, as I honor Sarah's memory, I want to honor all those women whose lives and work have sometimes not even had the luxury of their freedom. Whether fate or duty, still they do what needs to be done to make our living possible, often in ways that go unnoticed.
I'll never be able to say whether Sarah would be glad at the man I've become, but I wouldn't be that man without so many women who love me and whom I love -- whose love works day in and day out (often, again unnoticed and unappreciated). I can only hope to live long enough and well enough to honor her memory.
Thank you, God, for Sarah.
And thank you, grandmother, for so much. I don't believe I ever told you, because I didn't know to say it until after you had died, but you were loved. And by no one more than me.