Soon you will be nineteen. As your birthday approaches, there are things I wish I could say. Because of the challenges that afflict your body, bind your mind and wrack your soul you would not understand. Or understand all too well. My words would be slings and arrows when I would have them be a firm foundation for the kind of communication we can never have on earth.

Still, the words spill out of me with no place to go.

As other boys your age move on to college, jobs and missions, you sit at home wondering what your future has in store. You know that you will never serve a full time mission, attend college or be a husband and father. All your hopes and dreams are centered on a future that has no shape because the shape of today is intolerable.

Over and over you ask, Why am I here? It’s the answer to this question that I would give you as a birthday gift. Maybe one day, in this life or the next, you will be able to open this gift with joy and understanding.

You are here to be my teacher.

First, you taught me what it means to experience the kind of love that exists only between a mother and her child. Sometimes I thought I would expire from sheer elation. Sometimes I thought I would expire from sheer exhaustion. Both could claim Mother Love to be their sire.

You grew older and developed health problems; you taught me patience, tolerance and long-suffering. As time went by and all I could do was not enough, you taught me sacrifice, charity and what it truly means to forget one’s self and get to work.

More time went by. I yearned, with every fiber of my soul–would have given every fiber of my soul–to have you whole. But you never were. Meanwhile, you taught me what is truly important in this world and quite frankly, what is not.

Most of all, you have taught me what it means to align my will with that of God, to know that, in every case, His ways, His means, His timetable, His truth are all there is that is worth having. I know that if I am ever to have all that He has, I had to have you.

You, my son, are a teacher, and the gift of knowledge has no price.

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This past Mother’s Day, one of the speakers spoke about how her children all had another mother. For example, with her first daughter, a hospital intensive care (ICU) nurse held her baby and knitted her booties to wear when the only other thing she could wear was a diaper while in the isolette.

The speaker went on to tell about her children’s other mothers. Two of her children are adopted. As such, they both have natural mothers who gave them life. One also spent time in foster care. The speaker was able to give birth after adopting, but again, her baby spent over a month in ICU with many other women who took care of her child. She spoke of all the other mothers her children have had in Primary (children’s church class), Young Women’s (teenage girl church class) and all the different influences children have in different stages of their lives. Women around us contribute to our lives, they are other mothers to us.

It was a wonderful talk for a Mother’s Day — speaking to all women. We are all mothers as we contribute to the well being of children growing up around us.

Thank you to all the women in my life. I need your love and support to be who I am, and to help my children be who they need to be. It is especially applicable this time of year as so many children, young and old, go to school and are nutured by ‘other mothers’.

Few of us will reach our potential without the nurturing of both the mother who bore us and the mothers who bear with us. -Sister Sheri Dew

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Brooke’s Story

Michelle’s Story

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Sheri Dew: Of all the words they could have chosen to define her role and her essence, both God the Father and Adam called Eve “the mother of all living” (Moses 4:26))—and they did so before she ever bore a child. Like Eve, our motherhood began before we were born. Just as worthy men were foreordained to hold the priesthood in mortality, Alma 13:2–4, 7–8 righteous women were endowed premortally with the privilege of motherhood. (See Spencer W. Kimball, “The Role of Righteous Women,” Ensign, Nov. 1979, 102.) Motherhood is more than bearing children, though it is certainly that. It is the essence of who we are as women. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us.

The post First Person: “Mothering: It isn’t just for Moms anymore” appeared first on Women in The Church of Jesus Christ.