Mother's Day blog

Today won't be about cycling nor any gushy platitudes towards my mother because I have something different to say about Mother's Day.

Today, being a Sunday, the pastor at my church is doing a Mother's Day sermon - which is a great thing if you are a mother, grandmother, expectant mother, a woman who hopes to be a mother... but I am not in any of those categories.  I am going to be 54 this year, and that biological clock doesn't tick for me.  It ticked loudly about 15 years ago, but now it is silent.  I will say that I am grateful at this stage of my life not to have children, and quite frankly, although parts of me think i would have made a good mom, I could have just as easily been the mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub.  I think motherhood would have put me into an early grave.  That's not to say that I don't enjoy children, but they need to go home at night!  So I just feel like I don't fit in when these sermon days come.

I appreciate the the church's stance on family, but having a husband and children never happened for me and I've moved beyond that wanting.  It is part of the reason why attending a women's Bible study has never been appealing to me.  I did try it for a while, but I felt so out of place, and it got to the point where wild horses couldn't drag me there.  I really was in hysterical tears one day about it when one of the leaders called me to see if I would be there.  No, I wouldn't.  Now if it were men and women, no problem, but something about the women's group just made me feel like an outsider looking in.  I didn't fit the mold of the woman's role.  I really don't understand the need for women to have their own Bible study anyhow or for the men to have their own.  Everyone should be together.

When I was much younger, I was a little jealous of girlfriends who were getting married and I wasn't.  It got to the point where I wouldn't go to weddings.  Unless it was a family member, I didn't go, and people seemed to know not to ask me.  Even so, I could count on both hands the number of weddings I have attended, and half of those were for my siblings.  I'm not anti-marriage at all and part of me still has a candle of hope lit that someday I might find a man who is my best friend and soul-mate and who wants to spend the rest of our lives together (and he needs to enjoy riding a bike and going for adventures on the bike).

So here I sit, purposefully ignoring the Mother's Day sermon that is happening.  I will listen to some older Greg Laurie sermons from Harvest Church instead.  And then later I will take a little bike ride and explore a Beverly Hills street that is an alternative bike route.