MOTHERS DAY in 2022: WOMEN’S ISSUES

We move from INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY to MOTHERS DAY… a seamless transfer of one ideal to another but always with the focus on women. We are all international but we are not all mothers; however, we stand united as women and on Sunday with mothers. Some of us chose not to have children, some of us lost children, and some wanted children but did not have them in today’s world, there would be trans women who have become parents.

We live in a large and confusing world where old-fashioned principles of parenthood are generally preferred but we speak a language that few Victorian children would have understood… Most of us had a mother… there is no doubt a womb was involved for any of us to be here! And that is my answer to the biological question, what is a woman? It seems to have flummoxed most men and politicians, but I declare my womb is integral to being born a woman. It led me into terrible grief trying to make it work the way God intended. In having a womb it was my intention to breed from it with as many babies as I could manage… four or six?

I claim my womb and give a clarion call for it being all my own and my right to call myself a woman. It wasn’t a very effective womb, letting me down at critical moments in a very unproductive way. But it is mine and its very existence in my body has had a centrality to so much of who I am and what I have become. That I was given two fabulous children is still incredible….you might be given one lovely baby but never the jackpot of two. Piers is forty-seven and Adelicia forty-two and to be called Mummy by my great big son when he gives me a hug is my gift of love.