Bringing Up Mommy: Mother's Day in hospital a treasure for women

I was disappointed when I learned I’d be admitted to the hospital the Friday before Mother’s Day, for issues related to longstanding health problems, namely chronic leukemia, back pain, and the list goes on.

Call Mother’s Day a multibillion-dollar Hallmark invention if you want, but the second Sunday in May had developed in our family as a day when we commit to being together, doing yard work and making meals, reading poetry and finding value in family.

My kids and I look forward to it every year.

And yet this year, here I was, cooped up in a tiny room in a dank part of an old hospital an hour from home with beeps instead of birdsong and IV poles instead of gardens.

My daughter surprised me by offering to drive up and spend the whole of the day with me.

While my sons had already spent a faux Mother’s Day with me the Sunday before, she brought flowers, games, food and spent hours of her time at my bedside on the actual day.

We made the best of it.

And then, so too, unexpectedly, did the people taking care of me.

The nurses and aides, the people drawing my blood and the ones bringing my food – almost all of them were women, and most of them were mothers. According to the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics, 77.4% of hospital workers are female.

And we were in a special club, keenly aware that it was Mother’s Day and that we were in a hospital.

There was a recognition of the value of the day, a recognition of the fact that we were all in this place together because they were working and I was sick.

None of us at home with our children, we knew without speaking what was needed, to uplift our roles as mother for each other on the one day of the year it is sanctioned.

Gently asking in a way that wasn’t invasive or judging, we discovered first whether we were mothers. And then we moved into the storytelling about our particular children, names and ages and personalities, likes and dislikes and our hopes and dreams for them.

I learned much about the loves and lives of many women that day, many of them from different countries and different socio-economic backgrounds. Because I was in a hospital, oddly, I got to spend the day in community with so many mothers I would not have met otherwise.

I had the privilege of seeing into lives I wouldn’t have seen, gaining a continued and overriding understanding of how important motherhood is universally to those of us who are mothers or who ever had one.

It rang true, this synopsis I found in a New York Times article about Mother’s Day:

“Mother’s Day (might be) a saccharine invention, a national fairy tale in a nation that does almost nothing to support mothers. But it is also a day for contemplating the ways in which we’re connected to one another, through times of joy and times of sorrow, across time and across species.”

My experience made me think too, of one of my favorite teachings from the Buddha. He tells his students that friends are not half the holy life. They are the entire holy life.

Despite not being at home with my children planting basil for the summer, making muffins with strawberry jam and sharing Mary Oliver poems, I felt a special surrounding that day, a river of love and support, women reaching in to be present with me and I with them.

It is ironic, it seems, that I found Mother’s Day on the second floor of an old hospital.

And yet maybe not.

When there is time and intent to tap into our hearts, when we are drawing the very blood that could determine a future, we find that women don’t just mother their children, but each other.

Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Bringing Up Mommy: Mother's Day in hospital a treasure for women