Choosing motherhood The sacrifice of honouring life By Leanne Bellamy
ifteen years ago, a friend sent me an email with these lines from Isaiah 54: “you will forget the shame of your youth… For your Maker is your husband.” I am sending this to all of my friends who are single moms, she wrote. What do you think of it? Her email made me angry with God. I was weary, struggling to build my life again, to get an education, and to fit in with the childless young adults or the married mothers at the church we were attending. And my family was still broken. My children needed a father and I needed to be loved and while God’s promises to Israel were profound in their cosmic stature, they seemed impossibly removed from the mundane difficulties of loneliness and poverty and shame that came with single-parenting. I never wanted to be a mother, much less a single one. My own mother had nurtured me in a sense of shame, which for several years I misinterpreted as a strength, at the thought of resembling or aspiring to anything traditionally feminine. Both my parents, who never could agree on much, treated “girl things” as either uninteresting, or worse, shallow and devious, a message that was
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reinforced by the infamous “girl politics” at school and the general ethos of lower working-class prairie culture, where a girl could earn respect with her fists if she wasn’t as quick with her tongue. Ripening sexuality offered another kind of power, alluring but conflicted by its own disgraces. Beauty was admired but could also invite vicious attacks. Boys attended to girls whose looks, dress, and confidence suggested sexual availability, but used and mocked those who made too good on that promise. Movies and magazines encouraged emulation of impossible female perfection, contributing to a nagging sense of one’s unique and innate
