The Most Powerful Job

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I’m so grateful for this day. I love that it’s Sunday. I love that we’re in May. And I love that today is Mother’s Day. Thank God I’m here for all of it.

Before I go on, let me say this: I know this day is complicated for many people. It can bring up grief, unresolved feelings, and old wounds. I know many of you have lost your mothers and miss them deeply. I know others are in the midst of caring for aging mothers, navigating new roles and new emotions you never anticipated. I get it. And I hope that wherever you find yourself today, you’ll stay with me as I try to unpack motherhood (as if that’s even possible), and also celebrate it.

For me, this day is a blessing. I love, love, love being a mother. It’s a role that initially terrified me, by the way, I was afraid I wouldn’t be tender, patient, or present enough. I worried about how to combine motherhood with a career I loved. What if I failed? What if I made a mistake? What if I messed up the most important job there is? Turns out those questions don’t go away. You just get better at living inside them.

I am blessed to get along with all four of my children. I am blessed to be alive to watch my daughter Katherine become a mother herself. Happy Mother’s Day, Katherine. And I am thrilled, genuinely thrilled, to be a grandmother. Mama G, at your service.

Every morning, I wake up early and give thanks for being able to open my eyes and put my feet on the floor. I thank God for my health and the health of my children and grandchildren. I go downstairs, turn on the coffee, and then I go and light a candle for my mother.

I do this every morning, not just on Mother’s Day. Every single day. I do it because I miss her every day. I miss talking to her. Laughing with her. Getting her advice about, well, everything. I wonder all the time what she would think about this, what she would say about that. And I wish I could ask her questions today that I didn’t think to ask when she was alive. I have so many questions.

I wish I had asked her how she really felt about me moving to California. I wish I’d asked about her empty nest. Was she lonely? Was she scared? I wish I’d asked her more about aging, death, and the cost of being a force of nature. About the love that held her together with my father. I wish I’d known what truly made her feel loved. I wish I’d asked how she survived losing so many of her siblings. I wish I’d asked what it was really like to struggle with her health the way she did, year after year, and what it was like to work as hard as she worked. I wish I’d asked her if she ever truly felt understood. Seen. Appreciated. I wish I’d asked her if she ever truly understood herself—her drive, her desire, her anger, her life.

I spoke to my mother every single day of my life. But not like that, if you know what I mean.

My mother was a force. That much the world knew. What the world didn’t know was that she loved to play games, laughed easily and often, and cheered me on in ways that made me feel like I could do anything. She smoked cigars. She carried a briefcase. She had really smart men working for her, not the other way around. She was uniquely, unapologetically herself. I thought all of that was completely normal until I grew up and realized she was one of one.

So it stopped me cold when, late in her life, we were sitting outside together and she said to me quietly, almost matter-of-factly:

“You know, I was never really successful.”

This from the woman who had been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This from the woman who created the Special Olympics and changed how the world saw and treated people with intellectual disabilities. This from the woman whose face was on a silver dollar. This from a woman who had been married forever and had five kids!

I listed all of these accomplishments back to her. Every last thing. She listened, and then said, “Well, I never ran for office. That’s where the power was. I wasn’t like my brothers.”

I have thought about that moment so many times since. I’ve thought about how each of us defines success and about whether we ever truly feel it, no matter what we achieve. I’ve thought about how a woman who changed millions of lives could still measure herself against a standard that was never built for her. She was the most powerful woman I have ever known. And she didn’t see it.

That conversation has shaped so much of what I believe about motherhood and about how we must start telling a different story. Raising a human being to feel secure, whole, and good about themselves is an extraordinary accomplishment. Raising kind, engaged, loving people is a mark of success by any honest measure. Perhaps the most powerful job in the world is the one that gets the least credit for being powerful at all.

This past week, I was at the Cleveland Clinic for our Global Women’s Health Forum, and I thought about my mother constantly because, throughout her life, she struggled with her health. She went from doctor to doctor, with so few answers. So much of the work I do, I do because of her. I do not want any other woman, any other mother, to struggle the way she struggled. It is my purpose to make sure the road is better charted for my daughters’ and granddaughters’ generation than it was for hers, or even mine.

Because here is the truth: it is hard to mother when you are struggling with your health. It is hard to feel successful, powerful, or good about yourself when your body is a mystery to you. And it is hard to understand yourself, see yourself, or be yourself when no one has taken the time to understand what is happening inside you.

That is why this work matters to me. That is why it will always matter to me. My heart goes out to my mother and the fact that no one could ever help her with her health. No one.

The other day, I was going through some books, and I found a volume on my shelf by Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. The spine read: The Long Loneliness. I knew the book. I had met Dorothy Day as a young girl. Both of my parents admired her deeply, and I always felt my mother had a particular connection to her.

I pulled the book down and when I opened it, I found an inscription in Dorothy Day’s own handwriting to my mother. She wrote that she thought my mother would be interested in the book because my mother had once told her she enjoyed Day’s writing on pilgrimage. She wrote about how much she had enjoyed meeting my mother and talking with her.

I stood there holding the book for a long time. What did they talk about? What were my mother’s deepest thoughts about loneliness? About pilgrimage? About her own long, driven, complicated life? I thought about who my mother was before she was my mother, before she was anyone’s mother—a young girl with her own dreams, her own questions, her own interior world that none of us ever fully knew.

This week, our readers shared the lessons their mothers gave them, and reading their words I was reminded all over again of how a mother’s love quietly becomes the foundation everything else is built on, shaping who her children become.

It’s a strange thing. We meet our mothers after they have already lived a lifetime. We never knew them as young women. And our children will never know us that way either.

I find myself wondering what my children would have thought of me had they met me in high school, or in my twenties, before life had shaped me into who I became. I watch my daughter Katherine now with her children—how much they idolize her, how beautifully she has stepped into this role—and I think back to when my own children were small and my house was full of laughter and tears and life. And I compare that to the quiet of my home today.

It all goes so fast. That is what I tell her. It all goes so fast. Enjoy every single moment.

So on this Mother’s Day, here is what I want to say to all of you: whether you are a mother, have a mother, are missing a mother, are trying to become a mother, or are somewhere in the complicated middle of it all: Mothering takes many forms. Maybe you haven’t had children, but you are mothering other people’s children. Maybe you are mentoring. Maybe you are mothering like Michelle Hord, who writes this week with such honesty about what it means to still be here, still mothering, after unimaginable loss. Maybe—and this is the one I want you to really hear—you are doing the profound and necessary work of mothering yourself. Of giving yourself what your own mother couldn’t, because no one had given it to her either.

And I’ll say this: I look around at our country right now, and I think it needs to be mothered. It needs to be held. It needs to be comforted. It needs to be emotionally regulated. It needs to be reassured that it can get back up and keep going. It needs to be reminded of everything it has done well, and everything it can do well again.

Mothering is the toughest job anyone will ever do. You can be afraid of it and jump in anyway. You can make mistakes and ask for forgiveness. You can surprise yourself entirely. It is a job that never ends. Even after mothers go on to heaven, their children are still looking for them. Still reaching for them. Still asking for their advice.

At least I know I am. Every single morning when I light that candle, I am still looking for my mother. Still talking to her. Still trying to make her proud.

If that isn’t the mark of a successful life, I don’t know what is.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.

Also in this week’s issue:

• The Most Important Lessons My Mother Ever Taught Me

• After Unimaginable Loss, She Chose Motherhood Again