Mother's Day
Happy Mother’s Day 2025
Happy Mother’s Day from Wayfare. We have collected a profusion of beautiful essays into a literary bouquet to celebrate Mother's Day this year. We're confident that there will be many blooms here to raise interesting ideas as they awaken your senses and stir your heart.
Overflowing with Family
Do you have a family? The question came over the phone from the stake family history coordinator. I had signed up to be a FamilySearch indexer, and she called to welcome me to the team and get to know me. Though “family” is a capacious category, I knew she was really asking two very narrow, specific questions:
Hymn of the Alloparent
I recently learned that my two-year-old son calls his nursery leaders “Mama” and “Dada.” My son is not one of those toddlers who colors quietly during church. Instead, on this particular Sabbath, he had decided to be an especially noisy allosaurus during the sacrament, so I took him out into the foyer. I held…
Abundance and Natality
I couldn’t help but hear two teenagers talking behind me as I stood swaying on a packed crosstown bus. “Do you think you’ll have kids?” one of them asked. My ears perked up and I could almost feel their eyes on me—the woman with a child on her back, another clinging to her leg, two more chatting in a nearby seat.
The Womb of Suffering
I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is. . . . We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering. —Simone Weil
Jesus Before the Metaphor
This is a picture of me with my firstborn son. It was on the desk of a woman who loved us, who died this week. She was not a relative, or a confidante. We did not speak the same language–her English was better than my (non-existent) Spanish, but I doubt either of us ever understood much more than a paragraph or two that the other spoke. I know nothing o…
Power, Mother's Day, and the Heroism of the Mundane
In the mid-nineteenth century in rural West Virginia, a woman named Ann Reeves Jarvis bore at least eleven children over the course of seventeen years. Only four would survive to adulthood; the rest would die of measles, typhoid fever, and diphtheria, all common epidemics in Appalachian communities at that time.
An Expanse of Light & Memory
I can’t remember the first year of my daughter’s life. I think, write, say those words and my chest tightens, grief and shame washing through my body. I can’t remember.