Every few years around Mother’s Day, I like to salute some of the moms who are not necessarily celebrating this week. These are the moms who perhaps cried themselves to sleep last night, the ones who will not receive a bouquet of dandelions from a three-year-old’s fist on Sunday nor will have the Fed Ex man deliver a box of candy from a son in Minneapolis.

We need to do it, since no one else wants to mention these moms today; no one else wants to look in their eyes. There is simply too much pain. These women, and they are legion, are moms in their hearts but have no little toddler climbing up their legs, nor mouthy teenagers who will be staying out past curfew tonight. These moms would give anything to have a teenager to worry about.

Some of these moms are the bravest women in the world: women who gave up their tiny little bundles of love to adoptive parents because they knew they could not give their child the things that a two-parent family could. They mark birthdays and anniversaries by buying an extra box of Kleenex and staying as far away as possible from co-workers’ complaints about making lunches and laying out school clothes. While they know in their hearts they did the right thing, the pain of not sharing special days with their child is sometimes too much to bear.

There are mothers who would sell their very souls for a mini-van and an hour long car pool drive but who have a heart wrenching monthly reminder that their bodies will never be able to nourish a child under their hearts, and that ensuing loneliness is a constant ache in the deepest recesses of their very souls.

And what of the mothers who have seen their sons and daughters come home from far-away lands in flag-draped coffins and have stood by silently as taps were played? They tried as hard as they might to reconcile the memories of a handsome young lad hitting his first home run on a sand lot ball field with the lifeless form in the box being lowered into the ground and found they could not bear the thought.

We have mothers—and grandmothers—who ride buses—sometimes for hours each way—one weekend a month to visit sons and daughters incarcerated in prisons in every state, in all of our large cities and in every time zone. Sometimes the crimes their children committed were merely the latest in a lifetime of hapless mistakes and bad judgments. But often the crime was one moment’s reckless decision, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: a mother alone, crying silently into her pillow each night as she waits for sleep that will not come.

We have mothers who have given up a child to the Church and while they rejoice with a son on the altar or a daughter changing lives in the classroom they often are forced to turn their heads as their peers pass around pictures of the latest grandchild or tell stories of airplane rides to far away cities to help with new born babies or babysitting grade-schoolers while parents race off to Cancun for a week. These mothers, in the middle of a sleepless night, can’t help but wonder if their grandchild, the one who will never be born, would have had his grandpa’s red hair and fiery nature or her more generic coloring and temperament.

And we have mothers who tried to be good moms, who stayed up all night with sick toddlers and who attended every high school basketball game, yet, for reasons they can never fathom, have children who have turned their backs on family and refuse to acknowledge the pain they cause their aging parents. These are mothers who write cheerful notes to addresses half way ‘round the world, addresses they have never visited, and pray that someday their child will pick up the phone and dial a familiar number. They wait daily for phone calls that will never come.

Happy Mother’s Day to each and every one of you. May God comfort you in your pain.

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