Message given on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2026, at Durham Friends Meeting. On June 16, 2025, Shelley Randall also brought a Father’s Day message to Durham Friends.
Welcome and Happy Mother’s Day!
And its complicated! Mothers and daughters are complicated, mothers and sons are complicated, mothers and children are complicated period. And then as luck would have it sometimes the children become the mothers as their mothers age or get sick or become unavailable. How complicated is that?
Sometimes the children parent the mothers throughout their childhood, sometimes the mothers never let go of trying to parent their children as if they never mature – and maybe they don’t.
And sometimes men mother their children.
I am not a mother in the traditional sense, I have not carried a child to term or given birth nor raised children under my roof. And I have the utmost respect for those that do take on this endeavor. Especially in these times of discord and uncertainty.
I can only imagine the worry, the frustration and resentment, the knee jerk call to defend that mothers experience each and every day, alongside the heartfelt pride, love and joy that comes with raising a child.
But I am a mother nevertheless, in the broadest of terms. I have nurtured others in a variety of situations professionally and personally, as a friend, as a substance abuse counselor. As a Guardian Ad Litem for children, a lawyer for parents and children involved in the child protection system. I have witnessed countless women being told they are unfit to raise the children they birthed. And I have seen children that were removed from their mothers return once they are 18 despite the circumstances being unchanged: substance abuse, violence and mental illness. The bond is strong and most often unresolved.
We are, afterall, flawed human beings. That is all we are and ever will be. Some of us strive towards perfection; some of us don’t give a damn. And some of us toggle back and forth between the two on any given day.
My mother decided to manage her four children from the collective view of her generation with regard to mothering. Making sure we had the right attire, that we went to the right school, played the right sports and knew the right people. She wanted us to succeed in her world. So that is what she gave us and asked of us.
But what I really craved was her attention to who I was and not what she wanted me to be, I craved her acceptance. I wanted her to be a mother that could plumb the depths of emotions, dig deep into the meaning of life. She wanted to skate on the surface and have fun, why couldn’t I, I’m sure she wondered.
My mother was not perfect in my eyes and I was not a perfect daughter to her but we grew to respect one other once we let go of our expectations that we carried – You know – She should be more like me!
And I certainly was a thorn in her side. You see I didn’t buy into her world view. And in fact I disdained it, not only in my teens but into my twenties until I could make my own decisions about what path I needed to walk. Once I was able to do that my disdain slowly fell away but the damage was done. Our relationship had become grounded in mistrust of each other and each other’s world view.
We were at an impasse. And this impasse was unacceptable to me, I needed my mother.
So I did what I could to spend time with her and my stepfather on their terms without compromising my values. I’d visit them in the winter time on Martha’s Vineyard when there were no parties to attend, no one to impress. And I curbed my curiosity about her inner workings; how she felt about things. For her part, she did not judge my quiet and notably unsocial life, my lack of husband and children.
We took walks together peaking through windows of empty summer homes and entering newly constructed houses commenting on design and interior decorating. She fed me serving lovely meals in front of the fire.
Then my mother started to call me in the mornings when the furnace in their 18th century salt box failed and the temperature was 50 degrees. I listened and watched giving her the space to come to her own conclusions.
She made some decisions privately, without complaint, without discussion.
And I waited.
She decided she and my stepfather would move to an assisted living facility outside of Boston, near where she grew up.
My stepfather did not do well there – essentially he went to bed and got up only to accompany her to dinner so that she could dress and wave and nod at the other dressed and nodding residents.
He died about a year after they landed there. And my mother took up with another resident who could accompany her to dinner.
I waited and figured out how to visit just her and not go to dinner with the new beau.
The most precious memories I have of my mother and me are of sitting together on her loveseat in front of the t.v. watching British mysteries, shoulder to shoulder, holding hands in her apartment when she was in her nineties.
Decades of effort to bridge a seemingly unbridgeable divide yielded simple expressions of love that I had craved. And I am at peace because of it. As she was, her last words to me the evening she died at the age of 95 were “I love you Shelley”. And off she went – after I had left, privately as she always did everything.
And now Motherhood is ever more complicated as we watch unfold sons and daughters that make choices that did not seem possible a generation ago. It seems like more and more of our children are experiencing a fundamental conflict between their soul and their bodies that causes them despair. Girls are telling their parents that they are in the wrong body, they need to be in a boy’s body and vice versa. How did this come about – we want answers around the origin of this “trend” we want data and statistics, potential influences that has caused this. We want someone or something to blame for this “anomaly”. We shake our heads in incomprehension and misunderstanding. Yet how could we possibly understand what it would be like to have such a fundamental disconnect? This is all too much for us.
It was difficult for me to feel and then know from an early age that I did not fit in to my mother’s social construct and therefore I did not fit into my family – it was an impossibility – I was not that person. That understanding, that sense of disconnect from my biological family caused me a great deal of distress over decades – trying to fit in, trying not to fit in, trying to keep my mouth shut, not keeping my mouth shut and finally just staying away from my family altogether. And all the terms were cast about – it’s just a phase, she’ll come around -why can’t she just fit in!
So I can only imagine what it must be like to feel like you do not belong in your own body. The shock and horror and despair one must feel. And the panic. Who is going to love me? What will my mother think, say, do?
The mothering attributes raised up entail nurturing and taking care of and loving and we all hold those capabilities no matter our genders. And as such it is our job to nurture, take care of and love our children, all of them. And keep them out of harm’s way. But what does that look like with a child that says to us, I’m in the wrong body? And putting that child in the appropriate body entails cutting things off that the child was born with, that they came out of the womb with? How do we manage that? With a blind eye? With dismissal? Its just a phase? Or do we listen with our hearts and move along the unfamiliar path together with our children, listening to their heartfelt expressions of who they are and holding their hands.
I do not have any data or statistics – in fact I have only personal experience with a friend, and friends who are parents of trans kids. And I’ve watched from a distance at the courage and strength of love it takes to commit to a path that is integrous to the child’s soul but maybe far out of the norm of experience. I’ve watched with awe and the utmost respect at the expansiveness of heart this path requires, the nurturing of one’s child’s Spirit and the belief it takes in one’s child’s own heart and soul to walk this path.
And I’ve also seen the outcomes – my friend becoming softer as he settles into his true nature, no longer having to wear armor or move about burdened with a secret. No longer self-destructive or using drugs. I’ve watched the anguish of parents of trans kids turn to relief that they no longer have to worry about suicidality as they watch their children fully enter who they were meant to be, their children now feeling safe enough to express themselves truly, become productive members of the family and society. Knowing and feeling that they are loved and can love others honestly. This is what a mother yearns for her child.
And we are all mothers, we all have the ability to fall into our hearts to find the love and nurturing that was cast upon the one gender, women, throughout the ages. It is incumbent upon us all, now, women, men, mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts, to recognize the energy spent in our minds, the rational arguments, the “it didn’t used to be like this”, the science and economic rationales. We must enter into our hearts to find the love for ourselves and all of our flaws and thusly find the love for all others despite perhaps not understanding but learning to allow and accept. As we do that for others, we do that for ourselves. And we are richer for having found this expansiveness in our hearts and the possibility to reach out and put ourselves in another’s shoes, to learn about our own hearts and its capacities for encompassing others.
This is the path of love.
MAY WE ALL BE MOTHERS
May we all embody those attributes we find in the Sacred Mother
May we nourish and nurture ourselves and our human brothers and sisters in all their forms and bodies
May we care for our children and all children throughout the world
May we find interdependence and connection with all Beings
May we find our inner mothers to shower this world with love and the abundance of joy and satisfaction today and always.
May it be so. Blessed Be. Amen
