A Soapy Tasting Memory on Mother’s Day

10 Saturday May 2025

Posted by Catherine Lawton in challenges of motherhood, childhood memories, Family Stories, Humor, Mother's Day, Parenting, Remembering Mother

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Family, Free to Explore, Garden Snails, life, love, mother and daughter, Mother's Day, Mothering, Sisters, storytelling, Toddler, writing

A photo of my family about the time of this story.

Photo: My family about the time of this story, when I was 1 year old and my sister was an infant.

Mother’s Day brings to mind stories my mother used to tell. She said before I was born, when she was barely 20, the doctor said I was going to be a big baby with a big head, and since she was built small, I would have to be born by cesarean section. Mother said she and Daddy worried that “big head” meant maybe I had a “water on the brain” condition. Turned out I didn’t, but I did have a head full of ideas from a young age.

By the time I was 9 months, Mother was 6 months pregnant with my little sister, and since I still wasn’t a tiny, delicate child, she couldn’t be picking me up and carrying me around. And Daddy was busy going to college (studying for the ministry) and working side jobs.

So, I got up on my own two feet and started walking at 9 months.

Then when I was 12 months, my sister was born. No one had much time to watch me, so I entertained myself, I guess. One day I toddled into a flower bed, sat down and picked up a snail. Toddlers learn about things by putting them in their mouths, and I must have wanted to learn about that snail.

When my horrified Mother found me gumming what was left of the dirty, slimy mollusk, she panicked. She scooped me up, ran into the little house, and washed my mouth out with soap. I must have wailed about that; but she was still so worried, she lugged my crying young self over to the next-door neighbor, Dr. Orpha Speicher, a medical missionary on furlough.

Dr. Speicher, for whom Mother (and our small denomination) had great respect, said not to worry. A garden snail and a little dirt wouldn’t hurt me. A missionary to the poor in India, she had seen much worse!

In my curiosity, during young childhood I learned about many other things by tasting them, but probably never snails again. Once, years later, I had the opportunity to taste escargot. I tried it but didn’t like it. Maybe because of the subconscious association of soap in my mouth and a panicky young mother?

That wasn’t the only time Mother washed my mouth out with soap as a young child. But later it was because of what came out of my mouth, not what I put into my mouth. I don’t eat snails to this day; and I don’t cuss, either. (And I’m glad I grew up free to explore and also to consider consequences of my actions.)

Mother died in her 40s and Daddy lived to 90. But both are gone from us now. My sister is busy with other things. So, if the stories are going to be told, I have to stand on my own two feet and tell them myself!

A Mother’s Day Gift to my Sons

10 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by ardisanelson in generations coming together, God's healing love, leaving a legacy, mother wounds, Mother's Day, the healing journey

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authentic relationship, Children, Emotional and spiritual healing, Forgiveness, God's promises, Healing love, Modeling the faith, Mother's Day, Mothering, Praying for our children

The last time I saw my mother alive was seven years ago over Mother’s Day weekend. As I wrote in “Walking My Mother Home,” my story in Journeys to Mother Love, these trips back home were instrumental to my healing.

In 2012, during the editing process of the book, I decided to give the manuscript as a gift to my sons. After my mother’s passing the year before, I’d had a heartfelt conversation with them. I tried to explain the significance of what had happened to me. Now with the imminent publishing of the story “for the whole world to see,” it was time to give the boys more personal insight into my healing and my journey to mother love.

Here is an excerpt from that letter:

Dear Boys,

As Mother’s Day approached this week, I’ve been reminded many times that the last time I saw my mother alive was on Mother’s Day 2010. A lot has happened in our lives in the two years since then…

Since you are males, you will probably never understand the bond between a mother and daughter. But you will marry one day and will have to understand and be caring with your own wife and the relationship that she has with her mother. I hope and pray that I can have a loving relationship with my daughters-in-law too.

As you know, I didn’t have a close relationship with my mother, not so much by choice, but by natural consequence because of her mental illness. As my mother neared the end of her life though, God made it very clear to me that I needed closure and restoration with our relationship. The attached manuscript is that story.

What I hope and pray you will see in this story is the same thing I want others to see—how following God’s will for our lives, through the good and the bad, leads to amazing blessings. I want you to embrace opportunities when God wants to use you. It won’t be easy. But that is where the biggest blessings come into play—when we are stretched beyond our comfort zone and have to rely on Him. He shows up when we lean on Him. We just have to trust Him.

So as I start on my writing journey, I wanted you to know that is exactly what I am doing. I am trusting that God is behind this and that He will use it.

I love you both dearly. I hope and pray that when you look back at your lives that you will remember that legacy that I want to leave for you. I want you to trust God and follow Him all the days of your life.

‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

With all my love,
Mom

My sons didn’t read my manuscript right away. They were teenage boys, after all. When they did, their words of love were a blessing back to me.

I have the same prayer for all who read my story and the other eight stories in Journeys to Mother Love. : May you be inspired by God to embrace forgiveness and healing in their mother/child relationships. He will redeem your pain and give you peace.

~ Ardis A. Nelson

Dreading Mother’s Day

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by kyleen228 in emotional needs, encouraging each other, expectations, frustration to freedom, infertility, Mother's Day, the healing journey

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Adoption, Childless on Mother's Day, Desire for children, Mother's Day, Women's Issues

Kyleen

I dreaded Mother’s Day. I used to day dream about taking the weekend and going away to a spa … anything to get away from the constant reminders that I wasn’t a mother when I wanted so desperately to be one.

Church was torture: smiling mothers holding little ones’ hands, videos of children telling the congregation about their wonderful mommy, roses at the doorway for all the beaming mothers … TORTURE! I went through the motions, trying to disguise the tears that welled. I celebrated with my own mother hoping she didn’t notice how much I didn’t want to participate in this day. Then, at night I cried myself to sleep.

The pain of infertility and barrenness is difficult for many women. Wanting children, we will put ourselves, our families, and our bodies through the ringer in the pursuit of fertility. We watch the other mothers around us and wonder, Why not me? Our friends and family members who conceive easily struggle to relate to us, feeling uncomfortable around us and at a loss for words.

So what are we to do? During those most painful years, while I waited to be chosen as an adoptive mom and I struggled with the pain of childlessness, the only solution that provided any help at all was … surrender. I finally got to the place where I stopped fighting God’s will for my life and accepted that His plan was good, even if it was different from mine. I just told myself over and over: If God has given me this desire for children, then He will fulfill it. I chose hope over despair.

My part was to be open to Him working in a new, creative way in my life: perhaps He would give me spiritual children; maybe He would give me a ministry that would be like a child—something that I birthed and nurtured; maybe I would be called to raise other people’s children through foster care. Whatever His will, I had to trust that it was the best for me.

Ephesians 1:18 says, “I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.”

So this Mother’s Day, if you are a woman who is childless and brokenhearted, embrace hope. If you are blessed with children, appreciate them; and encourage the other women around you who are childless and struggling.

~Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

When Your Mother Believes in You

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Catherine Lawton in childhood memories, encouraging each other, generational patterns, leaving a legacy, Mother's Day, Motherhood, Remembering Mother

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Finding our identity, giving and receiving, Mother, mother and daughter, Mother's Day, Mothering

Here I’m making sand castles on the beach with my mother when I was a young child. She always encouraged my dreams.

Having a child defines us for the rest of our lives…. Each mother-child relationship teaches us our limitations and our strengths. It changes us in constantly unfolding ways and entwines us in the unpredictable mystery of another life….

Our mothers are our first teachers, and we teach others the same lessons we learn from them. As a child, when your mother believes in you, you believe in yourself, and when that happens there is nothing you can’t do. As a mother, that is the greatest gift we can give to a child.

–from She Walks in Beauty : A Woman’s Journey Through Poems by Caroline Kennedy

Grace to Mothers (and Fathers) Grieving Aborted Babies

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by Catherine Lawton in emotional needs, forgiving yourself, Free to Love, God's healing love, grief and loss, healing after abortion, Mother's Day, Regret transformed, the healing journey, The power of honest sharing

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Courage to be honest, Emotional and spiritual healing, Forgiving yourself, future hope, Healing love, life and death, Mother's Day, Post-Abortion Healing, unresolved hurt, Women's Issues

Mother’s Day is painful for many people, for the bereaved, the childless, and those who suffer from post-abortion grief.

A few years ago I found my mother’s birth family, including three cousins, living not far from me. Recently I visited one male cousin the same age as me (he’s a Baby Boomer and Vietnam Vet, if that gives you an idea of our age).

Though he’s been married more than once, he has no children. Speaking of that fact, he got a little misty-eyed. Then he pointed to a memento sitting atop his TV: a ceramic baby booty. He said it represents a baby he fathered that the mother didn’t allow to come to birth. I know there’s always more to the story, and it’s true I don’t really know much about this “new” cousin’s past. I don’t know what that young woman years ago was going through, either.

I saw the tear in my cousin’s eye, though. And I heard the wistfulness in his voice when he told me he believed there was a child of his that he would meet in Heaven.

I was touched by the emotions of this man, over something that happened several decades ago.

A huge number of abortions have occurred in the years since abortion was legalized in America. If you believe as most Christians do, that babies and young children who die before the age of accountability go to Heaven; and if you believe that unborn babies are persons with eternal souls; then you believe as I do that all those aborted babies will be in Heaven. Perhaps they’ve been growing and developing in the nurture of Jesus and loving saints. Then, what a host of beloved children are waiting there.

My cousin obviously believes and hopes to meet his one child someday in the heavenly realms.

One of our Journeys to Mother Love contributors, Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton, has written movingly about her post-abortion experiences and healing. To my cousin and to Kyleen and to the many women and men who chose abortion when they felt trapped, hopeless, and helpless … the Lord of mercy and grace has healing, hope, and restoration for you. And He is taking care of your child. May that thought give you comfort this Mother’s Day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This video and the book it is based on, express the emotions that lead to and result from the choice of an abortion: