"The moon lays a hand on my forehead,

Blank-faced and mum as a nurse."

- Sylvia Plath 

My mother reminds me there are many ways to mother, that biology doesn't have everything to do with it.  

I know this.  

I've known it for decades, known that those who adopt children are no less parents than biological parents, that those who 'mother' are not always those who give birth. 

I expected to be a mother.  It came with my earliest cultural programming--girlhood, young womanhood, wife, mother--all wrapped up in ribbons and bows.  It didn't account for all those mysterious things in life that make up a human being, or those quirks of fate that take them on a different journey.

I was a little mother first, the oldest of six, an only child for almost five years so by the time my youngest siblings came along and my mother was stretched to capacity (as many are), I was highly engaged in their caretaking, bottles, diapers, nurturing, watching, being a big sister.  By the time my youngest sister was born on my first day of high school, I thought she might as well have been mine.  We followed a pattern not particularly unusual in larger families, where oldest sisters take care of the young ones.

Just after my seventeenth birthday I left home, and two summers later as a college junior I worked in a small 28-bed hospital in southwestern Wyoming where among other responsibilities I was in charge of labor, delivery and the nursery on my shift.  At a time when women and their babies were kept in the hospital several days after a normal delivery and generally kept apart, I bathed, bottle-fed, rocked, changed and loved dozens of babies in their first week of life.  The moment a woman in labor arrived at the hospital I accompanied her in the labor room, prepped her, attended to her, and prior to her delivery I went into the very sterile, very white stirrup-ready delivery room to open all the sterile packs, then stood next to the attending physician while during delivery, handing him sterile instruments and bottles of Procaine.  When the baby came, I took it immediately from the doctor, wrapped it and wheeled it down the hall to the nursery, weighed it, measured it, footprinted it, gave it its first bottle, its first bath, and rocked it to sleep.  

Over the next several days I gave each baby several bottles of infant formula while its mother slept away down the hall (very few women breastfed then).  Once or twice a shift I'd take the baby down the hall to the mother who was also my patient, but hours I spent rocking them, bathing them, changing them, making it difficult not to be attached to them by the time they went home.  It was a different time in the life of hospitals, so different from labor and delivery and newborn nurseries today.

When my siblings first started having children, I was the aunt who came to help, first to Seattle when my oldest niece Megan was born, and then to Salt Lake City when another niece, Shaelyn, was born.  My sister had been bedridden for a month before Shaelyn came with a difficult pregnancy anticipating complications while her husband was a young medical student; while I fretted over her welfare I sewed an entire nursery set out of purple and yellow Laura Ashley fabrics--crib quilt, bumper pads, pillows, even a little music box that looked like a house--all long gone now. 

Marriage brought a husband who already had children and a wedding day that made me both a stepmother and a grandmother.   My grandchildren were all fairly young then, the oldest less than ten, the youngest not born, but my husband's children were all old enough to be out on their own. I know that my grandchildren love me and know how much I love them, the youngest now in high school and the oldest just returned from fighting an uncertain war in a faraway land.  

It might not occur to them readily that a woman who married their grandfather was their grandmother the same way a woman who married their uncle was their aunt.  Having stepgrandmothers myself, perhaps I understood it better.  I remember with affection when my youngest grandson made the connection on a day I picked him up from elementary school and he proudly announced it to his teacher.

Three years ago, we raised a thirteen-year-old niece for her seventh grade year, a child who had enough issues with her own mother and didn't want another one, yet we loved her as deeply and unconditionally as if she was our own, gave her what we hoped was stability, security, and the knowledge that she was loved.

I have cared for many children in many different ways, siblings, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, children in a hospital nursery, yet still, family members know if they want to really hurt me, the shiftest and surest way is to go right for the heart and say, "You're not a mother."  

You're not a mother.  Whether fate chose not to make some mothers or they chose it for themselves, moral authority does not suddenly shift in the direction of those who feel they are superior by virtue of being able to procreate.  The ability to conceive or give birth does not bring with it the automatic ability to be a parent (would that it did), and children in this world don't always go to those most capable or most deserving.  My sisters forget when they think I know nothing about raising children that I came to their sides when they needed me, both as infants and as new mothers.  I wasn't just the exotic aunt who flew off to Paris and knew nothing about children, or mothered anything beyond fur and feathers.

There's an exquisite hand-carved French swan cradle in our guest room up north, a happy find years ago in an antiques store in Carmel, which has remained forever empty but not without purpose. 

I've nurtured, loved, cared for, rocked, cradled, wiped away tears, bandaged, diapered, bathed, sung to, tucked in and blessed countless children, children who had other mothers.  I long ago came to a place of philosophical peace with not having my own children, though I understand the pain and the longing of those for whom biology oppresses.

I am not a mother.  But I have mothered, like countless others.

(top, photo of Float cradle bed: Okooko; bottom, photo of author working in the nursery at Uinta County Memorial Hospital in Evanston, Wyoming, summer of 1975)