Your mother’s collar may have been soiled with your sorrowed sobs.  Her eyelids may have been wrinkled with dreams of your happiness.  Her lap may have been stretched and softened to cradle your cultivation.  These are a woman’s badges of honor, medallions of her motherhood.

Women are born mothers.  Motherhood doesn’t ceremonially commence when a woman conceives a child.  She can bear children in her heart long before she ever (if ever) bears them in her womb.