Mothering

The Bot and I used to look for Mother’s Day cards that weren’t so mushy as to be insincere, and that didn’t use the “L” word…i.e., love. He was quite certain that what he felt for his mom wasn’t love, and I was still snagged in a vortex of pain and confusion about my own. We had a few good laughs about the arbitrariness of Mother’s Day, and without a trace of self-pity, he wheeled his chair through a challenging world and found among his friends all the nurturance and understanding he needed. (May 7 was his birthday, by the way, the first one since his death nearly a year ago, and I still get the impulse to call him now and then.)

I remain ambivalent about Mother’s Day, as I am about most greeting card holidays that tell me what I am supposed to feel. There’s something annoyingly condescending about it. I dislike commercially-motivated customs and declarations that celebrate relationships that are personal and individual. My relationship with my mother was complicated indeed, but I grew to love her dearly over time, and I hope I also showed her that I did, but that’s between her and me. (And it’s a shock to realize that the dialog has not ended with her death.) In any case, love comes easier for me now–I appreciate how hard life can be, and I’ve become more respectful and forgiving.

But I also know that Mother’s Day can be an alienating or painful day for those whose mothers are recently departed or more achingly-than-ever gone, or those whose mothers were not up to the task, or those who yearned to be mothers themselves and never got the chance, or the ones who simply didn’t want that and chose a different (and quite worthy) life. And as for mothering, I have come to understand that we must nurture one another, here and now.

Then again, maybe Mother’s Day provides a kind of nudge, and I suppose that’s not so bad. Just this morning, I got a text from my dear friend Steve, who lives with his wife Priscilla in Louisiana, but has been staying in their family cottage in Michigan’s upper peninsula. The spring weather is chilly and erratic, and they are reading a lot of books and canning a lot of asparagus, and he said he was thinking of me because it’s Mother’s Day, and he sent me a Mother’s Day hug.

Steve does not realize how much he mothered me during the 1970s, a bleak time in my life. For example, he got me running, literally and figuratively, and I can still recall the sting of ice-needles upon our faces as we jogged through sleet and hail; at times it seemed masochistic, but then I’d find my stride, and I felt cleansed and energized, and I grew strong. We ran around Green Lakes, and on lunch breaks from our jobs at the bus company, once all the way to the zoo and back, probably returning to the office ridiculously late.

Steve and Priscilla invited me to dinners at their cozy home on the north side of town, with its fireplace and pale green walls and lovely sense of calm. He gave me a tiny handblown glass bottle as a present when I left on my journey West, and it still sits on my dresser, a testimonial that even what seems delicate can endure.

The point is, we have to mother one another, and that’s what good friends do when they sense the need. It’s one thing the pandemic has taught me. It isn’t easy for anyone, but we have so much power to steady each other. In the past week alone, I have been gifted with bread still warm from the oven, homemade soup, a perfect poem, the companionship of an understanding girlfriend willing to walk with me straight into the wind. My Besties helped me to decipher the puzzle of a brother who is dear to me, and with whom I was missing connection. Nancy, my mother-in-law, crossed to the other side a few days ago, but left me with a seed-starter growing kit, toyons to plant, and the sudden realization that she loved me, a knowledge that brightens my light.

My seven-year-old buddy Virginia gave me confidence and ideas for a little children’s library we are hoping to establish, and my wise older friend Aristotle reminded me that the sad memories are always there, right in the open, and we don’t need to be afraid of them. The Bicycle Girls have linked arms and motherly hearts as we each weathered the deepest of losses over the years, while also encouraging bravery and joy, and if that isn’t mothering, I don’t know what is. And I awaken each morning in the protective embrace of the hills, and a dauntless sky that says keep trying.

As I think about it, I realize that I have been granted a lifetime of mothering, and chances to mother as well. It’s an honor to be strong enough to soothe and care for another. I saw it in my husband most memorably as he tended to his mother in her final days earlier this week, a tableau of tenderness that I will never forget.

Maybe my idea of mothering is just another word for kindness, but no, I think it’s deeper than that. This line from a poem called Healing the Mare by Linda McCarriston comes to mind:

As I soothe you I surprise wounds

of my own this long time unmothered.

That’s what has happened to me during this pandemic, this time of loss, and this Mother’s Day. I am surprised anew by wounds of my own, but humbled by the healing that comes from soothing others. I am not a motherless child, but instead, I hope, a mothering one, not an orphan, but a daughter of the earth, connecting to other souls on my way to being stardust.