Mother’s Day – unabashedly female

May 8, 2016June 29, 2016

She is no longer perfection who fell from her pedestal.

It’s Mother’s Day today here in the US. I woke up thinking of my Mom. She passed away just about eight years ago. Hard to believe I haven’t seen her for that many years.

As I thought about her, I thought of this picture above of the two of us together, in one of those picture booths they had back in the day. We were traveling across the country by car and these picture booths were available at many of the rest stops in the midwest. The rest stops situated on overpasses that graced the highways. My parents had just split up and mom was taking us to visit our grandparents in Michigan. She drove the four of us, my sisters and me, all the way across the country by herself in her 1964 1/2 Bronze-colored Mustang.

I got up and looked at the real pictureÂ and as I looked at it, what struck me, maybe for the first time ever, was her full humanity – the fact that she was just a human being. What struck me was her age – she was 36 years old here. So young to be facing motherhood on her own. She had her parents 2,500 miles away, but she had no siblings. And, she was facing great shame and judgment during a time when single motherhood was very uncommon.

She was just a woman, a young woman, hit hard by infidelity, separation, and divorce.

I could feel this ‘just a woman’ piece for the first time. You know how, as kids, we see our parents as gods? How they seem so much larger than life, as if they are super people with super powers? And in seeing them this way, their love when we get it is magnified like 1,000x? 10,000x? or even a 1,000,000x? And, so are their limitations, wrongdoings, and faults?

I don’t know if that is how you’ve carried your parents’ (especially Mom’s) limitations and wrongdoings, but for so many years I did. They hurt so much.

But seeing her here as this beautiful woman, trying to hold it together while in so much pain, and seeing me next to her, eyes full of love for her and getting my face as close as I could to her face, what has been left of any feelings of not enoughness-of-love fell away. I could see that everything hurt so much because I loved her so much. We do as kids. We love our parents so much because we are still in touch with that purity of love, that innocence of love – until we cannot bear to feel it in a world that’s forgotten it. That was how it worked for me. Perhaps, it was different for you. And, what I see is this underlying way children are, still holding up this huge image of Mom because the love within our hearts is huge and full and without resentment – until it no longer is huge and full and without resentment.

Oh, how I see her now in her humanness. Her frailty and amazing strength to do what she had to do. And, I see my love for her – my big-hearted, shiny-eyed love for her. I just wanted her to be happy and I couldn’t make that happen. I just wanted to be happy and I wanted her to see me happy, and she just couldn’t all the time because of course she was human and doing what we do to get through these lives we are living. Seeing her happy would have made me feel safer during those years.

It feels funny to be writing this at my age – like I should have this all together by now and I didn’t. And, I don’t.

To finally see her in her tenderness, with all of her flaws, trying so hard to keep it together when she probably wanted to just run away from it all, is the greatest gift I could unwrap on this Mother’s Day.

She is no longer perfection who fell from her pedestal. And, neither am I.

May 6, 2010May 7, 2010

Mother: You Are Enough

â€œYes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.â€ ~ Alice Walker

I bet none of the Mother’s Day cards to be given this week include words like these.

My mother, Joan, died not quite two years ago. She wasn’t perfect. She did not hide her flaws. Yet, I didn’t know her obvious humanness was her gift to me until I sat with her body after she passed.

As I sat with her beautiful womanly body, a body that bore three daughters, I stroked her fine white hair, caressed her tender wrinkled face, and cradled her belly, the belly that was my first home. I felt awe for her obvious humanness and the strength she found as a single mother. The lines in her face bore witness to these parts of her life that were hard.

Like most daughters, I complained about the ways my mother was flawed. And I grew up fighting my own flaws, especially as a mother, especially when my life got very hard. I’ve really struggled with how I lost my way when my husband died. I wasn’t there for my children in the way I ‘should have been’ if I had been a good mother. I’ve held myself up to some standard that was always unattainable. I’m flawed. My daughters saw my flaws. They experienced my flaws. They can tell you in a minute all about my flaws.

What if I realized my flaws are my humanness? What if I simply accepted that I am flawed? human? real?

What if I saw my body now, while I am alive, like I saw my mother’s body when she was lying in the light that surrounded her moments after her death?

Flawed is a whole world away from sinful. I know sin is not real. I’ve seen too many babies born to believe one comes into the world as a sinner. Those tiny pink toes. Those cherub arms and legs. Those eyes that look at you from the other side of the mystery could never be marked with something such as sin…the kind of sin pill we keep being forced to swallow.

Flawed is where the light shines through, or as Leonard Cohen sings:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.

And that’s how the light gets out, how our light shines into the world, through our flaws, through our humanness.

And when we teach girls they must grow up to be perfect mothers, it’s a set-up for the never-ending striving for perfection, the never-can-be-reached destination that is exhausting and robs women of simply being themselves, and the opportunity to model to their children what it means to be content with oneself.

Oh, to feel myself relax into the shape of who I naturally am, flaws and all, so I might hold my daughters with the softness of self-love and acceptance.

Oh, to see my daughters relax into the shape of who they naturally are, flaws and all, so they might cradle their babies with the same softness of self-love and acceptance.

What if we gave our mothers a soft place to land, a place where they were showered with the praising words of “you are enough”?

May 10, 2009August 22, 2009

The Original Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870

Julia Ward Howe

To all women, to all men, and to all of Life, I offer you the original Mother’s Day proclamation of 1870 by Julia Ward Howe. Read it and let is wash over you. Take it in and see what comes from it.

I shared this on Facebook, and received many wonderful responses. One response was from my Aunt, a strong vibrant woman. She recognized her own voice in Howe’s and could see this voice in all women; and, she also feels gratitude for all the men in her life that have served when called.

I mention this because I feel both are true. Neither sentiment negates the other. We live in a world of paradox. While we can hold firmly to the knowing that we can have a world in which peace truly exists, we also can honor those who have fought for freedom and justice. There is only one answer to it all – Love, unconditional love.

Sometimes that love is soft, sometimes it is fierce, but hopefully we can all find a way to the love that is unconditional, for all that is, for all of life, for the depth and breadth of how Life reveals itself. If it is all One, then Love means to love it all, unconditionally, while allowing your own being to move towards that which you know from deep within your self is True in every cell of your being.
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

thanks to Jonathan Klate, of Amherst, MA, for sharing this.

May 12, 2008May 12, 2008

Post Mother’s Day Thoughts

Happy Mother’s Day. I am a day late in wishing this, and yet it feels right to wish it to all mothers for yet one more day.

Just one day is not enough to truly appreciate what mothers do and give.

Just one day is not enough to really stop and consider what your mother offered up to you.

Just one day is not enough to imagine what it would be like if we all looked inside to see what we expect of mothers and motherhood, what kind of ideals we hold mothers to, and how we might soften our expectations of our own mothers, ourselves as mothers, and all the mothers in the world who continually live under the stress of such expectations.

I had a wonderful day yesterday. I was able to see both my daughters, their husbands, and my grandson, as well as my mother and sisters.

I was particularly aware of the smiles on mothers’ faces and wondered what it would be like if we let mothers off-the-hook from expectations of having to be super human, and ultimately what it would be like if we let ourselves off-the-hook of the same expectations.