by Jenny Rose | Sep 23, 2023 | A Flourishing Woman, The Journey
Today is Mabon. My calendar informs me it’s my weekend to post on Harvesting Stones. Some weeks I’m all ready to go and need do nothing more than push the publish button. This week these are the first words I’ve written, sitting here on my little porch on Saturday morning watching the clouds tatter before the morning sun.
Mabon, or fall equinox, is the balance point during which the hours of daylight and darkness are equal. It mirrors spring equinox and falls between winter and summer solstice. Fall is my favorite time of year, and this fall I’m in the midst of profound transformation. It’s a harvest season like no other in my life.
Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash
Sometimes we are so swept up in the tides of life and death we can do nothing but keep breathing. Days fall away from me, hours drift by and disappear without my awareness. I am focused on the next task, and the next. At the end of each day, I cross to-dos, questions, concerns off my lists, make notes for the next days and weeks, and fall into bed before rising at 4:30 or 5:00 to begin again.
In the midst of the chaos, I remember I choose my life. I’m getting better at just stopping.
Stopping.
I have before me a weekend. Mabon, 2023. It will never come again. A hundred tasks to do. A hundred things to worry about. A hundred choices to make.
Mabon is about balance. Action balanced with rest. Complexity balanced with simplicity. Fear balanced with confidence. Work balanced with play. Grief balanced with joy.
The light; the growing season; the summer of hospice, anguished love, extra caregivers, demented phone calls, medication lists, and, finally, my mother’s death, wane. Trees retain their leaves, but summer’s fierce green fades, bronzing, drying. Sedum and chrysanthemums bloom in the garden. A few sunflowers still flower among the ripening seed heads of their fellows.
Mabon. Balance. And I, a creature, a life among so many other lives, what can I say about it? How can I talk about balance when it feels so far from reach? How will I find balance again on the other side of transformation?
What I hold are impressions, vivid moments of mindfulness and sensuality, unexpected emotions, and the determination to cling fast to myself as autumn rip tides carry me where they will. For I am here, alive, curious, creative, awed, grateful, terrified.
Photo by Autumn Mott on Unsplash
I’m rereading Susan Fletcher, a favorite author. I just finished Oystercatchers. On the last page, this: “You’re this: an onion bulb. The glint of a rabbit’s eye. The clicking of a beetle’s legs on a leaf; the leaf’s brown edge; dandelions; a pebble; windfall fruit.”
I read no more; I was crying too hard.
My mother is always with me. She has always been with me. My blood, my bone, my sculptor. Now, her death is with me, too, and her dying. Grief has not come to the front door, which I’ve left ajar in anticipation of its coming. It’s crawled through cracked windows, slipped through old screens long-dead cats tore with their claws. It’s drifted down the chimney, come up through gaps in my old wood floor from the cellar, crept along the copper radiator pipes, cool now, but soon to be warming.
I carry bewildered pain within me, like a ripe nut in its shell. How does it happen that a human being, intelligent, talented, competent, with so much to give, can have no feel for life? How can anyone refuse to engage with the mystery, the glory, the terror, the sweetness, and yes, even the pain of what it means to be alive, to love, to be broken and heal over and over?
Isn’t it strange that I find her in the small delights she herself would never have recognized as sustenance, as miracles? Something in Mom was too blind or too broken or perhaps too frightened to allow life to clasp her in its arms. Something. We could never talk about it. I knew it was there, but she would not reveal even the edges of her true experience.
In the end, as the fogs of dementia surrounded her, she was at last able to say she loved me. I have that, at least. And yet, she was demented … But I choose to believe.
Mabon, then, is the autumn garden. Planting blue and white grape hyacinths in drifts with daffodils under the magnolia so in spring they will bloom and naturalize as the seasons come and go. Shoveling and spreading compost mixed with aged cow manure, rich with earthworms and beetles. Pruning, trimming, prying weeds and grass out of cracks in the sidewalk and driveway. Disturbing our small brown toads as I weed and clean up debris in readiness for the blanketing fallen leaves. Dividing and transplanting. Spider webs jeweled with dew. Chilly mornings and gorgeous afternoons. The smell of my catnip, ecstatically trampled and chewed, no doubt discovered by the neighborhood black cat, Winston by name. Planting a few end-of-season sale perennials from our local greenhouse: lavender, black-eyed Susan, sedum. My garden manicure of dirt ground under my fingernails and into my cuticles, always dry and ragged from so much time in the pool. It won’t scrub away, but it will soak off in the pool during my next lesson. Peeling skin and blisters. Bruised knees.
Photo by Dakota Roos on Unsplash
Mabon is the early morning mist rising from the Kennebec River three or four blocks away. It moves up from the surface of the water, along the dark, early-dawn streets and walkways, enveloping the trees, rising to hide the church spire and then gently dissolving as the sun rises while the crows call and the neighborhood rooster announces the dawn.
Mabon is the taste of Apple Pie Chai (Republic of Tea) with a dollop of half n’ half in it, as delicious as it sounds. It’s scented candles burning in the first hours of my day as I journal, make lists, think about the day ahead. Orange, red, and golden candles – orange and spice, apple and cinnamon, sandalwood. One of my closest friends says sandalwood is a “dirty hippy smell.” The thought makes me smile every time I light it. The apples and cinnamon candle sputters companionably because it has a wooden wick (Book&Reverie candles on Etsy).
Mabon is linen sheets dyed a glorious old gold on my bed, textured, heavy, luxurious. It’s socks and sneakers instead of my Keen sandals. It’s my heavy grey shirt jacket with a Buff bandana or a scarf.
Mabon. The Wheel of the Year turns. Seasons and cycles. These things remain. These things are predictable, comforting. They sustain me.
This year, Mabon is also a blizzard of what feels like endless documents, digital, paper, filed away, stacked on my desk, put into binders, stored on USB sticks. Soon, Mom’s house in Colorado will sell, the requisite paperwork will be filed for tax preparers and other legalities. Printing and scanning, FedEx drop offs, notarizing, will eventually be complete. The business of opening accounts with a new bank, obtaining new cards and checks, changing automatic payments and direct deposits, connecting to other accounts, will be finished. Insurance, retirement accounts, paying off debt – all will be managed. I will create new systems, effective and simple.
This week my nearly 20-year-old Subaru failed to pass inspection. I can’t understand it. The driver’s side door handle still works; I don’t really need the others. It drives. I don’t need AC or an audio system. I can manage without being able to open the back hatch. The heat and defrost work if I put in the fuse, and the battery is good as long as I don’t leave the fuse in when I park it. I know exactly where to bring my fist down on the hood when an ice storm seals it shut and I need to open it and put the fuse back in.
It needs $3000 of work. It’s worth $1100.
I need a new car. More tasks. More paperwork. Insurance. Registration.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
These things, the documents, the tasks, the paperwork, phone calls, texts, emails, are nothing but the chrysalis of transformation. I know it. I feel stressed and overwhelmed much of the time, frustrated by delays, miscommunications, jumping through legal and bureaucratic hoops. It’s all temporary, though. It will fall away, along with the autumn leaves. The chrysalis will shred in the dark winds of late autumn and winter, this rip tide will release me, and then … something new.
Through it all is my mother. My memories of her. The pain of my love for her. I’ve inherited so much more from her than assets. There is some comfort, some strange, painful comfort, in remembering to pause. To choose. To stop. To be touched, broken open by the small daily beauties and comforts of life. The taste of creamy tea. The scent of sandalwood. The texture of rich soil. The late copper and garnet blooms of mums. The mist rising into the sun’s golden warmth. Most of all, the painful risk of loving friends, family, the world, life.
Look, Mom. See the little toad? Let’s put him here, under the rhododendron. Remind me to buy toad houses.
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
by Jenny Rose | Sep 9, 2023 | Choice, Power
I’m a spinner, a speeder, a thought racer. (Yes, I know it doesn’t help. I know rocking chairs and hamster wheels go nowhere. I know worrying is pointless.) Under the right conditions, the inside of my brain is like a dusty attic filled with hysterical cats zooming in all directions, climbing the walls, knocking over piles of junk, filling the air with dust and yowls. Chaos. Destruction. I call it speeding. I call it anxiety. The world calls it racing thoughts.
Whatever we call it, it’s a miserable state of mind, and a common one.
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
Herding cats, as any cat lover will tell you, never works. Sheep, maybe. Cows. But not cats.
However, at times familiar life goes off the rails in such varied, complex, and unforeseen ways I find myself once again herding cats, usually during the hours I need to be sleeping, though sometimes those hours bleed over into days when I’m supposed to be focusing. On something productive or something relaxing or something. But all I’ve got are catapulting (pun intended) thoughts and emotions racing around in my brain.
Not long ago, before the start of my current cat rodeo, I read somewhere (probably Substack) about The Rule of 9s. I’ve since gone back to look for it, but I can’t find the original source. Anyway, I didn’t come up with it myself. I wish I had.
The Rule of 9s is a tool used to identify what really matters. Or, if you like to look at things bass-ackwards, like me, what really doesn’t matter.
This morning, for example. I could garden, work on business at my desk, write, or make a Spotify playlist. I have just under two hours at my disposal before I head off to work.
I have a lot of desk business just now as my brother and I (mostly my brother) wind up my recently deceased mother’s estate and deal with our inheritance. By inheritance, I mean not just assets, but the inevitable emotional inheritance we all receive from our families of origin. What I’ve heard is true. When a parent dies, we cannot be prepared for the ways it changes us and how uncomfortable some of that change is.
My metaphorical cats – these mixed up thoughts and feelings — pull me in different directions at the same time. Everything feels overwhelming right now. It’s irritating. Two items on my grocery list and I’m overwhelmed. Now and then I have a few minutes free from the inundation, but I get a call, a text, another document to sign, and I’m overwhelmed again.
Fortunately, I just learned The Rule of 9s.
So, the option of gardening. It’s hot outside. Really, really hot and humid. Just when the weather should be getting crisper and cooler, a heat wave has arrived. It will ease in the next couple of days, but it’s brought a resurgence of mosquitoes and it’s not fun to be outside. So, no garden this morning. I’ll wait for cooler weather. Is that a crisis?
Photo by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash
Will gardening or not gardening matter in 9 seconds? In 9 minutes? In 9 hours? In 9 days? In 9 months? It might start to matter then, because I’ll be making spring plans and whatever progress I make this fall will affect those plans. But it’s clearly not urgent. I won’t remember choosing or not choosing gardening today.
Business at my desk. I’ve already done some of that this morning. Balanced the checkbook. Looked for a document I’m waiting on from my bank (not there yet). Made some notes. Did some planning. Considered options. I have money in my account. All the bills are paid. I don’t need to spend anything today. Will taking care of more business or not taking care of more business matter in 9 seconds? Nine minutes? Nine hours? Nine days? It might start to matter at that point, as one thing leads to another as we wade through this process. If I stay on top of tasks, step by step, I know I’ll eventually come out of the tunnel with effective systems in place that work for me and respect my goals and values. Tempting to start herding the cats quivering on my desk, but I only have two hours and nothing is urgent.
Make a Spotify playlist. I may shortly have an opportunity to bring a dance program to the community. I’ve tried several times in years past without success, but I haven’t given up hope. Now that I’m on Spotify (though I have misgivings about how platforms like this fail to support artists), I wanted to get a few of my dance playlists put together. I have them burned onto CDs and in iTunes, but not on Spotify. However, I don’t have any solid dates for dance now. It’s all in the planning stages. At some point it will matter, but not right now.
Writing. It’s my weekend to publish on Harvesting Stones. I don’t have to. It’s not required. But I’d like to, if for no other reason than it’s my usual routine, a stepping stone in the current chaos, and it comforts me to be doing something normal. Not to mention how much I enjoy it. Hard to think about focusing on it, though. All those cats whizzing around …
Will writing or not writing matter in 9 seconds? Nine minutes? Nine hours? Nine days? It won’t matter to the world, but it matters to me. It will matter to me in two days, when Saturday morning comes and I either do or do not have a rough draft I’m happy with.
So I’m writing. And while I’m doing that, miraculously, the other cats settle down. Tired, I guess. Maybe they’ll curl up in the chaos they’ve wrought and sleep a while. Sleep is good.
As I live my life and listen to the inside of my head, especially the anxiety, the fear, the resistance, the catastrophizing, I pull out The Rule of 9s and apply it. Will this matter in 9 seconds? In other words, will I die in 9 seconds if I don’t do whatever-it-is or figure it out, completely and perfectly? How about in 9 hours? (Have you ever noticed how crazy your nighttime I-can’t-sleep thoughts are in the light of day?) In 9 days will I even remember whatever feels stressful this minute? Will the fearful thing I can imagine happening be important in 9 weeks? In 9 months? In 9 years?
The Rule of 9s requires I slow down and think. The questions give me perspective, help me with a reality check. I stop reacting and remember my power to choose. I decide what’s more important than my peace of mind (not much). Hysteria is contagious; so is calm.
Photo by Ryan Moreno on Unsplash
Applying The Rule of 9s settles the cats right down. One or two may still zoom, because cats are contrary like that, but the chaos diminishes as I become intentional and mindful. I can find some focus, at least for a few minutes. I know what to do next, in the next 9 seconds, anyway. The next 9 years can take care of themselves.
Questions:
- What are your strategies for pulling yourself out of racing thoughts and anxiety loops?
- How do you choose priorities?
- Is your experience one of choice in life, or one of reaction and compulsion?
- Share something ridiculous that’s kept you up at night.
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here: 
by Jenny Rose | May 27, 2023 | Connection & Community
My partner tells me I “build bridges.” He’s right. I do. All the time. Building connection is the foundation of my life – connection with myself and with others. I also do what I can to support connection between others.
It’s no wonder I feel increasingly alienated in a culture focused so strongly on division.
Image by Bob Dmyt from Pixabay
Some people, and right now many people in power, are breakers rather than builders. I won’t pretend I understand such a priority, but it’s undeniably real and undeniably destructive.
As I’ve thought about building bridges, I’ve realized underneath the patterns of building or breaking is a larger issue: power.
If evil exists, I believe one of the first steps on the road to it is the willingness to steal power by any and all means. When individuals and groups of people lose their power, they’re easy to break, easy to disconnect and isolate. Easy to control.
Dedicated power-stealers are very, very skilled at what they do, so skilled they often present themselves as the marginalized or disempowered victims. In this guise, they infiltrate systems, organizations, and groups like a cancer, steadily breaking healthy connections and communities and appropriating power. By the time enough people notice, clearly identify what’s happening, and organize resistance, the balance of power is so skewed serious conflict becomes inevitable. Those addicted to stealing and hoarding power don’t give it up without a fight. This classic aggressor behavior is referred to as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. In this dynamic, when individuals and groups are forced to defend themselves from aggressors their defense is framed as bigotry and hatred. Brutal social sanctions steered by those who steal power are activated to stifle it.
Few see past the emotional rubble and wreckage of destruction to the offense triggering the defense, and even fewer see past all the drama and distraction and recognize a simple, savage power grab disguised as social justice, political correctness, compassion, empathy, etc.
This is not to negate the true problems of systemic and institutionalized racism and bigotry so many people stagger under every day. We all know power (and other resources) are not distributed equally – far from it. And why is that? Because there have always been people who are committed to disempowering others.
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash
I’m a builder, not a breaker. Not a breaker, I hasten to say, in the sense that I deliberately hurt others or injure healthy connection. However, I have more than once tried to build a bridge to nowhere. Worse, I have spent much of my life frantically maintaining my bridges to nowhere, a kind of counter-terrorist who never blows up a bridge but instead batters myself against a broken one as though my blood, sweat, and tears will magically build a solid, effective connection.
The thing I invariably forget is not everyone wants to build a bridge!
Sometimes, and I’ve done this, we blow up bridges accidentally. Some action or word becomes a catalyst and suddenly … BOOM! The bridge is destroyed and we’re left wondering what the hell happened.
Sometimes our bridges are sabotaged by others and deliberately destroyed. Unless both parties connected by the bridge understand what’s happened and work together to make repairs, the bridge becomes permanently weakened.
Sometimes, and I’ve made this choice, too, we deliberately walk away from a bridge we’ve built. It didn’t connect us to what we were hoping for, or it didn’t connect us at all. We built the bridge, it went nowhere, and we found no there there, so we leave it behind to fall into disrepair.
Saddest of all (to me) are the people who don’t value bridges, or can’t recognize them. Building is expensive. It takes time, patience, commitment, and cooperation. It takes emotional labor. For me, the rewards of good bridgework are enormous. Healthy connections enrich us and I believe bring joy and healing into a suffering world. Healthy connections enhance individual power and are productive and creative rather than destructive.
Anyone can destroy. How many can create?
At the same time, I accept and endeavor to respect that some people have no interest in building bridges, at least not with me. Some people are focused on other things, and the activity central to the meaning and purpose of my life isn’t in their field of view at all.
By Landsil on Unsplash
It’s probably unwise and unnecessary to take this personally, although I have a tendency to do so. On the other hand, I have no interest in coercing anyone to build a bridge between us. Forcing healthy connection is impossible, not to mention coercion is a power-over tactic I don’t employ or participate in.
Sometimes I build bridges to nowhere. I work hard, for a long time, because that’s my default. Eventually, however, I notice I’m the only one building. A little bit after that I wonder what would happen if I stopped building. Would the person I want connection with even notice? Would they pick up the work I left undone? Would they value our potential connection enough to meet me half way? Part way?
Honestly, in the case of most of my bridges to nowhere, once I stop building the building stops. I move on, looking for another place to build another bridge. Those abandoned bridges are, at best, picturesque ruins going … nowhere. Resting places for unrealized possibility and potential. Crumbling monuments to loss, heartbreak, letting go, and wisdom.
Questions:
- Consider your life. Are you more of a builder or a breaker?
- When you struggle to connect with someone who’s just not that into you, how do you feel?
- If you can’t successfully build a connection with someone, do you leave quietly or blow up the metaphorical bridge you were trying to build?
- Who or what has sabotaged previously healthy connections in your life?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
by Jenny Rose | Feb 25, 2023 | Connection & Community, Emotional Intelligence, Shadows
I found a brief offering in my Inbox from Seth Godin recently about bitterness being a wall we can lean against. The image caught my imagination. Since then, I’ve been thinking about walls … boundaries … supports … prisons … and the desperate, destructive choices we make to survive.
By Marc Pell on Unsplash
Walls. On the one hand, I like walls. I invariably position myself with my back against a wall when I’m in crowds or unfamiliar places. Nothing malignant can sneak up on me from behind. All my hypervigilance can go into watching my sides and front. I feel safe(er).
A corner is even better. Now two sides are covered.
A third wall, as in a blind alley or cul-de-sac, begins to feel more like a trap than a place of protection. What if I want to run away? I’m blocked on three sides.
A fourth wall? Now I’m in prison.
The thing about walls is they may keep danger out, but they keep everything else out, too. The good stuff. Love. Sunshine. Wandering children and butterflies. Inviting paths and trails. Possibility. Exploration. Views. Perspective. Wonderful surprises.
Walls, like everything else in life, can be taken too far. Built too wide and thick. Impenetrable. Too high to climb.
Shelter or dungeon?
What about metaphorical walls? What do we lean against because it’s familiar and we believe it keeps us safe from failure, from disappointment, from heartbreak?
Bitterness, certainly. We’ve risked. We’ve been vulnerable. It ended badly. We feel angry, disappointed, resentful. Never again, we tell ourselves. Things don’t work out for us. The world is against us. People suck. Life sucks. It’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. We’ve found a wall to lean on, a wall protecting us from trying again, risking again, feeling unpleasant feelings again.
By Hector J Rivas on Unsplash
But the wall is made of unpleasant feelings, isn’t it? Bitterness is the result of unresolved unpleasant feelings. So it’s really not protection. It’s reinforcement. It’s the thing closest to us pulling our focus from happier thoughts and feelings. It’s a constant negative reminder. It locks us in place with it, and it blocks any kind of relief.
As I’ve lived my life the last couple of weeks, interacting with and observing others, listening to the inside of my own head, I’ve made a list of walls we lean against:
Victimhood (closely allied with bitterness.)
Blame (oooh, this is a juicy one. “It’s not my fault. I have no responsibility, and therefore no power.”)
Denial (leaning on the wall, eyes squinched shut: “No, I won’t believe that! No, it’s not true! No, it’s not happening! It’s too scary! I’ll only accept what makes me feel good and in control!”)
Chronic health problems (“I would _________, but I can’t because I’m sick.” Sigh. Moan. Groan. Someone once said to me, “I don’t know what I’d do without my pain!” as though pain was her lover.)
Lack of money (“I can’t be happy. I can’t have/do what I want. I can’t experience abundance. I have no power.”)
Perfectionism (a personal favorite. “I would, but I’m afraid to because I won’t do it perfectly! So, no point in trying. I’m imperfect and therefore can contribute nothing of value, not even myself. Expect nothing from me. ‘Cause I’m so imperfect.”)
I don’t suggest we’re never victims, never have health problems, never experience financial scarcity. I don’t minimize the challenges of perfectionism or fear or the seduction of blame. However, constructing a wall out of such experiences and feelings and deciding to spend the rest of our lives leaning against it seems like a dubious choice. It may feel like it props us up and allows us to survive, but is survival the best we can hope for? Is leaning against a wall to stay on our feet the best we can do?
By Christina Botelho on Unsplash
Can a wall made of bitterness stand by itself? If we choose to step away from it, support ourselves, will the wall crumble? I wonder. What if the wall needs our support more than we need its support? It takes a lot of energy to maintain a wall.
What would happen if we just fell down instead of constructing walls to lean against? Better yet, what if we choose to lie down now and then, take a break, look at the sky, feel the world on our skin and beneath us? What if, when we feel hurt or despairing or sick or broken, we lay still and whispered, “Help!” and rested and waited for something or someone to come along and give us a hand back to our feet? If we’re not leaning (cowering) against walls, we’re in full view. Life can find us. Friends can find us. Help can find us. Hope, inspiration, and comfort can find us.
Walls can be useful. But they can also imprison us. They can be strong and organic and lovely, as in healthy boundaries. They can be poorly built and inadequate, too. Or just old and tired. Crumbling. Falling down. Gnawed away by Time’s tooth.
I ask myself, with all the world before me, why do I choose to lean against walls that separate me from it? Is that what I mean by safety?
Questions:
- What walls do you lean against?
- Do you think of a wall as protection or prison?
- How have your walls let you down?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
by Jenny Rose | Feb 11, 2023 | Connection & Community, Parenting
Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash
February. A couple of days with -40 degrees wind chill here in Maine that felt apocalyptic. A dead car battery. At work, a broken pump in one of the pools, private swim lessons, ill team members, and an upcoming lifeguard recertification training this weekend, which I’m sure I’ll pass. Probably. A $250 “unscheduled delivery charge” on a $500 + propane bill, as though the brutal cold was somehow our fault. A possible estate tag sale on the contents of my mother’s untenanted house in Colorado, as she now lives in memory care.
The sound of the cardinal at the birdfeeder. The cats basking on my desk in the morning sun. Blueberry lavender tea. The scent of a lavender candle. Imbolc, when the wild maiden returns. The Ice Moon, or, if you prefer, the Storm Moon. Daylight arrives earlier and lingers later.
Through it all, I think about The Mother. The Mother the wild Imbolc maiden might become. The Mother who nurtures, creates, carries the possibility of new life and beginnings within us. I think of biological mothers who labor and deliver a new baby into the world. I think of foster mothers, substitute mothers, women who grieve for their empty wombs. New mothers. Struggling mothers. Mothers whose children have grown and gone, or just … gone.
Sisters and aunts and grandmothers. The long line of mothers who stand behind our own mothers.
Myself as Mother.
I wrote down a quote recently. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the source of the quote! I always think I’ll remember and then I don’t. Never mind. If it’s yours, let me know and I’ll give you full credit!
“A mother without fear of her own potential.”
There are so many ways to unpack this. A creator, an archetypal mother without fear of her own potential. Is there any artist or maker alive who doesn’t struggle with his or her fear of failure and success?
A young woman, simmering with hormones, discovering the power and potential of her sexuality in the context of rape culture and patriarchy; risking unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, violence, heartbreak, health, and even life.
A woman who longs to be Mother but cannot conceive, or carry, or deliver a living child. The yearning. The agony. The grieving and despair at being unable to fulfill such an overwhelming biological imperative. A woman who feels herself a vessel of death rather than a vessel of life.
Photo by Laercio Cavalcanti on Unsplash
A mother, the sweat of labor still on her face, swept with a ferocious love for the infant she’s just birthed, a love terrifying, passionate, transforming the landscape of her life irrevocably and forever.
A mother, lined, weary, anguished over her child’s unhappiness, ill health, addiction, behavior, wounds, choices, death. The passion of her pain equals the passion of her love. The passion of her rage and fear equal the passion of her love. How can this child we carried and cherished and loved so deeply, this child we would have defended with our teeth, our fingernails, our life, make self-destructive choices? How can they refuse to love themselves? How could we have failed to protect their health and happiness?
The ability to love like a firestorm, like a hurricane, like an earthquake, most would agree, is exciting and wild, a beautiful force of nature, perhaps the most powerful feeling in the world. But never forget passion cuts both ways. If we release and allow the potential of our love, we have opened ourselves equally to grief, loss, rage, unendurable pain.
I am a mother. I fear that potential.
Not that I had a choice. The feel of my newborn sons in my arms overcame me as powerfully as labor did. I was helpless before it. Their wellbeing and existence twined inextricably with mine in an instant. I made no conscious choice and had no conscious control enabling me to stand back from my potential as Mother.
I was Mother. They made me into Mother. I can never go back.
Photo by Liane Metzler on Unsplash
Yes, I know, boundaries are important. Individuation is important, as are freedom, letting go, and a hundred other facets of emotional intelligence I’ve written about on this blog. But I’m not talking about the long road of motherhood here, where we learn and stumble, fall down to rest, weep, get up, learn and stumble again. I’m talking about the timeless primal bond, deeper than language, deeper than reason. The wild love that works through us. Divinity, perhaps. Some would say The Devil. Whatever it is, it’s bigger than us. Bigger than me, anyway.
Do we imagine our own mothers feeling about us as we do about our children? Can we imagine it?
I can’t. If my mother felt for me what I feel for my sons, the tempest of her passion was never expressed in a way I understood it. Not in words, not in touch, not in action. Now, as she drifts in her dementia, I wonder, though, if she did feel as I did, but some great wound or constriction in her heart, now loosened because she does not remember it, did not allow her to express it. Perhaps her fear of her own potential as Mother was too great to allow her to demonstrate the depth of her love.
If so, I can understand. I can forgive.
Can I forgive myself as Mother? Can I forgive the things I didn’t say and should have, the things I did say and shouldn’t have, the unintended hurts and consequences as I made choices and lived my life? Can I forgive my inability to keep them safe every minute of their childhoods? Can I forgive my ignorance, my lack of understanding regarding their needs and challenges?
I used to tell a story about an orphaned boy who was “so lonely and so hungry nobody wanted to be with him.” That phrasing always made me fight tears when I spoke it. More than my many imperfections as Mother, can I forgive the way I tried to abandon the Mother part of myself? As my sons grew into manhood and began to live their own lives and I saw their challenges and pain, the Mother in me was too lonely and too hungry. Too filled with pain and rage, grief and shame. I turned away from her for a time, walked on without her, left her alone in the wilderness to live or die, as long as I didn’t have to experience her hunger, her loneliness, her feelings.
With my first child, I claimed the potential for Mother within myself. I flung myself into it, holding nothing back, having no thought of caution or reserve. And then, years later, I rejected it, abandoned joy and love because I could no longer face the pain. I severed myself from my own mother. I severed myself from my experience of Mother. I sundered myself and lived for a time with a cleaved heart.
But my love is a blind thing, a feeling without reason or logic. No matter the distance between my mother and myself, my sons and myself, my love did not diminish. Nor did the suffering that goes with it. The internal Mother I evicted grieved and wept. She lit candles and raged and feared and prayed for peace, for all to be well. She scratched at the windows of my life, whispered dreams beside my pillow, followed me like an abandoned spirit. She is mine and I am hers, though I tried to cast her away.
I know I will never be whole without her. The child within me, the crone I am growing into – both need the Mother. I need her as I care for animals and people, as I nurture new life in the garden, as I teach children to swim, as I write, as I cherish my friends and family. As I cherish myself.
Perhaps I simply needed a break from the pain. Perhaps I could not learn to love myself while being battered by the needs and demands of my mother and my sons. Now, my ability to care for and nurture myself gives me a place to pause, to rest. Perhaps, as I age, I am growing in wisdom, losing not the depth of my love, but the frantic edge that cuts so keenly. Love, after all, endures. Motherhood endures. I am the sum of my parts plus a little more. I cannot decide to be less. I might as well accept all of myself, reclaim all of myself, be all of myself. 
And so, I’ve returned, Mom. We were not a perfect mother and daughter, you and I. We each did our best, and now my best is better than that. Let there be peace between us now, at the end. I have never stopped loving you. And Mother of my sons, cease following me just out of sight. Come in. Let us soothe one another’s weary regrets and scars. We loved with everything we had. Those we gave life to were never ours to keep. They must walk their own paths. Let us find a way to release our love from our pain.
Let us reclaim one another.
Questions:
- What was your experience of being mothered?
- What has been your experience of being a mother in the wide sense, as a creator, a biological mother, or a substitute, surrogate, or foster mother?
- What potential in yourself do you fear?
- Who in your life has been so hungry and so lonely nobody wanted to be with them? Have you ever felt like that person?
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