| My Two Mothers May reminds me of Mom and the flowers that grow in the Midwest. She had special vases for her lilacs each spring. They don’t grow in Arizona, so I make do with pictures of them. Funny how we most appreciate what we have after it’s gone. This aphorism applies most specifically to moms. The other day I was thinking about the word mother. Without Mother Earth, we would have no place to put our homes, nowhere for our shoes to step, no place to swim or dance or dig. Without a mom, we would not be able to walk the earth because we’d have no body. She offered her physical, mental, emotional body to us. She “laid it all out on the table”—for 9 months. And that’s just the time to took to deposit us into the world. After that, an infinite amount of time was spent on our nurture, care and socialization into the society. So the two mothers, Mother Earth and our Mother, worked together as a dynamic dream team. Ok, maybe our moms weren’t perfectly attentive to us, but after all, they were trying to manage their own messy lives while helping us grow. We came without instructions, so moms “wing it” the whole time, and often feel unsure about what the next right step should be. Motherhood is too complex for words. Analogies of nature come close, yet one thing is true in our family: the love my sibs and I feel towards mom, 19 years after her passing, is just as strong (if not stronger) than it’s ever been. I miss her in a million ways. So this year, since I can’t tell her how my heart aches for her, I will honor the other mothers in my family (and my circle of life) who are mothers; those who mother me in ways that don’t get credit; and those who, like Mother Earth, give my feet confidence to move forward, even when I don’t see a clear path ahead. To paraphrase my brother’s answering machine, “And Mother, wherever you are, thank you!†|
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