Mother Love
My mom was formidable, a force to be reckoned with. When she had her sights set on something she was determined to accomplish it. Even on her deathbed, after a fifteen month battle with ovarian cancer, she refused to accept defeat. Gasping to catch her breath, she asked to speak to her grandson, my five year old little boy who had been praying every day for his Baba’s healing. She held his pudgy hand in her translucent one and implored him not to lose faith in a God who wasn’t answering his prayers, “I am being healed, God is answering your prayers, He’s just doing it in a different way than we had expected.”
Mom refused to have a “funeral” and instead made all of the plans for a “party” after she passed, including sending her own enchilada recipe to the funeral coordinator to be served with chips, salsa, and instructions to have decorations to include bright colored balloons, none of those “depressing funeral flowers”. Sitting in the festive fellowship hall of the church, we all laughed and shared stories of my mom’s gumption and determination, while at the same I also knew the shadow side of those qualities in her to be controlling and stubborn. We spoke of her kindness and generosity but I equally remembered her anger and fears. All of those details felt true to me and loving the whole person that my mom was felt like the most honoring way for me to remember her.
We often do not speak of the less lovely, or shadowy, parts of a person, especially after they have passed. It seems ungrateful at best and at worst, like doing so would cancel out all of their wonderful “positive” qualities. However, in my therapy room I hear stories of mothers who all at once loved, hated, nurtured and harmed. Remembering and naming the contrary aspects of our moms is complicated and because we witnessed them up close, doing the most important and difficult job imaginable, we saw their heroism and their imperfections side by side. The mature work of naming how our mothers loved us and how they failed to perfectly nurture us or harmed us, leads to healing and transformation. We do not denigrate our moms, but rather look where patterns came from and seek to uncover ways in which we can move out of old narratives and wounds that do not serve us. We can then aim to do just a little bit better than they did.
We name the pain and the hurt, alongside the beautiful and the good, realizing these two seemingly opposing truths don’t cancel each other out, but rather live together in co-existence. In this way, we increase our capacity to love ourselves, all of the parts, the “good” and the “bad”, understanding those labels may not be as useful as “balanced and less balanced”, “desirable and less desirable”, and “healthier and less healthy”. We make room for our perfectly imperfect Mothers, thereby also creating space for the banished parts of ourselves that need to tell their truth. This ability to live outside of black and white thinking inevitably increases our ability to hold ourselves and others in love. We then can begin to re-mother our inner child (children) by offering them all of the love, affection and attention they needed in childhood. Even those of us who would say we had the most wonderful moms can point to ways we needed or wanted more and then begin to give it to ourselves NOW.
Like my mom I am learning that healing sometimes comes through death. By dying to the idea of who I believed I should be, ways I thought I needed others to be,or how I imagined the world ought to work in order for me to be happy, I made room for what IS. When I am able to show up to reality as it is and make friends with the truth, I stop shaking my fist at all that isn’t operating according to my plan and then can flow with more ease through my life. And like my mom, I see my contradictory beauty, ugliness, kindness and tyrant all show up in one day sometimes! In naming that, I accept responsibility and accountability and when needed, ask for forgiveness. In doing so, I believe I can make the world a little softer place for myself and those around me.
May you meet Mother’s Day in all of its loaded complexity with softness and open handedness to whatever it will be and celebrate whatever part of “Mother” is most loving for you.