(Me on the left, our darling mom and my sister, Carol, on the right. Our brother, Rick, was off at school I would suspect when this picture was taken.)
Nature often offers metaphors more elegant than any we can manufacture. In the redwood ecosystem, all seeds are contained in pods called burls, tough brown clumps that grow where the mother tree’s trunk and root system meet.
When the mother tree is logged, blown over, or destroyed by fire the trauma stimulates the burls’ growth hormones. The seeds release and trees sprout around her, creating the circle of daughters.
The daughter trees grow by absorbing the sunlight their mother cedes to them when she dies. And they get the moisture and nutrients they need from their mother’s root system, which remains intact even after her leaves die. Although the daughters exist independently of their mother above ground, they continue to draw sustenance from her underneath.
I am fooling only myself when I say my mother exists now only in the photograph on my bulletin board or in the outline of my hand or in the armful of memories I still hold tight.
She lives on beneath everything I do. Her presence influenced who I was, and her absence influences who I am.
Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay.
Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.
Author Unknown
This is a reading that I have sent to countless women when they have lost their mothers. It expresses what I feel so deeply about my own mother as I know she lives within me and in those whose lives she touched in countless ways. As I have entered into my “third third” as Anne Lamott, refers to it I find myself often gazing though her lens now of what I imagine life might have looked and felt like for her.
As Mother’s Day approaches for many of us it is filled with numerous ways in which to lean into it. Each of us were birthed by mothers, some of whom who could give us what was needed in terms of nurturing and guidance. Others grew in environments where mothers could not offer what they didn’t have, thus finding their mothering in their teachers, coaches, grandmothers, mothers of friends, fathers who stepped into both roles, aunties or even diving deeply within and becoming their own cheerleaders.
Some of us have mothers that we might have had very complicated relationships with and perhaps out of necessity the need to create a healthy boundary of not having them in our lives is our reality. Also, for some when their mothers leave this earth, there might even be a sigh of relief and that is okay. One cannot put into a tidy, universal box all the ways in which our mothers, birth, adopted, chosen, are continuing to land on our hearts and inform us of the many ways in which mothering continues to impact us whether they are earth side or not.
My mother and I shared the loss of our sons and she remained on this physical plane for sixteen months to show me how to continue to breathe when it hurt to. It was in the sharing of our losses that I never felt closer to her and saw her as the woman she was, is and what I would lean into when she was no longer physically present. I have this image of an IV hooked into me where a steady and slow drip of her essence was being infused into mine. Twelve years later, I feel the warmth of that trickle and rely on it to infuse me with just the kind of mother love and wisdom I am craving.
However Mother’s Day unfolds, may it be moved through our way. It might need to look and feel like any other day, perhaps pizza and Netflix, maybe it will be a day to honor and connect with others, perhaps a cocooning day feels best, yet stopping the incessant chatter that it should be anything other than what we are capable of is vital to remember.
One of my mom’s favorite things to say to me was always, “Please take care of your dear self.” I found myself repeating that to a bereaved momma friend recently and she expressed how it felt for her and that she planned on saying it to her loves as well. LoRaine’s legacy, lives on in the simplest yet most profound way and also in her honesty about what kept her tossing and turning at night. Her regrets, one of them being that Robert Redford and Paul Newman were not available when she was.😉 Mom is no longer earth side, yet she’s still as bossy as ever, and my husband often comes out looking for me in the garden when she has told him I’ve been outside long enough in the sunshine and heat. I’m still being mothered, something as a teenager which made me want to run for the hills, yet today, it feels like the warmest and most needed heart hug from one of my greatest fans.
Erma Bomback expresses a bereaved momma’s world so beautifully. "On Mother's Day I can think of no mother more deserving than a Mother who had to give one back." Do not be afraid of reaching out to a bereaved momma simply to let them know that you are thinking of them and remembering their child/children with them. Say their name(s), ask for a memory, share one and walk alongside, this IS the gift that keeps on giving.
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