Mother’s Day. I wake up this morning feeling insanely grateful for the gift of motherhood. I’ve been a mom for almost 27 years now….THAT is hard to believe. I don’t think it’s possible to find an honest mama that doesn’t describe motherhood as the most beautiful, painful, wonderful, heart wrenching, challenging, lovely, and completely overwhelming experience of life. There have been times where I just needed a break from the whirlwind of mothering (can I please just stay in a hotel and order room service and pee alone?). There have been times when I am surrounded by all of my amazing kids and I feel such an abundance of love that I could explode. There have been FAR more of the latter. The first kind was mostly when the kids were little and there was always so much to do and so much caretaking and sometimes my cup was just empty and I was oh. so. tired. Motherhood is this strange and wonderful circumstance of balancing between the giving of allll of yourself while trying not to lose that little speck of yourself that is still just you.
When I think of what motherhood has taught me, it seems impossible to write it all down. When I think of the greatest joys in my life, so many of them stem from the growing of a child in my belly, smelling that sweet wonderful baby smell, watching them experience the wonder of the world, picking them up and dusting them off when they fall down, kissing their boo-boos, lying in bed reading stories at night, putting them back in bed again and again and again when they start to test the boundaries, watching their wide eyed observations of all the little things our adult eyes don’t notice anymore, and literally crying every time I saw them on stage even if they were in the back row, not singing, and barely visible to me - what is that autonomic response of crying when your kids are performing? Every. Single. Time. All the tears. All the while, I was attempting to mold and shape them, only to watch them live outside whatever artificial lines I had created as they expressed their true and unique selves. Mothering is a true example of control being an illusion. I can try to teach them, but they are their own people. This lesson took me awhile. I’ve watched myself change as a mother from the mom who had a baby at 25 to the mom who had another at 30 and then again at 39….no one would expect that I would mother them all the same, and I certainly haven’t. (if you ask the eldest, the youngest gets away with murder….true.)
Growing your heart outside of your body ain’t easy…..there are so many times you want to yank it back in, keep it safe, protect it from all the harm that you know is out there. You want to save your children from the pain you may have experienced or save them from things you know they don’t yet understand. Then you see it. You see them encounter trouble. You see them recover. You see them learn to navigate their emotions, their desires, their own becoming. You see that they are capable, and that it is only THROUGH the struggles and the boo boos and the running into brick walls that they develop all of the life skills they need - the resiliency, the bravery, the humility, the compassion, the love.
I feel like we FORGET so much of motherhood - the time flies by so quickly, and it’s only when I leaf through the pages of my mind or of a photo album that I remember. I remember that time when I left my firstborn at daycare for the very first time, and I sobbed for an hour in the car - knowing that FOREVER, I was going to worry about this little one. That FOREVER when I was away from this beautiful little girl, I would feel a tiny, gnawing ache and worry inside my belly. It lessens, but is still there - even when my baby is a 26 year old grown woman. She is probably a stronger, wiser, and more independent woman than I ever was at her age , yet that little ache is always there. I remember falling asleep with her on the couch as an infant after a sleepless night, wondering if I would EVER be able to do this motherhood thing. I remember that when I went to leave my second child with his giant blue eyes and white hair at day care, I LITERALLY could not leave him there. I sat with him, rocked him, smelled him, and then promptly took him back to the car with me and took him home. I quit my job and spent the next two years watching him roar at ants by the front porch and laugh and giggle incessantly as he raced around the house with me chasing him. I learned to cook with him sitting in the bouncy seat on the kitchen counter, and I ran hundreds of miles pushing him in the baby jogger. I remember how he snuggled in by my side on the couch every opportunity he had, and I remember that every minute of every twenty four hours was hard and wonderful and exhausting and gratifying and so full of love. Then there was that surprise red headed bonus child when I was almost forty years old. He had that cherubic face, the naughty laugh, the love of nature and animals and the great big heart full of love for everyone around him - especially his big sister and big brother and all of their friends. We wrapped him up like a burrito and fought over who would get to hold him. This one teaches ME so many new things ever single day. I remember how hard it was juggling a growing career with all of this - wanting to stretch intellectually, yet find a way to do it that wouldn’t steal from mothering; a delicate and nearly impossible balance.
My mom gave birth to me at the way too young age of fifteen. She was a child raising me on her own - doing the best she could with what she had. I am so grateful for all of the sacrifices she made to ensure that I had a better life and that I could take care of myself. It’s what we all do; when we have grace for our own mothers and grace for ourselves, we realize that we are all doing the best we can with what we have. Not one of us has been a perfect mother; we have tried, failed, tried again, but mostly we have loved deeply. Motherhood is this beautiful and wonderful miracle that grows your heart to a million times its original size, breaks it a few times, and then continues to grow it in a million different directions. The humans I am blessed to be a mother to are hands down my favorite people on earth. They are true miracles.
“Around us, life bursts with miracles, a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colours, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there. “ —Thich Nhat Hanh