On the form in the doctor’s office, it asks how many “live births” I’ve had. I write the number two. I’ve grown two humans in my body, and that is a quantifiable fact. But after that, the numbers get fuzzy. I think I’ve had three early, spontaneous miscarriages over the years, but the doctor doesn’t count them because they weren’t confirmed by test. And after that, the notion of motherhood becomes not so much counted but measured in brush strokes, each one blurring into the next.
I once mothered a pelican, so much fishing twine wrapped around the place where his wing rotated in its joint that it dug down to the bone. I once mothered a little girl who was wandering, lost on a crowded, dark street on Halloween night. I felt her terror through the small hand placed in mine. I once mothered myself through a hard decision, forming and whispering kindness and encouragement to myself.
I feel surprised that mothering is always at the ready. I’ve found it kicking into action in the middle of the night and the middle of the grocery store. We’ve heard them call it “maternal instinct,” this force that pulls my words out and my arms wide, and sometimes, pulls on my heart like a riptide, one that could drown me. In so many ways, it feels like holding this kind of heart might sink you to the bottom. Might leave you without your own air.
I’m realizing the current, strong and invisible, was pulling before I had my own children. Every single person has a mother; each of us is impacted by her, for better or for worse. I’m often in conversations with women about deliberately embracing the beauty of our mothers, intentionally moving away from the things we don’t want to perpetuate, and continually negotiating with the things we inherit. But what I don’t account for — frankly never even consider — is how my daily life is being influenced still by my mother in countless subconscious ways.
A couple months ago, while on a trip, I bought a secondhand jacket from a flea market in New York City. The seller had a few racks crammed with interesting clothing, and tables arranged in a square on the blacktop heaped with old purses and blankets and other odds and ends you find being sold together only at flea markets. It was a bomber style with a wide black stripe down each arm and an embroidered tiger on one shoulder. I thought it was cool and would make a great souvenir. Last week, my sister-in-law saw it and said, “Doesn’t your mom have that same jacket?” I called my mother to confirm, and sure enough, she had purchased the same one years ago, in California, and still has it. Could be ten years old. I’m certain, something in my body, below my consciousness, knew this. I’m certain I was drawn to the jacket, had an attraction to it, because it was filed deep in my memory as a piece of home. A piece of my mother.
Also last week, I helped my daughter move out of the house she’s shared with four roommates this past schoolyear. As we packed boxes and cleared out cabinets, one roommate who was cleaning out the fridge offered me a glass of water from her filtered jug before emptying and packing it. I declined, saying I don’t really love water (okay, don’t get distracted, I know I need to drink water). “Oh, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” she replied with a laugh. Apparently, my daughter doesn’t drink much water either, to the obvious dismay of her roommate. The sweet girl then filled a mason jar of water for me anyway, urging me to drink. Mothering me.
The pull of our mother’s influence is real. I forget it’s always there until someone else points out the resemblance. It’s often, “You sound just like her when you answer the phone.” Small things like that, reminders that you came from someplace and that place was a person who gave you not only much of your genetic makeup but also your very first impressions of living. And those very first impressions, again for better or for worse, pressed on our physical bodies, our developing brains, our nervous systems, and our psyches in a way we can’t ever fully comprehend nor extricate ourselves from. Having a mother, being mothered can be another sort of drowning.
Sometimes through multiple generations, the influence of a mother bleeds through. But the authority of that influence doesn’t have to. Here is where we can enter adulthood claiming our own authority to reconcile with the parts of that influence we keep running into. We can honor and embrace the parts we enjoy, we can bless and release the parts that don’t work in our current lives, we can change our minds, we can try on the things our mothers wore well, we can understand context and culture play a part in shifting belief systems, and we can pursue healing from the ways our mothers have hurt us. We can get our heads above water, save ourselves. Invite God to mother us fresh. Call it a baptism instead.
I find the experience of being born from a mother is a tide that rolls in every so often, wakening the senses like the Pacific hitting your toes. It’s at once comforting and deep. Exhilarating and threatening. In the worst of cases, people die doing this work of mother. And people die from having one. In the best of cases, that tide is a hug so strong it presses on your lungs the deeper you dive; the flavor of love stays on the skin even when you’re apart. And for most of us, we fall somewhere in the middle: it’s complicated. One day, my kids will say of me and our relationship, “It’s complicated.” Because it often is.
Today, I have three prayers.
May you keep your head above water in your relationship with your mother, holding complexity, gratitude, and grief as they are called for.
Regarding those you mother in the world around you, may you release them to see you as complicated.
And may you let yourself drown in a Heavenly Mother Love you have been worthy of since the day you were born.
You are the Beloved.
-Leslie
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You did it again. Thankyou
Thank you so much for this. This was exactly what I needed today. My situations are immensely complicated, and I deeply appreciate you helping me hold space for the grief, the trying-to-figure-it-out-ness, and for the gratitude. Truly, God bless you for that! Happy Mother’s Day!! 😊❤️ I’m sending you and your family so much love! And I’m praying for you all right now! 😊❤️