This isn’t my favorite day of the year. But it doesn’t sting as badly today as in past years.
I’m learning. I know to avoid social media for the entire weekend, and then add a few buffer days for safety. Scrolling through people posting about how incredible their mothers are, how lucky they are to be a mom, or how proud they are of their children; it all upsets me.
I’d like to say I’m bigger than that, that the Buddhist philosophy of sympathetic joy or mudita has really permeated my whole personality, but it hasn’t. I see the inflated exclamations of love and joy and praise (it is social media, after all) and scowl a bit. You can’t even imagine how incredible my mother was, my pained inner voice grumbles. No sympathetic joy arises, or if it does, my self-pity overshadows it.
It is better today than in the past. As I mentioned in Ikea Psychology, I once tried to ignore this hallmark anniversary and instead wound up almost having a panic attack on a date. At least now own it as a shitty day and prepare for it accordingly.
Grief is an amputated limb. Love reaches, stretches, pokes, and itches, like nerve endings searching for that arm that is no longer there. It’s all this displaced love, restless and pained without anywhere to go.
So I’ve learned to let it flow into new places. It can go to her, of course. I can light a candle and look at my mother’s picture and say I love you; I can read a book of poems or cook a meal she loved.
But sometimes that’s not enough. The electric current of love is shorted without people to give it to. I have to close the circuit, to let the ionized atoms course through me into other people and then back again in a feedback loop of love.
As I wrote last week, one of my first thoughts after getting the news that she had died was actually of thanks.
Thank god I have so many mothers.
To celebrate Mother’s Day, to scratch that phantom itch, I have to celebrate it not just for her, but for every woman who has mothered me in life.
My grandmother, who fed me and nursed me in sickness more times than I could ever count. My aunts, who have grounded me, advised me, supported me, and uplifted me all in turn. My godmother, who is one of my dearest mentors and my new example of the maternal gold standard. My stepmother, who is an inspirational powerhouse of a woman.
Then there are all of my friend’s mothers; not only have they all housed me a time or two, but they did the awesome work of raising incredible humans that I am blessed to know. I’ve had bosses and farming mentors that have mothered me in turn.
One mentor, when I asked her why she never had children, responded “I knew I could either be an amazing mother of one or the energetic mother to a million.” Today is also for those women, the childless who may not be biological mothers but have hoisted up those around them in countless ways, large and small.
Each of these women is a mother in that I know they want the absolute best for me, for themselves, and for everyone they love.
Not to say any of us are perfect or unconditionally loving. The love we have can be clouded by our own pain or masked by confusion, warped by external circumstances. No family is simple or perfectly cohesive or easy. We are all in our worlds, navigating as best we can through new terrain. There always will be politicking and tension somewhere in the room.
But all that’s complicated is temporary. Spats and fits and hurt; they’re not necessarily short-lived, but they are temporary. Either they’ll dissipate with time, or they’ll end by a graveside.
Yesterday, at a cousin’s university graduation, this was vivid in my mind. If I was asked to face each person at the reunion and asked, “Do you wish for the ultimate, highest, and best good to come to this person?” I would unequivocally give a yes to every one of them.
If they were asked it of me, I know their answers would be a resounding yes. All of us want each other to be well, to be happy, to be free from whatever hurt is sitting at our feet.
Because if someone is wholly deluded and paranoid, wouldn’t your life be easier if they were well? If someone is aggressive to the point of violence, wouldn’t you feel safer if they were at peace? If someone has hurt your feelings and you don’t know how to repair it, wouldn’t the weight feel lightened from your shoulders if you both experienced radiant joyousness?
Not that we can conjure these things immediately. But we can wish them for ourselves and for those around us, even those we have difficulty with or feel little love for. Though it might not change the reality around us, it can open our hearts a little wider. It can add trust that, if someone speaks from a clear place unclouded by pain, they would wish me well. And when I am unclouded, I can do the same.
We all seem so much more fallible and silly, in this loving light. It brings a sense of ease, trusting that when all the pain is stripped away, there is love. That’s the power of a metta meditation practice, of loving kindness as a touchstone. It brings me such deeper patience and such an expanded heart space.
And that’s also a lesson my mother taught me. To turn my resentments over in my palm and inspect them thoroughly. Yes, this person can be unforgiving and rigid and rude; but, then, am I not doing the same in response?
This circuit of love is not only disrupted by grief, but by resentment. I don’t believe they’ll forgive me or love me, so why should I forgive or love them? One of the core lessons my mother gave me was through a collage she made for me as a girl. A framed work that has hung in every bedroom I’ve ever had.
“When you’re stuck in a spiral,
to change all aspects of the spin
you need only to change one thing.”
So instead of begrudging Mother’s Day, I’m trying to embrace it. I’m doing my best to change the direction of the spin. I’m trying to wield it as a means to give love and praise to all the mothers I am blessed with and have been blessed with and will be blessed with in the future.
So for all my mothers, happy Mother’s Day.