It’s Sunday, I’m hosting Mother’s Day and I know that it’s not a good day for lengthy posts pondering mother meaning.
So, I’ll just say that when it comes to mothering, my mom has to get credit as a “good enough” mother—and at 49 I take the blessings and the wounds into an embrace trusting that all is perfect, I’m just tasked with figuring out how. Particularly as a spiritual being I really love and appreciate my mom (even if her incarnate self has rooted more deeply than Narcissus by the still waters of the zeitgeist, even if she literally shot me down in a past life, per her own reckoning… or was it I who shot her down?). In the spirit of this time, perhaps we might strive to allow the mother wounds and as well the hugs and kisses to be so much water under the bridge… provided we’re ready to sit under the bridge and hear the river laughing and crying.
While Andy is not my mother, she is an amazingly good mom—engaged, sane, fun, fair and able to really think about what kids need (our own, but also other kids). I’ve noticed that kids really like being around our house, sleeping over, etc. And while they may “thank” me the way one thanks a driver who takes you somewhere, they thank her as a true host. Whatever penchant for mothering that I may carry, the lioness’ share I’ve learned from her (and her mom Ellie, and my buby Rose, and her sister Karen—a true earth mother), and on this day I particularly want to celebrate the food, the touch, the light, the tears and the laugher… and ditch the ideas, symbols and words lovingly into the crying and laughing river.
We sit on the banks, we are the stones, and we are the river: we are each other’s flesh and blood, and we are each other’s spirit.
“Mothering” is an attitude and not merely a gender—it is an ethic of nurturing, caring and transcending the individual Self—and in this spirit I want to appreciate the many wonderful “moms” that I encounter in the course of my life: in my friendships, in my clinical work, in this blogosphere and in our expanding and awakening consciousness where, at least at the spirit level, the child and the parent are but passing reflections in a shattered mirror, rainbow images dancing upon a dazzling brook—a unity of opposites that every mother can love, but only the great oceanic Mother can possibly hold.
Namaste, Bruce
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
“A unity of opposites.” Indeed.
Happy Mother’s Day – to Andy, to you, and to your family.
Right back at ‘cha.
I love your notion of mothering as an attitude, a philosophy, a way of being in the world. I agree entirely.
And I so appreciate your joining me in it. Happy Mother’s Day, Lindsey.