Mother's Day

Annie and Katie - Oh My  :))

Oh My Goodness. Fell down the rabbit hole again this morning. Right on schedule… mother’s day. I think there’s an invisible cloud that just hangs there… waiting for the day. All the bad memories, hurts and sores not in my conscious awareness come raining down, pounding me.

Thank goodness that patterns change… thank goodness for my own daughters, their exquisite wonderfulness, their precious beings, the way love and healing and growth flow between us. What an amazing gift. How they help ME heal… A totally unexpected perk of being a mother.

I can’t fool them. They hear it in my voice no matter how perky I try to sound. Like their love has a special probe or antenna. I am reminded by one of them this morning that I am still in the midst of the darkness, and that in the darkness, everything looks negative, and that thoughts and beliefs that come from this place can’t be trusted. She lives in Washington State, and she wrote me the most beautiful email, and if I was crying nonstop before I read it, the waterworks really turned on as I read it. Then my other daughter, herself in a hard and challenging space, wanting nothing more than to hop on BART for the long ride out here to spend the day hanging with me.

Every year I work to reframe it. Every year my intention is to focus on all there is to be grateful about in the mother-daughter terrain. And there is so incredibly much. Having them, mothering them, how moment by moment they’ve challenged me to be a better person, the way our relationships have grown and transformed as they’ve come into their own womanhoods, all beyond my ability to ever imagine. Ditto that having come from such an unhealthy mother-daughter dyad, that something so completely different has come into being with them. I mean different. By as many degrees as is possible. Mind blowing, really.

I would think that would be enough, but here’s the truth: no matter how much work I do to heal, there is still this little girl living inside here, a sweet, precious shy little being that wasn’t treated well, that had some bad things happen to her, and that was taught to believe she was bad and worthless and good at nothing and good for nothing. So all things considered, I think she’s doing a pretty fantastic job.

So this mother’s day I celebrate her and her perennial, unwilling-to-give-up spirit. I celebrate my own daughters, and more love flowing between us than I ever thought possible. And at the same time, because it’s a big part of what formed me and who I am, I grieve; I grieve for what was and what wasn’t; and I grieve for my own mother, so unhappy and wounded herself, she had little to give that didn’t end up perpetuating her own broken heart and serious life pain.