Yesterday, as I drove into the sun with tears streaming down my face I wondered why it hit so much harder this year.
Memories of her face melting as she held my daughter for the first time bubbled up, breaking the surface tension of a momentary stoicism.
A woman pulled up beside me at a stop light reminding me so much of her in her final year that I fell in line behind and let myself laugh about this woman’s driving habits, much more like my own than hers. She could weave in and out of traffic like nobody’s business, fearlessly tailgating but also never complaining about my slower way of getting us there or the distance I kept from other cars.
I arrived home to realize I had all the ingredients to make a dish she used to make for us. One that dawned on my taste buds as the memory registered. Tangy tomato slices, tart creamy Hellman’s, pungent spicy sweet thyme, bacon umami crumbed underneath a creamy and nutty melted top of muenster.
Spring deaths are hard. Like a taste explosion in the mouth contrasted with an emptiness in the heart that can’t be filled but only loved. There’s a dissonance to everything else getting a fresh start while this life that was such a big part of my own ended but, of course, time doesn’t wait and birth and death are often intermingled.
Some years grief arrives on the first birdsong, a light touch to let me know my heart is awake. Other years it sits heavy like a headstone over my lungs, holding me down until I feel its weight along with my own breath grasping. Each, in their own way, a reminder of the easy and not-so-easy truths about loving someone.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt my mother’s presence. I’ve reached out for her a couple of times and felt an echo marked by distance. I like to think she’s off on a new adventure or maybe she’s carrying on healing work with our lineage that I took up last year.
As I drove, half-blind in the sun, I thought this is what stepping into a transition is like. We rarely get to have it all planned out. We rarely get to have full visibility. Sometimes we’re lucky if we just get to see the next step. Yet, we’re asked to step anyway, a bit like the fool card in the tarot.
While I’m not able to feel my mother’s presence the way I could when I was untangling myself from my life on the homestead in Virginia, I know she was with me yesterday.
Answering questions I hadn’t allowed myself to ask.
Personally, my next step is to refine my writing, to be willing to draw a conclusion and make a point when I write. Not always, sometimes my writing is very much like a session where clients move through their own experience and draw the conclusions that are theirs to draw with me shining a light with a question or reflection. Of course, writing is different because I’m speaking to what’s alive in my awareness rather than being able to ask you what’s alive in yours. Still, I can feel the possibilities here, that I might write more directly and attempt to bring you along on a journey of discovery on the way to a fine point.
In terms of what I might have to say, well, top of mind today is that it is essential that we learn to mother ourselves, perhaps even in ways we couldn’t have learned from our own mothers. And when we’ve learned the how of that, which many of us have and are, it’s imperative that we remember to do it on the daily and stand fully in the power of that. Even if we never mother another, our leading by example will be felt.
The gift of developing the skills of mothering ourselves is that we can then be with—ourselves, others, life as it was and is. There’s less risk of othering—ourselves or others. Less risk of putting them up on pedestals that will inevitably crumble. Less risk of looking down on others from the roles or vantage points we cling to for a sense of safety. More regard—for our own humanity and that of others.
These are the gifts of doing somatic work, bringing being and doing into a functional balance that uplifts and makes it possible to walk through this experience of life without averting our eyes from its pain and suffering while still being able to take in all of its beauty and joys. To be able to hold it all and respond with discernment from a deeply grounded place.
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