Today is Mother’s Day. Historically, not one of my easiest holidays.
The intensity of difficulty has eased over the past couple years. To be a little emo about it, the song lyric in my head is from the Goo Goo Dolls – “scars are souvenirs you never lose, the past is never far.” And yeah, I’m smiling as I type it out to put it on YouTube.
For a long time, the day was hard because of the strained (to put it gently) relationship with my own mother. It also made me think of my bio-mom, a missing piece of a puzzle that I got to place with warmth and love when I met her a few years ago (happy Mother’s Day, Kelly!). I had a couple of women in my life who were not my mother who I did occasionally send cards to for this day. I hope they understood why; I was never looking for a replacement, I just wanted to be able to express gratitude for what I saw as any maternal love.
I have a lot of love to give. I always have.
They say grief is love with nowhere else to go. I have a lot of that, too.
I was pregnant with Oscar for this day in 2018. Happy, fat, physically aching, dreaming of the next year when I’d be holding him in my arms for pictures that never got to be taken.
2019, I was pregnant with Lucy. Terrified, distraught, and afraid to dream, and already in love with the little bean.
In 2020, it was the pandemic, but that was fine with me. I wanted pictures, nice pictures, of Hawthorne and Lucy in their little matchy outfits, and I got that.
2021, I couldn’t function. I don’t remember it. I don’t have any pictures.
2022, I took Lucy for beach adventure, just the two of us.
2023, we spent with the family, where I was gifted with their supervision and got to add an edible to the mix (highly recommended, by the way).
2024, my brother-in-law watched the kiddo, and my sister took me to a beautiful tea. My neighbor stole the kiddo when we got home and brought her back ten minutes later with a card she’d helped Lucy make.
This year, I have no plans. It’s a sunny day, I want to enjoy that. I’m going to be headed to the grocery store soon, hopefully avoid most of the dads who decided to take the kids and (hopefully) the shopping list and have no idea how to navigate the crowded aisles. Lucy wants the skatepark, I want to see some baseball, I want to eat something tasty and follow it up with cake.
The grief is there, a backbeat that never ends. It’s poised, kinetic, waiting for it’s time to be the singular sound or be overlaid with bright notes.
I find myself particularly contemplative this morning. I opened my journal to pages I had once promised to read daily, and continuously skip in the name of expediency.
Reading my word of the year and my affirmations, I felt like I had started a song I liked and then zoned out, and had to restart, because I wasn’t appreciating it the way I wanted to in that moment. I did that a few times, until I finally slowed down enough to read it out loud, each word of the definition of my word of the year, each of my affirmations.
It’s striking me today that the word I picked for the year – flex – can be considered a Janus word, or contranym. Janus was the ancient Roman god with two faces, each looking 180 degrees from each other. Two meanings (both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene…) that oppose each other.
The duality is fascinating to me today. Boasting, an ostentatious display… or pliancy, an ability to yield.
This is something I love about choosing a word of the year, as well as tarot and oracle cards. It provides a new angle more often than I could imagine on my own. It makes me think, and question, and play. My psyche is a kitten and the string today is a word. I’m going to let my soul tangle with it, see what happens.
(being a mother is a flex, a demonstration of the shit I have walked through to get the both of us here for the five and a half years of her life; mothering has taught me more about flexibility than anything else could)
It’s Mother’s Day, and I am a mother, noun and verb.
Noun: I am a mother to a starside child who never knew doubt or cold, only love and warmth.
Verb: I am mother to a wild and wonderful, fierce and feral force to be reckoned with. She challenges me daily, and brings me such joy. She has a shockingly wide vocabulary and the most incredible imagination. She feels so deeply, and she has so much love to give. She looks at me with my own eyes, and the mirror she holds up to me is warped in the best possible way. She has no concept of sin, and the most adventurous soul. She is going to be so much taller than me.
May she take the best of the notes I have given her – the crapshoot of DNA, the creativity, the deep well of feelings, the love of sunshine and wind in her hair, the wide-eyed willingness to learn. And while she will need balance, may she find her own, and not pick the strings of my anxiety, my mental health struggles, my fears and doubts and traumas.
May she write her own affirmations, and choose her own words with care. May she find her own way that is not mine, make her own mistakes, go to therapy for different reasons than I do.
Because I am Mama, and so much more. She is my child, and so very much more.
Queer Mama Rising 