Love Post for Valentine’s Day (but not Romantic or Partnered Love)

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photo of a beach with a strand of seaweed forming a heart shape

A few months ago, I was talking with a friend and I whispered, “I don’t have a felt sense of being loved. Is that weird?” I whispered it because it felt weird. It felt wrong somehow. Like there was something wrong with me.

Before she could say anything, I quickly spoke again – this time a little louder. “I mean, cognitively, I know I am loved. I have amazing people in my life who I know love me. But I don’t have a trusted, grounded sense of it in my body. In my ‘Self,’ if that makes sense.”

“Oh, Kar. Honey. I’m sorry.”

It was a low point. But also, if you know me, this won’t come as a surprise, it was a bit of a call to action. Because I’ve spent so much time in the last few years developing the Grief and Rage work and tuning into my body to reconnect my brain, body, and spirit, I began to feel like it was important to pay more attention to that. Have I ever had a felt sense of love? Not that I recall. Have I always wanted one? Yes. But I don’t know if that is because it represents security to me or something else.

Most people I know would describe me as a loving person and I do work to let people know I care about them in a myriad of different ways. It used to be a frantic, ‘if I give you this thing (love), you’ll have to give it back to me’ sort of program, but when I had kids it shifted to a much more pure ‘I love you because you exist on the face of the planet’ thing. And the more I dove into community care and read things like bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, the more I exercised the muscle of extending unconditional love to everyone around me.

I recently experienced a relationship rupture with someone I cared about very deeply and it was a rich learning experience, for sure. I was hurt and sad and angry and very, very confused. I alternated between reliving some of the sweet, tender times we shared, the laughter and conversations, and being really busy so that my mind was filled with tasks and plans for work. But one night before bed, I began to wonder if I could really walk my talk on unconditional love. I asked myself whether I could simply hold this person in my heart in tenderness and care because of those lovely moments we shared without following threads of what might have come before or how the rupture occurred. Could I just purely open my heart and let this person be held there, period? I asked the question and then went to sleep.

I woke up once in the middle of the night to song lyrics playing in my head that made me smile, and when I woke up in the morning, I knew the answer was yes. It isn’t in my nature to not find a way to love people (is that a Libra thing? Maybe). It’s not an invitation to reconnect without repair, but that is the part where I show myself love, and in the past few weeks, my capacity for self-love has grown enormously. I might even say I am beginning to have a felt sense of my own self-love.

But the question that came to me this morning is whether I actually DO have a felt sense of love in my body and I just haven’t allowed myself to access it. What if it is there and I just have to open myself to the possibility of feeling it? It’s entirely possible that I closed myself off from it because, as a kid, adults would say the words “I love you” and pair them with behaviors and actions that didn’t match. It was confusing and likely easier for me as a child to ignore what I was feeling in my body. When someone says “I love you” and then they physically harm you, how is one supposed to interpret that? When someone says “I love you” and then they shame you or proceed to tell you all the ways you are actually unlovable, where does that land in the body?

Over the years, I have had friendships with people who said “I love you” and then hugged me or acknowledged my gifts or expressed gratitude for me. Is it possible that those things also landed in my body and I just didn’t recognize it or I haven’t discovered yet where they live in me? I know what it feels like to extend love, that warm rush of energy from my heart and belly to another. It is not outside of the realm of possibility that I just haven’t paid much attention to what it feels like coming back to me because it isn’t something I’ve cultivated.

This is probably the strangest Valentine’s Day post I’ve ever written, but in the interest of keeping it real, I wanted to share my belief that love isn’t as complicated as we think it is. It is a body thing, a spiritual thing, no matter how much we try to make it a head thing. Learning to open myself up to where love lives in my physical body, what it feels like as I send it out, where I am intuitively driven to love, and what that energy feels like without parsing it out or analyzing it in my head has given me the knowledge that love just flows. It just is. My attempts to explain it and qualify it (romantic love versus platonic love, love that is “right” or “enough”) and justify it actually interrupt that flow. If I just open myself to the possibility of love, it is there. And it is transformational.

I hope you are feeling loved, today and every day.

It’s Complicated, Mother’s Day Edition

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Mother’s Day weekend will forever be complicated for me. Because none of us who are mothers are only just mothers – we are daughters, too, I have this strange caught-in-the-middle feeling of being pushed and pulled. But beyond that, it was Mother’s Day weekend when my father died in my arms 14 years ago, and as much as I’d like to think that those kind of anniversaries become less of a focus over time, I haven’t found that to be true.

Every year in the last days before the deathaversary, I start to get teary and emotional. I feel shaky in my body and achy and a little “off,” and it usually takes me a lot of introspection and “what the fuck is with me?” to figure it out. I don’t know how my body knows, but it does. To be honest, I don’t even really remember thinking that it was Mother’s Day weekend when I was holding Dad and rocking him and whispering to him that it was ok to leave if he needed to. But given that the last few hours I spent with him are among some of the most crystal clear memories I carry, it’s not surprising that I feel it so viscerally over and over again every year.

I moved to a new town a year ago, and Mother’s Day weekend was the first weekend I spent in my new home – the only  home I’ve ever lived in alone, without kids or a partner. Last year was also the first Mother’s Day weekend after my mom died. This morning, I leashed the dogs and put them in the car for the four mile drive to Bishop Diego Garcia High School – the Catholic high school my mom and her siblings attended. I’d never been there before, and while my mom and I didn’t ever talk about her time growing up here, I knew this was one place where she spent a great deal of time. I was amazed at how small the school is and really struck by how lovely the grounds are. It was almost exactly what I expected a Catholic high school to look like in this town, in some ways, and as soon as the dogs and I stepped on to the path that meanders through campus, I felt her. I hope she was happy here. I hope she had fond memories.

I’ll spend my afternoon hiking in the hills above town, thinking about my parents and how much I miss them, feeling grateful that I am mother to my amazing kids, and honoring the work of mothering in all its forms. I am increasingly enamored of the idea that I can create nests for beloveds as part of the continued mothering I want to and will do. I love the notion that nests are created from whatever materials are available in the immediate area and are designed to be safe and comfortable, often in precarious places. They don’t have to be pretty. That’s not the point.

Music and Memory

Hey  –
The Fixx are playing in Seattle on Aug 28th –  if you don’t have plans for that night, you should really take L to see them.   They’re in Portland the night before and I just got tickets for that show . . . 


My brother emailed me sometime in June to give me a heads up about this show. I’m incredibly grateful because there’s no way I would have found my way to it without his suggestion. I am notoriously horrible about names – band names, song names, celebrity’s names. In the moment, I couldn’t conjure up even one song The Fixx was known for, but I knew if my brother was cueing me, I’d know them when I heard them. 

I bought tickets that day. 

As a junior-high kid (we didn’t call it middle school in the 70s and early 80s), I went to a lot of concerts – most of them with my big brother. Mom went to a few with us, but eventually, I think she burned out and decided that if I tagged along with C, there would be no hijinks, even though the nearest big city for concerts was Portland, which was a two-hour drive from home. I was the happy recipient of that policy, although C has pretty eclectic taste in music. We went to see Debbie Gibson, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, as well as REO Speedwagon, ZZ Top, Metallica, and Judas Priest. He knew all the songs – A and B sides – and which albums they were featured on. He sang along with them all, knew when the drum solo or guitar solo would come, knew the names of each band member and which other bands they’d been in. He still does. He’s a walking encyclopedia of music, and I trust his taste. Every year he sends me a CD for my birthday and while sometimes it’s a performer or band I know (Tom Petty, Steely Dan), other times it is an entirely novel act, but I always love it. He knows what I’ll like and respond to. 

As a kid, I used to listen to the album for whichever band we were going to see next obsessively, reacquainting myself with the lyrics and the rhythms. I could remember songs really well, but I never knew their names or which album they were on or who was playing which instrument. I never really felt the need to catalog that or keep it in my brain. 

My big brother is 50 now and I can’t even begin to imagine the number of concerts he’s been to in his life. He goes to about two a month, at big venues and small, and he always has recommendations for me. On the day of The Fixx concert in Seattle, I woke up to a series of text messages from him, complete with photos of the show he’d just seen and a review of how great it was, which albums they played music off of, and which songs were the best. I smiled and got excited for my own experience. But unlike when I was younger, I didn’t seek out any of the music to refresh my memory. I went in cold, as did my daughter. She was definitely the youngest person in the crowd, but as a musician herself, she’s usually up for a concert (especially if I’m paying).

As the early strains of “Are We Ourselves” began to play, I felt a warmth in my belly. When the lead singer pointed his microphone out toward the audience, I knew exactly where to come in and what the tune was. It happened again with “Saved by Zero,” “Red Skies,” “Stand or Fall.” At one point, I leaned over to speak into L’s ear and tell her that I was reminded of sitting on C’s bedroom floor, playing cards and listening to music – these very songs. Had we not gone to this concert, I’m not sure I would have ever thought about The Fixx or been prompted to seek out their music. I simply hadn’t remembered they existed. 

There is a lot that I don’t remember about my childhood, a lot I dissociated from as I tried to find a way to survive emotionally in the firestorm of days after my brother disappeared and my parents divorced. I’ve been researching polyvagal theory lately as part of my work with adolescents and trauma and trying to understand how our bodies protect us by disconnecting from so much of what is going on around us. As I listened to the band play and felt the comforting memories of hanging out with C, listening to music, I wondered, is music the way in to those memories I want to have?

As I let my mind play with that thought, I realized that I was feeling calm and peaceful, that I was recalling the safety of being my big brother’s little sister, remembering a mundane, “normal” childhood activity that must have happened dozens of times in those frightening, sad days. I’m not so sure anymore that what I want is to use these memories to push my way in to other ones. For now, I’m simply basking in the reminder that my brother and I shared a connection through music, that it was his way of being in relationship with me and showing me the ropes, leading with his passion and inviting me in to share it. What a beautiful gesture, what an amazing, seemingly simple way to be part of each others’ lives, even though we haven’t gone to a concert together in decades. 

I’m so grateful to have these kinds of memories come back to me as I get older, to remind me that there are myriad ways to connect with others, and that the ones that come most easily, most naturally, are often the ones that endure. I hope that someday my big brother and I can go to another concert together, but in the meantime, I’m definitely listening for his advice on which ones I should buy tickets to myself. 

For the Love of a Car

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My dad loved cars. He loved old cars, classic cars, any car he ever owned. He loved washing and waxing them, tinkering in the engine, driving. Everything about them.

He taught me how to change the oil and air filters in my car. How to change a tire and check the air pressure and how to calculate my gas mileage. He was often disgusted at the state of the inside of my car, and he was positively purple the night I drove my car off a cliff in the pouring rain by accident.

I loved that car. It was a 1979 Datsun 210 hatchback and I could fit more people in there than you’d think. After I drove it off the cliff, he had it towed to town and ultimately to his place, 140 miles away, and even though it wasn’t worth it, he found someone who could put it back together for me. I drove it for several more years and took really good care of it.

The car I had after the Datsun finally died was maybe the worst car I’ve ever had. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy a car that was made the first year the car company ever existed. Give them time to work the kinks out. I was proud of it because it was the first car I bought all by myself, but it was a 1986 Hyundai Excel and it was a piece of junk. It only took a couple years before fifth gear didn’t work. A month or two more and fourth gear died. I still drove it to and from work because my commute on I-405 was so slow that I didn’t really need to get beyond third gear. But when the transmission dropped reverse, I started to worry. I got by for a while, parking on hills and only parallel parking in huge spots where I could go head-in.

The next car I had that I really, really loved was also the first truly brand new car I owned – my Ford Ranger King Cab. Fire engine red, four-wheel drive, five speed. My then-husband thought I was nuts. He grew up on a farm, driving combine and nothing but trucks, so when we moved to Seattle and he got a job at a tech firm, he couldn’t wait to buy himself a little Honda Civic. He turned his back on trucks forever – distancing himself from his days as a farm boy.

I loved that truck. I sat up higher than most cars on the road and driving a manual transmission was always my preference. We could use it to haul the second-hand furniture we bought for the house, or dirt for the yard. Groceries sat in the king cab, safe from rainy days. I felt powerful in that truck. And I was sad when I had to say goodbye to it because I got pregnant and the king cab was no place for a baby’s car seat. After Baby 1 and Baby 2 came a Volvo and a minivan. Sigh.

But when the minivan had outlived it’s usefulness, I got Sparky. Sparky was a 2010 Toyota Highlander Hybrid and he was such a great car. Big enough to haul six kids, or five plus the dog, and not a gas guzzler at all. Sparky became known as the Party Bus when my girls were in middle school and I drove through Woodinville, Kirkland, Bellevue and Mercer Island, picking up girls along the way to take to school in Seattle. Sparky’s glove compartment was always full of pretzels, granola bars, fruit and napkins for the long ride to and from school. I took a car load of girls to Astoria for the weekend on a field trip, sat in a ferry line for six and a half hours with my daughters and two pups, and listened to countless hours of kid music in that car.

When I bought my electric car last year, Sparky became the girls’ car – solid, cheap to insure and drive, and a bit gutless. And last Friday, Sparky took one for the team, absorbing the impact of another car t-boning him, and protecting my girl and her boyfriend. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive, and it’s time to say goodbye.

As I cleaned him out today, grabbing a blanket and a pack of gum, a coffee mug and the registration papers, I saw the old metal First Aid kit beneath the driver’s seat. Dad gave me that battered box, full of everything I might need should I get in to an accident – band-aids, gauze, alcohol wipes, scissors, flares, a space blanket, and more – when I got that Datsun 210 back in 1987. It has sat in every car I’ve ever owned and been used many times when kids cut or scratched themselves or simply needed something for their headache. I slid it out and settled it in to the rental car I’m driving for now and felt the tears come.

I am so grateful that Lola and her boyfriend are ok and that Sparky cushioned the blow. I am so sad to see him go and while it feels silly to cry over a car, it’s also true that there are so many memories that are conjured up when I think about him. So much laughter, road trips, rides with stinky dogs. I guess maybe I inherited some of Dad’s love of cars, even if I haven’t changed my own oil in a couple decades.

When The Story Gets Too Heavy

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Naturvetenskap 1

I am a storyteller and I have been my whole life. I carry them inside me, work on them, figure out the best way to share them. But sometimes the stories get heavy. Before I ever put anything on the page, the words and feelings chase each other around and around inside, making connections and trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. When I sit too long with the stories, they start to burn and I know it’s time to walk or go pull weeds. Somehow, being outside helps the sentences flow and combine in ways they can’t when I am indoors.

The stories of the last year and a half are heavier than many that have gone before, and I’m finding that walking takes on a new urgency for me and it also requires a focus I haven’t been forced to have before. These days, I have to walk farther away from home and immerse myself in places that are new and expansive in order to divorce myself from the circling thoughts and feelings. I have found an open space surrounded by trees where few people go and at least once a week I walk there and sit and untether the words from each other, and also from my head and heart. Sitting in this place just breathing helps to re-string it all in a way that offers clarity.

I am learning that there is a sort of chemical reaction taking place as I assimilate the stories and try to keep my heart and my head on the same level. Most days, the two are at war, fighting for supremacy, which sometimes means wild swings from sadness to anger. My brain can only witness so much grief before it burns it off with anger, like alcohol in a skillet. My heart is simultaneously relieved of its burden and seduced by the beautiful flames, but the anger is also expansive and  at some point I realize it is taking up too much space in my head. The sadness dissipated, but the stories are still there and they are all about other people. I imagine a large section of my brain colonized by the stories of others, the actions of others, the words of others, and I am impatient to evict them.

When I was in college, the days I spent in the Chemistry lab were some of my favorites. The cool, cave-like room with its expanse of concrete worktops and glass beakers and pipettes and orderly rhythms gave me a stillness and a focus. There were rules, a set of steps to be taken, and all that was asked of me was to do one thing at a time and remain curious – observe and report. Even if I knew what I was supposed to be creating, somehow the cascading chemical reactions along the way were always enchanting – sometimes it was a smell or a particular color flame that I hadn’t expected. Witnessing the magic kept me from getting caught up in the story or the sequence. I had my instructions. Observe and report. Remain curious.

 

The Problem With Compartmentalizing, Part Two

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Part One is here. 


This one’s for Birdie. 


Oh, Birdie. I don’t know you, but I know you. We’ve never met, but I hear you. 


Birdie left a comment on the previous post that I’ll excerpt. She wrote, in reference to seeking professional help to process the trauma she experienced as a child, “…I can’t be helped and soul destroying because it means I am really messed up. I am so afraid of opening Pandora’s box and becoming unable to deal with what lies waiting. But I am tired. Tired of never being happy. Tired of always feeling anxious. Tired of always, always being afraid.”


Talk about ‘bringing the whole house down.’ That’s what compartmentalizing does to us. It makes us feel safe for the moment, but it ultimately destroys us from the inside out. Because when we hide those things away – either for later or for what we think is forever – we deprive ourselves of community and support. 


Human beings are social creatures. We are designed to live with each other. Our bodies respond on a molecular level to touch and interaction from each other – our adrenal glands activate, our neurological systems light up, we secrete hormones that make us feel safe and loved and happy when we let ourselves share experiences with other people (and animals – never underestimate the power of a soft, furry creature to snuggle up to). 


But when we wall of parts of our human experience, we relegate ourselves to holding what are often the most traumatic and painful things all by ourselves. It is akin to telling everyone that we would like their help carrying the 20lb. box of papers but that they can go home after that because we’ll figure out how to lug that 200lb. desk in the corner alone. Or not at all. There are so many reasons we do that – shame, denial, overwhelm. We hate that desk. Maybe we will just leave it there and never look at the corner where it sits, heavy and ugly. 

It is counterintuitive to expect ourselves to bear the heaviest weights alone. We can’t do it, no matter how much we want to or how hard we try. And we aren’t designed for it. But when we compartmentalize, that’s what we’re setting ourselves up for – isolation, solo work. 


So, Birdie, if you’re reading this, know that even as you wait for a therapist who is the right one to help you work through that pile of stuff you’ve hidden in the corner, you aren’t alone. While it’s important to find skilled counselors to help us dig through the deepest traumas, in the meantime, there are people out there who will help you support the weight of what you’ve got sitting there. Let them. Don’t worry about whether they’ll get something on their clothes. Don’t think about how it smells or what it looks like. Just know that, together, we can bear so much more weight than we think we can, and that there are people out there who care for you who would like nothing more than to hoist up a corner and take some of the pressure off of you. That’s how we’re designed. That’s what we do for each other. And while it takes some practice (often, years of practice), that feeling of relief that you get when others come along to help bear the load is the beginning of healing. 


Thank you for your courage.
You will get there from here. I know it. You won’t do it alone, but that’s the sweetest part of this. You’ll discover, along the way, which of your friends and family is really great at unpacking, cleaning up, and showing up. Let them. Don’t apologize. It’s how we’re designed. Embrace it and know that you were never supposed to hold all of this by yourself. 

The Problem With Compartmentalizing

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By Creator:Giulio Bonasone – http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/392735This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons by as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

It is just so tempting, and it’s also something many of us are conditioned to do from the time we’re little: set aside strong emotions or difficult thoughts until later.

I can’t deal with that right now.
I can’t think about that right now.
Let me just get through this.


Compartmentalization has its purpose, to be sure. When you’re physically occupied by something else – say, driving – you really need to focus on the task at hand. But all too often, when we seek to tuck something away “for later,” what we are really doing is hoping it will stay tucked away so that we don’t ever have to see it again. And unfortunately, the kinds of things we generally hope to never have to see again are usually the kinds of things that will end up demanding our attention in one way or another at some point.

I’ve had both extreme examples of this (repressing the memories of childhood sexual assault for decades) and moderate examples (putting aside my fears and grief at the serious illness my husband struggled with so that I could get through the day raising two toddlers), and both times it came back to bite me in the ass.  In the first case, I developed a severe anxiety disorder that made it hard for me to work and live the life I wanted to live for many years until I examined and explored the abuse, and in the second, I spent three years working with a therapist to overcome a depression that nearly drove me to suicide.

What I’ve learned is that while I may not have the luxury of expressing my emotions and really sitting with my grief every time it shows up, if I don’t acknowledge it to some degree in real-time, I will suffer the consequences.  Because here’s the thing: if I just keep tucking it away in some box labeled “Later,” what are the odds that I will ever voluntarily choose to go back and open that box of pain and look at it? Why wouldn’t I just keep it in the corner, always finding some other thing to keep me busy. Who in their right mind would want to set aside time and energy to reopen a container of sadness and grief?

So these days, when I’m confronted with a particularly difficult situation, I do my best to fold it into my life. I cry while I’m walking the dogs or doing dishes. I call a friend during lunch and ask for support. I give myself permission to honor the struggle, even if it means I sob a little every day, because hoarding the feelings I don’t want to feel in some back room might be the thing that ultimately brings down the whole house. I know. I’ve been there, and I don’t want to do that again. Big piles of junk attract rats and disease. Dealing with the trash one day at a time means that I don’t have to dread what might jump out at me from that heap someday.

Instruction for Difficult Moments

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It feels surreal.

I realize that I say that so often now. That I experience things that I have a hard time accepting for one reason or another.

The fact that my mom doesn’t know who I am; that feels surreal. As though in some parallel existence my real mother exists and she is still able to take the train up to visit me, sit and talk to me at the kitchen table about how crazy it is that my oldest daughter is a senior in high school. And so every time I see her sitting in her living room, watching Bonanza reruns and asking me over and over again where I live, who I am, why I’m there, it is as though I’ve been cast in some absurd play without ever having auditioned.

The fact that my oldest child is a high school senior is also surreal. Is it possible that I’m old enough for that? That she is?  Even though it feels like I’ve been a mother forever – it almost feels like I’ve never NOT been a mother –  it couldn’t possibly be accurate that Eve is almost 18, that this year we will visit and apply to colleges, that next year we will move her in.

I haven’t imagined these moments, I guess. Maybe that’s what it is. I haven’t sat and wondered what it might feel like to be without a mother or to be without my daughter. Is it that, because I can’t picture myself here, because I haven’t turned these scenes around and around in my head, tried them on for size, pulled them off and tweaked them a little bit and put them back on that I am having trouble believing they’re real?

I don’t ever remember feeling like anything was surreal as a kid. I don’t really remember imagining how things would turn out, though. Maybe as a kid the world seemed so unpredictable, so full of possibility or so fully out of my control that I couldn’t begin to compare reality to what I had expected. Even as things happened that were unexpected or unwelcome, as a kid, I simply accepted what came and tried to figure out how to respond. Ignore? Run for cover? Adapt and move forward?

I wonder if it has something to do with the way the child brain works – that it is concrete and so just takes what comes. Adolescents develop the ability for abstract thought, and as we age, we also begin to believe that we can control things in our lives. Maybe “imagination” is the wrong word. Children have spectacular imaginations that are often unbounded by any sort of reality. But as we get older, the kinds of things we imagine center more around ourselves and our desires and our expectations. So maybe surrealism comes as a result of life looking significantly different than my expectations – especially when what I’m presented with is difficult emotionally or something I wouldn’t have chosen to spend time thinking about or planning for.

The seduction of the surreal is that it doesn’t beckon me to spend much time there. At least not in these two scenarios. I am not fully present when I experience these things because I don’t truly want to be there, so perhaps it’s a trick of my mind that is trying to tell me I can deny it by labeling it that way.

There have been other moments in my life that feel similarly dream-like that were exhilarating and pleasant, and while they had the same qualities, those were moments that I bathed in, savored, chose to fully experience. Several years ago, Lola and I paraglided off the top of a mountain in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The ride lasted about 15 minutes and from the second we strapped in and started listening to the instructions, I felt as though I were outside myself. As the wind caught the parasail and lifted my feet off the side of the mountain I pulled my consciousness back inside, tethered it, and focused on each breath in an effort to capture the experience as deeply as I could. I knew it was going to be over before I was ready, and I was determined to pay attention. I will never regret doing that because it remains one of the most amazing things I’ve ever had the good fortune to do and I’m thrilled that I really took the time to be there while it was happening.

Maybe I need to do the same during other times when I feel as though I’m out of my element. As painful as it is, choosing to be fully present with my daughter and my mom during these moments that I couldn’t have imagined or prepared myself for emotionally could mean the difference between simply enduring them and finding some grace in them.

Happy Mother’s Day

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The older I get, the more complicated Mother’s Day seems to be. As a kid, it was all excitement and anticipation – making crafty gifts in class with glue and construction paper and flowers and hearts. I couldn’t wait to watch Mom open her one of a kind present and exclaim how wonderful it was.

It was about experimenting in the kitchen to make her breakfast in bed or plucking flowers from the neighbors’ yards on a walk to make a spontaneous bouquet.

In my teenage years, Mother’s Day was more of a reprieve for both of us; a day to set aside the petty frustrations and disagreements and have 16 hours of peace and appreciation. I’m sure, more often than not, by the time Monday came around, I was back to rolling my eyes in derision while the flowers stood tall in the vase on the kitchen counter.

When I became a mother, it was about excitement and anticipation again – waiting to see what my girls had made for me or chosen for me at the store with their dad. But it was also a revelation.

Motherhood is about soft snuggles in bed, the smell of a baby’s head, and it’s about bedtime routines that lasted for hours and often ended with me screaming into a pillow after tiptoeing out of my child’s room.

It is about smiling in pride when my children do something amazing and the stark fear that they are somehow in danger and it’s my job to protect them every moment of every day.

Mother’s Day is about recognizing that my mother is a human being, that she had to try and hold the tension between caring for me and preserving her Self, and that she didn’t always do it the way I wanted her to. It’s about realizing that my daughters feel the same way sometimes. It is about appreciating the evolution of my relationship with my mother – from feeling smothered and policed to feeling appreciated and honored. It is also about the evolution of my relationship with my children – from overwhelming responsibility and endless repetition of tasks to stepping back and watching as they do things I never dreamed they would do and knowing that we will always have this bond in one way or another.

Mother’s Day is about widening that circle to include every woman who ever mothered me, the teachers who took an interest, women who mentored me or listened to me or encouraged me. It is about honoring mothering in all its forms – gentle prodding and sideline cheering and bandaging wounds and holding space for my grief. It is about watching my childhood friends grow up to be mothers and realizing that we all had it in us somehow, somewhere, this ability to believe in something bigger than ourselves and the desire to protect it so that it flourishes.

Mother’s Day is the ultimate exercise in opposites, the feeling that you’re part of a tribe and that you’re in charge of it; the joy of watching your children grow up and the nostalgia of your own childhood; the gratitude of being recognized and the knowledge that you would do all of it even without that recognition. But since mothering is an exercise in opposites, that seems fitting. From the moment our babies are born, they begin moving toward independence, stretching that distance between us and them and we are tasked with helping them accomplish that while simultaneously mourning the loss of that connection.

I’m coming to realize that Mother’s Day is simply the distillation of the biggest lessons in my life. It is a day that reminds me that grief and joy live together in every moment, and that my job as my daughters’ mother is to help them figure out how to hold both of those things simultaneously, honor them both, and keep moving forward. Whether you are mothering children of your own or you are a mother-figure to other children, whether you have a mother or you’ve lost yours, may your day be restful and full of peace. May you find the strength to hold all that is present in your life today, or have others who will help you hold it. May you feel mothered.

Memoir Excerpt on The Manifest-Station

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Yesterday, Jennifer Pastiloff’s site, The Manifest-Station, featured an excerpt of my memoir-in-progress on their site. I am thrilled to have this process begin. You can find it here.