Today I am choosing to think of a time when my mother was the moon and the stars to me. Her turquoise eyes my sea, her hand on my forehead the warmth of the sun.
I can go no further than that without the prism of time fragmenting my memories into pieces that I can only fit together if I sit down at the card table and sort them into similar colors and shapes. The problem with this puzzle is that it can be configured in many different ways – there is no one solution, no right answer, no true story. There is only one thing I know for sure. I loved my mother and she loved me. The rest was and is complicated. But I was loved, very much. Sometimes that was a burden, but on balance, it was a gift. There were strings attached, but what gift doesn’t come without expectations?
It is so much easier to fulfill expectations when you are a small child and your only desire is to be held safely in a small universe of routine and delight.
Later, when we go into orbit, the opportunity for malfunction and miscommunication increases exponentially. The gravitational pull weakens and the bond is stretched thin. Inside, we are still that small child, but now we want a different kind of comfort – acceptance, support, blessings.
Just as my relationship with my mother shifted and stumbled over the years, my relationship to my memories of her changes, too – constantly. Even as I write now. I no sooner capture an atom of truth (or what I think is truth) than it splits in two. Words disappear as soon as they are written, as if I was using an etch-a-sketch.
Some day when I stop trying to pin the stars to the sky, willing them never to move, I may find a way to let the story tell itself. 🌱
P.S. My mother (her name was Pauletta, her nickname Perky) loved zinnias. These are for Perky.
I truly loved reading these "real" remembrances on this Mother's Day morning. Life is difficult in so many ways for so many reasons and results in human beings being human with large and small stumbles and regrets on all sides. Unvarnished memories allow for the happy and the bittersweet to rise and be viewed in hindsight with the compassion of adulthood and perhaps motherhood ourselves.
Oh I love how you sorted this... What a treasure our mothers are in their complicated, messy, wonderlust ways... my mom was Carol and loved salt on grapefruit and tulips! Blessed are we.