An Open Letter To My Mother: Mother's Day 2013

Dear Mom,

I've been thinking all week, in light of what this year has been and meant for me, in terms of mothering and daughtering, both as mother (now) and daughter (always), been thinking all week about how to honor you, in light of it all.

I considered flowers and cards and material gifts but none of them came close to conveying what I simply must convey to you at this unique, unparalleled moment in my life. This unique moment is, as you know, one of having mothered a live daughter for a year now, having accumulated a years worth of mothering and now having some new insights into the vocation itself. And it's a moment when I come to a new horizon as pregnant mother of a boy child: uncharted territory in our last two generations of maternal experience.  Part of that inability of 'things' to convey my gratitude, my honoring, my abundance of love, is the very thing I must convey to you at this moment. Because I have learned through the accumulation of a year and now standing at this horizon that there is nothing that can 'tell it' like I can. About your mothering. About the potency of your individual capacity, as a mother, to show me mothering, in such a way that I am now--absolutely incapable of allowing mothering to exist outside the concreteness of particular bodies, stories, bonds, breaks and strands that have become 'us.' All this to say: our relationship is ours to tell and celebrate. And on this day, I must tell it from where I am and where I stand. And this feels like the only gift worthy of giving to you "at such a time as this." On Mother's Day. 2013. 

Part of the cruelty of life is that you don't know what you don't know. In some ways I wonder how I ever celebrated Mother's Day before. Like, what the hell did I know about mothering in order to celebrate it? Perhaps this sounds too harsh. But what I am trying to get at is that it's (somewhat) true that you can only truly appreciate a thing once you've entered into it and given your full self to it. Last year Aurora was only two months old on Mother's Day and though I'd gone through pregnancy, birth and a few months of day to day mothering, this year is different. I have accumulated minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and more of waking, feeding, washing, dressing, caring, caressing, holding, laying down of this little body that has been and continues to be utterly dependent on the vocation of which I speak. Of mothering, which you showed me. Of mothering, which I now do in the legacy of your lessons within. And because of these acts of mothering which I have accumulated a life has grown. No two lives have grown. Hers and mine. Or perhaps three: yours growing inside of both of us as these lessons and lived experiences unfold? 

I didn't know until now about the way mothering saves you. Or the way it stretches you, sometimes to the point of near-death. I didn't know how it could melt and heal the hardest shit you carry. And make you all the strong you need to be for the sake of your child's survival. I didn't know about the heart-breaks that live in those moments where no matter how hard you try, you cannot control outcomes of safety for your child. I didn't know about the joy of first words or steps or the first time your baby truly sees and recognizes you for the Mother you are. I didn't know about how mothering redeems and sacrifices your body at the same time, how you come into this complicated awareness of your own interconnectedness and autonomy in ways that forever shatter your illusions about total freedom or impossible enmeshment. I didn't know about how you become more yourself and less yourself than ever before when experiencing the demands and delights of mothering. And I surely didn't know that I didn't know how much you've given, how much you've succeeded, how much you've gone and done and forged and made possible to me, for me, through me in your own mothering practices. 

And so, in some ways, because of all I didn't know, I didn't know how to honor you in the ways that I can now envision. Which of course, now, includes a certain acknowledgement of all I am able to see, be, do and know as a mother because of the kind of mother you were to me. This is a new gratitude, born of experience, and again, it is mine to tell, yours to receive, at this particular moment. I want it to get up inside you, like a recognition that feels like God's eyes opening themselves within your flesh, for you and you alone. I want you to feel seen and understood in your own particularity like no card, flower, or gift could possibly facilitate because no card, flower, or gift has come from that very flesh nor stood in the light and shadows of your history like I have, nor can they name the legacies or losses of your life like I can. 

A friend of mine was working with a family a few weeks ago whose mother was/is struggling with alcoholism. My friend was explaining to me that the mother's daughter felt no ability to distance herself from the mother's problem. In her frustration for the pain in this family, my friend said in all honesty: "I swear that mothers could light their children on fire and the children would still cling to those mothers in love." It felt like a hot truth, one I didn't want to hear, but had to hold because I knew the truth in it. What is there that you could have done or did do that would stop me from clinging to you? Nothing. There is nothing. Is there anything more awesome and potentially destructive than a child's fidelity to its mothering/source? It is biological, of course. And so one wonders about its practicality for our species in environments where mothering is less than good. I wonder about your own mother for instance. My grandmother. Not that she failed you (what does that even mean?) but the spaces of mothering she couldn't occupy that set you up for a life-time of seeking mothering/fulfillment in other places that have been harmful and healing. And then I juxtapose that with the mother you became. How did you do it? How did you know, despite what you didn't learn from her, how to do it all? How to encourage me to be strong bodied and strong willed? How to encourage me to question and to trust? How to bend over backward for others and to never collapse from the weight of it all? How to play it safe (most of the time) and to branch out in risk? 

You didn't always protect me enough. They always tried to protect you too much. I can barely fault you for finding your way just a little too far on the opposite side of the pendulum given your experience. Perhaps Aurora and Isaiah will find the sweet spot between those extremes. One can only hope. 

When I was in seminary there was no foresight into being a mother. But we talked, a lot, about G-d as womyn, about G-d as womb, about G-d as mother. It was a theory I needed at the time because it helped me part ways with the patriarchy of Christianity, patriarchy that stifled my body, spirit and capacity to create the life God willed for me. In some ways that theory laid the ground work for my becoming queer, which in all honesty, made it possible for me to have children. More on that in some other subsequent letter. But suffice it to say that trusting one's own desire enough to create life from that desire is the essence of queer reclamation of one's body/spirit from a world (and in our case, religion) that tries to stifle bodies, desire, etc. The theory back then set the ground work for a set of life practices that would later enable me to see, through experience, not just cognition, the truth of Mothering as Divine and Divine as Mothering. 

And so, Catherine Keller, who has written extensively about Tehom (the female primordial Chaos from Genesis that pre-existed 'creation' with G-d in all her watery, uncontrollable, genius self) is right. In mothering and being mothered one recognizes God and in God one recognizes both being mothered and the capacity to mother. But I think she's only right when it comes to a particular kind of mothering: the kind that nurtures the capacity for a divine line of sight within itself. You have been that kind of mother to me which is why today I know what I know about love, sacrifice, and what you've drilled and instilled in/to me all along, grace upon grace. 

My one and only prayer on this day is that I carry this nurturing capacity into the relationship with Aurora and Isaiah, that they too recognize God in mothering and mothering in God. If they do, it will be because of what you taught me, with every day of your beautiful, bold, messy and miraculous life. 

Goddess bless you, Momma. Now and forever. 

In your faith and doubt.

In your struggles and victories. 

In your strength and weakness. 

In your body that is old and young, big and small, tired and energized, hard and soft, birthing and dying still, every day. 

On the days of bounty and the days of barely making it through.

Through the years of so much, too much separation from the daughter who emerged from your body.

Into a time when Crone, Maiden, and grandchildren reunite in the flesh. For good. 

Amen. 

Love,

Emily Joye