Normally we do guided meditations on Sundays, but I have a different idea for Mother’s Day.
We are “guided” by media and marketing as to exactly what thoughts we’re supposed to have today. But our real thoughts are often more complex. We’re supposed to be loving and grateful and tender. But most of our mothers are not Hallmark mothers. Most, in fact, are human beings.
In thinking about our own mothers, we may indeed feel loving and grateful and tender. We may also feel grief and loss and rage. We may feel abandonment or neglect or longing. We are likely to feel a combination of things, only some of which would make a marketable greeting card.
I remember there was a day I was working out, and I was explaining how my mother could be both maddening and wonderful. The two women I was working out with were really interested in shutting me down, in criticizing me for airing negative thoughts. I was saying how, when my knee was broken, my mother would take me to my doctor’s appointment (because it’s pretty hard to drive in an immobilizer), but she would show up every time in her Mini-Cooper. And every time I would ask her to please bring the Camry instead, because it was a long, slow, painful process to wriggle my way into her tiny car in the immobilizer. But every time she came with the Mini-Cooper. And yet, every time, she came.
The women at the gym were angry with me for being exasperated, when my mom was so great to pick me up in the first place. And it’s surely true that there are plenty of people whose mothers live the same twelve miles away mine does, who’d have to take a cab. I did say she was wonderful and exasperating. Human. Not a Hallmark card. And that wasn’t okay with these ladies, who, it turned out, were grieving the loss of their mothers.
Grief. Exasperation. Love. Anxiety. Self-consciousness. Compassion. Frustration. These are all real feelings. We may have any or all of them. Or others.
I invite you, this Mother’s Day, to explore your honest feelings about your mother, and to permit yourself to have those feelings.
“I was saying how, when my knee was broken, my mother would take me to my doctor’s appointment (because it’s pretty hard to drive in an immobilizer), but she would show up every time in her Mini-Cooper. And every time I would ask her to please bring the Camry instead, because it was a long, slow, painful process to wriggle my way into her tiny car in the immobilizer. But every time she came with the Mini-Cooper. And yet, every time, she came.”
Is there a better example of passive-aggressive behaviour, ever?
Happy Mother’s Day, Deborah……. !