Mother’s Day

I know the most amazing mothers.

Mothers of children. Mothers of lost ones. Mothers of fur babies. Women who mother through friendship, care, intuition, and presence. Women who nurture gardens, communities, animals, ideas. Women who ache to become mothers and already carry the depth, tenderness, and devotion of motherhood inside that longing.

I have one of the best mothers myself, and I am always trying to become a good one too.

Today, though, I’m sitting alone because I asked to be alone. I’d be lying to say there isn’t resentment or overwhelm embedded in that. It’s an dichotomous thing because I love being a mom more than anything. But I also know that the unseens held together by my glue need me to be alone. To return to myself. To nurture myself. To become steady again inside my own body. To reconnect with both my strength and my softness, the two things motherhood has magnified most in me.

For mothers, we carry the invisible labor of remembering everything and everyone. The anticipating, the advocating, the emotional temperature-taking. The comforting, protecting, organizing, soothing, holding. The constant calculating of needs, moods, timing, safety, feelings. The quiet swallowing of exhaustion so everyone else can keep moving. The beginning again and again and again, no matter what.

No amount of commercialization will ever touch the reverence of motherhood.

And so today I’m thinking about all of us.
The exhausted mothers.
The grieving ones.
The ones that are grateful.
Healing.
The mothers filled with love and also loneliness.
The mothers longing for what hasn’t arrived yet.
The ones mothering others while learning how to mother themselves.
The ones who feel undone and will still wake up tomorrow and try again.

In none of this do we need to be perfect. And because of that there is something holy in all of it.