mother's_day lulie For Mother's Day I'd like to go hiking, where the path cuts across a brook and all the dogwood trees are blossoming. I want to look for chipmunks (those squirrels with racing stripes), Queen Anne's Lace, Cardinals & Finches. I want to feel my nose get sunburned. We can eat apples and oranges and the trail mix that we made in the morning (if I add some chocolate chips I wonder if they will melt). Later on I hope we can sit on the porch, my girls sipping iced tea and me a Sam Addams. This would give me more pleasure than a piece of jewelry or a dinner out at one of those over-priced, over-packed restaurants. 020508 ... bijou one year my dad got my mom a plant. it had flowers. it was a nice plant. i remember at some point they were discussing something while i was sitting at the dining room table, and my mom started railing on my dad, i don't really remember why. my parents NEVER fought in front of us. they didn't fight much at all. but my mom was really upset because she had asked for some specific thing she wanted for mothers day, and my dad got the same old potted plant and a card he always got every year. i was like fifteen so i rolled my eyes and left the room, but she was really upset. we've only since then really taken mother's day seriously, and it made us think twice about christmas too. i guess i still just got her a card this year, but hopefully it means more coming from so far away, from someone living on next to nothing. 050504 ... raze when someone who doesn't know me very well asks me if i'm getting my mother something for mother's day, i don't think about the fact that we haven't seen one another or communicated in any way in more than twelve years now. what i think about is the time i got her a beautiful arrangement of flowers for mother's day when i was sixteen years old, and she told me i should have used the money to get a haircut instead. no...i don't think i'll be getting her anything. maybe next year. 130512 ... unhinged (i will always have a lead weight in my heart) 130512 ... gja For the missing ones 160508 ... unhinged (my sister is right; it gets easier. but i dont think i will ever forget) 160508 ... ovenbird Mother’s Day arrives every year carrying a bouquet of complexity that I can never quite arrange into something that doesn’t sting. My own mother is so far away and we will not get to spend this day together. I will call and we will press into the wound of distance and try to pretend that it hurts less than it does. My daughter brings me gifts in the morning–a picture she drew of two bunnies (one labelled “me” and one labelled “you”). The bunnies are painting a picture together. There is a rainbow over their heads. She has made a button I can pin to my shirt. It also has a bunny on it. I wear it over my heart. I’ll leave it there all day, this reminder of what it means to love a person that you made with your own self and must leave at the mercy of all the things this world will do. I never expected to have children, and it is still a world I’m learning to navigate. I am knocked over by the force of love some days, and crushed by the weight of responsibility on others. I am trying to be a good mother. Or at least trying to be good enough. I can never tell if I’m succeeding. My son, newly a teenager, had no idea it was mother’s day today. He gives me a sideways, cursory hug. It’s a hug that says “I love you, but I’m hitting an age when I’m not necessarily comfortable showing it.” I hug him back harder. Try to wrap him in all the love I’ve carried since he fit in the crook of my arm. Watching your children grow up and away from you is a brand new kind of torture that is also tied to this secret wish for freedom, a wish to be something other than a mother again, a wish to know the parts of me that are something else entirely. I move through the morning carrying an ache in my arms that is shaped like the babies who used to rest their heads there. I don’t miss the days of their infancy when I was so sleep deprived I wanted to die, when I was so wrecked by a mix of love and despair that I wasn’t sure I could survive it. I was barely alive in those early days and I mourn for everything I missed in the mayhem. I am more grounded now, but motherhood transformed me into a wild animal and now my soul is twinned, part human, part wolf–a creature risking death to protect the lives entrusted to her. The wolf prowls around in my chest while I make breakfast. She growls a little. Curls up for a nap, but is always vigilant, keeping me from ever falling into a truly deep sleep. I haven’t slept deeply since my children came into the world. My mind is always half awake, waiting to see if they need me. I haven’t quite figured out what it means to be a mother. I try every day to live into that question, but it resists easy definition. I know that I will fail in so many different ways, I know that I have already failed. I hope the failure exists alongside some other truth–that I gave everything I could, that I loved without reservation, that I have tried to be, as Kahlil Gibran so beautifully articulates, a bow from which my children fly, arrows aimed at their own futures. 250511 ... nr i love the wording of this. i never know how to feel about motherhood either, even though i'm not one. or maybe because of that. or both, or neither. it's been four years now that i've spent a mother's_day without a mother. i don't know how to describe those complex feelings either. i like to hear that the people i love who are mothers are being spoiled today. my sister told me her 3-year-old son couldn't help proudly revealing the gifts he got her before she opened them. 250511 what's it to you? who go blather from