Sometimes, usually, motherhood can look like this.
It’s not a single, static place, and it’s not a single, static role. It branches off. It goes in different directions. Everything happens at once and yet not all that much happens.
Motherhood is about making meals and giving hugs. It’s about giving advice and holding our tongue. It’s about exhibiting patience and teaching patience and reacting with patience while sometimes feeling anything but patient. It’s about late nights when all we want is rest, and it’s about late nights where we just can’t bear to close our eyes and shut out the beauty of the moment. It’s about saying yes to one last Mickey Mouse because you just need one more to finish cleaning up the kitchen and then it’s about sometimes spending that minute snuggling babies on the couch and then staying up too late trying to get that kitchen cleaned.
Motherhood is a role. It’s a calling. It’s a vocation.
It’s a gift. And it’s a sacrifice. And it’s a reward.
And motherhood is also a decision. It’s a decision we make at one point in our lives to forever make decisions with another in mind.
It’s wondering about a date night and then it’s considering babysitters and toddler stages and nighttime temperments. It’s then about canceling at the last minute because of an ear infection and being disappointed for the loss but being grateful for being so needed.
It’s about hugging a child with a broken heart and whispering words of encouragement and love and then closing the bathroom door and sobbing into a pillow because the slights hurt you just as much as they hurt her.
It’s about praying the boy that has your daughter’s heart will hold hers as well, and then it’s worrying about how gentle his hands will be as they hold hers.
It’s about instilling lessons now that you hope will stick later. And it’s about desperately trying to mold your own actions because you know your daughter is your clearest mirror.
Motherhood is from the Eternal. It’s a bonding of souls; it’s a freeing of demons; it’s a gift of the Divine.
Motherhood is a whole lot of this.
Beauty and growth and blossoming and promise.
But it’s also this.
It’s also those moments when the trees blow to the side and the clouds part and for once you don’t grasp at an understanding of what Heaven is because you realize that through the act of creation, you have been granted access to the Creator. You gain access to moments of transcendence. To beauty that can’t be expressed. You gain eyes that can see what others can’t. Your ears are open to candences otherwise overlooked.
A look can spark a tear, a word a melody, a moment harmony.
On Mother’s Day, we celebrate our mothers. The mothers who lived those moments for us and through us. Who gave for us and to us what others couldn’t.
And on Mother’s Day we celebrate our vocation, our calling. We celebrate those little people who every now and then help us brush away the branches and the noise and the chaos and help us see the Heavens.
So to all the mothers out there, know that you are indisposable. You are what will last forever in your children’s hearts even when yours is no longer beating. You are the music that will run through their veins and the dreams that will keep them looking towards the horizon. Be pampered. Be loved. And love. And be grateful. And thank the Heavens.
And to my mom, Happy Mother’s Day. Thank you for doing for me all that a mother does through all the different stages. For loving me. And for loving my girls. For being there for them during the times I cannot. For teaching me, through example, how to love them as a mother should. For being the legacy from which my family can grow from. For starting traditions of nurturance and acceptance that will shine forth throughout my life and theirs and their children’s and their children’s children. For helping us move and watching them when I am ill. For answering the phone even though I call too often. For considering the well being of my girls and for rejoicing in our victories and being ever present in our lives.
And to my grandma who took her last breaths five years ago today. It makes it kind of hard that you passed away the day after Mother’s Day because every year we are reminded of the loss at the same time we want to celebrate you. But I am also so grateful that it was this time of year. Because for a women who spent the majority of her lengthy life mothering people — both those who shared her blood and those who did not — there couldn’t be a more fitting tribute. I still have the bracelet I bought for you that Mother’s Day. I never got to give it to you. But still I hold it dear. Because though we may be separated by death, death does not take the bond or the love or the relationship. You are still a mother and a grandmother and a great grandmother. We can’t see you. We can’t touch you. But you are here. In a spirit I can sometimes feel but also in more tangible ways — in the ways my daughter’s eyes dance when they smile and the ways your children became grandparents and in the way your grandchildren became mothers and fathers. And in the ways all of our children will one day do the same.
Mother’s Day is a celebration of all that motherhood is. And because of that, it’s a time capsule and a bridge. Connecting yesterday to today and today to tomorrow.
Because in this life, nothing is eternal. Except love. And that love is born and reborn each day and each generation. As once the first mother held the first hand, so do we and so will they. Until one day, we will all be united once again in the circle that need never be broken.
