All Those Mothers, Gone
My own, at 53—
to cancer in the breast that nursed me.
My aunt-turned-mother—
to malignant lungs that contracted as mine expanded
to push my slippery son into the spinning world.
The bluebird mother—
caught in a six-pack holster, her chicks waiting,
open-mouthed and chirping.
The Blessed Mother—
whose inner grief is told only in the shadow folds
of blue-cloaked figurines.
Reef mother—whose fish float and corals bleach.
And my toddler’s Godmother—
to a bleeding, seizing brain. She, who plucked cotton
milk-weed puffs from green pods with my daughter
and tossed cotton to the wind, child-shrieking,
“Watch the angels fly!”
Beyond mountains, there are mountains—
layer upon layer of birch bark,
those tender peach-skin scrolls.
_____
REFLECTION:
Last month, I attended a retreat, “Rooted and Rising in Love,” framed around three conditions of the human heart: the broken heart, the awakened heart, and the radiant heart.
During the conversation about the broken heart, the retreat leader—a female Episcopal priest and environmental activist—read psalm 131, a meditation on the soothed soul. It is one of the only psalms that includes imagery of a mother nursing her child, of the settled affect babies have after nursing. The short but powerful psalm depicts the quieted soul as “a weaned child resting against his mother.” It made me think of my nine-month-old son, the way his eyes flutter toward sleep as he swallows and stills into porcelain.
In those moments, he has everything he needs: food, love, connection. All is well.
I have had many moments of this quiet contentedness, when I rest peaceful in the assurance that there is meaning and order to life. But in the midst of parenting young children, who are in constant need, and also in the middle of bereavement—when waves of emotions are unpredictable and often unrelenting—my soul feels the opposite of my serene son: choppy. Unsettled. Irritable. On good days I know my baseline will recalibrate—that this is an intense and finite period in a pandemic—and on other days, the longing feels unbearable. Pain and exhaustion pinball within me.
“We don’t want to feel pain,” the retreat leader said over Zoom. “And yet we do. We all feel pain.” She asked us all to put our hands over our hearts and close our eyes. In the stillness, she posed two questions:
Where do you need to feel the grief?
Where is your heart breaking?
A single tear fell down my cheek. As so often happens for me when I receive—opposed to write—a piece of writing, I saw the title of a poem in my mind. The letters were stark and crisp. It looked like the title of a screenplay: all caps, centered in the middle of a blank page.
ALL THOSE MOTHERS, GONE.
All those mothers. Not just my mother. ALL of those mothers, gone. The cumulative layers peeled away inside me. My mother, just four days before I graduated from college. My aunt, just seven months ago. My daughter’s Godmother, just three months ago. That damn bluebird that could not feed her chicks because of excessive plastic production. Earth. Mother Earth. Just, mothers. Gone.
I opened my journal to write.
In the twenty-five allotted minutes, I wrote the poem and painted the watercolor above. Both tell the story of suffering surrounding the wound of mother-loss, of the tendency to recycle our mourning when it is not fully processed. When our hearts stay broken. How grief bleeds and morphs and reactivates during major life changes and subsequent or anticipated losses.
Many writers have written about the particular pain of losing a mother, of course. In her book Of Women Born, Adrienne Rich writes: “The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.” The book jacket of Hope Elderman’s Motherless Daughters calls the death of a mother an “incalculable loss” and describes any woman who has lost a mother as “irrevocably altered, as profoundly changed by her mother’s death as she was by her mother’s life.” The book tells us that outliving a mother forever reminds her daughter of her “exquisite separateness.”
That, for me, is true. I can feel a thousand lovely, fulfilling, kind-hearted connections but they are, ultimately, defined in my mind as not mother. They exist in a separate category. It is a binary division.
My own therapist calls the mother wound “the hole in a bucket that is never filled.” This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of grieving my own mother: I did not just lose her once, on May 23, 2006, but I re-lose her in every bruise that scrapes against the reminder I have been separated from my first, most humanly reliable, source of unconditional love.
There is a Haitian proverb that gestures toward this: “beyond mountains, there are mountains.” It is as if to say, “as you solve one problem, another will present.” After you grieve one loss, there will be another. In the context of maternal grief, it is as if to remind us that we do not just say goodbye to “Mom” when she leaves her body, but again and again and again.
In the valleys between mountains, we find new ways to soothe ourselves, but even those are reminders that we do not have access to the security and embrace and unconditional love that psalm 131 portrays. We—all over again—lose the soothed, quieted soul as nurtured by the womb that carried us, the breast that nursed us, the arms that comforted us.
And then, we find center again. We keep trudging. With each expedition, we accrue faith that—whether we want to or not—we can mother ourselves.
*
When I finished writing the poem, I picked up my daughter’s watercolors. There were ten allotted minutes left for creative time. I had no image in my mind, just a desire to express the gravity of my mother’s absence, a paintbrush and a strip of Crayola paints. As I wet the brush, I imagined a landscape: a series of mountains to climb, representative of the interminable, uphill feeling that often surrounds grief—that looming question of, “when will I get through this?”
Or—just, exactly, how long am I going to feel this bad?
In his book Finding Meaning; The Sixth Stage of Grief, David Kessler says that the number one reassurance grief workshop participants want is, “it won’t always feel like this.” And I know that it doesn’t. But I need that reminder every time I lapse back into the darkness.
As I dipped my paintbrush in green paint and blue paint and purple paint—my mother’s favorite combination of colors—I felt some psychic grip release. Between each mountain, I washed the brush clean. Started over. The colors mixed and dripped to the base. A river of tears pushed its way down the paper. And underneath each tear’s trail? White space. Blank canvas. The opportunity to re-imagine.
And that is exactly what happened: the lamenting in the poem, the felt expression in the watercolor, and now being witnessed in this blog is my cleansing release until the next wave of grief, which I will surely write about (truth be told, I’ve already started it).
While I do not like my mother’s gone-ness, this retreat held the space for me to re-accept it, to allow my heart to break open instead of break apart. To allow the suffering to transform into a perspective shift:
All those mothers, gone?
Or
All those mountains, climbed?
***Retreat info: Rooted and Rising in Love; Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas; February 5, 2021 - hosted by The BTS Center.
