Mother's Day... (Year 2)

My second Mother's Day is rapidly approaching. I'd been congratulating myself on how well I'd been handling it until I realized that, as usual, I was actually NOT handling it at all. I, like many, have a propensity to push away things that are difficult to deal with. I am an "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" person and while Peanut is never far from my mind and heart, the struggle and pain of my particular brand of motherhood often are. It is not uncommon for grief to cause feelings of surrealism, and I'm often surprised by what a foreign idea it seems that I am a mother. A mother. Of a child. Like trying to convince myself that I'm a wagon wheel; it simply can't be true. Realizing that I'm stuck in the surrealism often (read: always) precedes a time of grief in which my sadness seems overwhelming. However painful this grief is, it's also usually a little bit of a relief to feel it - I hate the numbness that comes with the surreal stage; the knowing that I'm not fully entering into my role as a mother. Of course, the grief often makes me long to feel "better," and the cycle usually begins again.

As I discussed in my last blog, I've been working on learning how to live between these tensions, in the paradox, as Parker Palmer would call it. What I have been learning is this: being Peanut's mother is a daily decision as much as a biological reality. Shortly after coming home from the hospital, I started to feel (natural) feelings of separation from Peanut. He wasn't there and the hormones that would have strengthened our bond had he been present started to fade. To put it succinctly: I freaked out. I felt like I was uncontrollably falling out of love with my son. And then I was reminded, by One greater than myself, that love is always a choice, never a "feeling." I was reminded that every day that I chose to love my son, I loved him. If it didn't "feel" like I thought it would, then it simply didn't; it had no bearing on the reality of my love. And so it is with motherhood.

Being Peanut's mother may not feel like I thought it would, but every day that I choose to be his mother, I am his mother. To know that this truth has no basis in my feelings is more reassuring than I can say. And this is what I'm learning I must choose to believe in both the joy of the surreal and the pain of grief: I am a mother. Plain and simple. And exceedingly complicated.

So Happy Mother's Day to all mother's, traditional and non-traditional, of children present and accounted for, and lost and grieved over, of children born and not-yet born; your daily choice to be a mother makes you more of a mother every day, whether it feels like you thought it would or not. It has given you the power to choose to nurture and celebrate the lives you've been entrusted with. It has given you the grace to laugh and love and the courage to open doors to possibilities that terrify you. You have had the faith to raise the impossibly beautiful and unique people that you made. You do all of this even when you've been too tired or frustrated to think you want to, because you bravely and irrevocably choose to. You are, in short, superheroes : )

And so, those these words are far too few...

Happy Mother's Day!