Life-Love 86: Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is a hopeful day. A change of pace from the world we have built.

We spend so many of our days pursuing things that really do not matter. We fill our minds with material goals, with dreams of status and reputation. We consume life as it is presented to us, day by day, eating it and eating ourselves. We’ve grown very good at turning people into ideas: through psychoanalysis, through economics, through television. Social media has even converted our identities as people into symbols, our relationships into public relations exercises. Even as we gain more and more awareness of what our friends are doing, we feels the human bonds that link us to them grow more brittle and, as a result, our lives are diminished. Even our feast days have become festivals of consumption – Christmas is about presents, Easter about bunnies and eggs, New Years about unsteady debauchery in face of an uncertain future.

On Mother’s Day, however, we are invited to slow down. To remember.

Our relationships with our mothers, whether we are men or women, are complicated and often fraught. On Mother’s Day we celebrate the sacrifices and generous love that our mothers have given us, but we also think – often against our the wishes of of brittle ego – back over the one real relationship that we could never escape from or diminish through media and materialism.

This thinking back can be an unsettling thing. That’s because it is human and somewhat uncontrollable. Just as falling in love with someone is a complicated blend of biology, emotion, experience and reason, so too is our relationship with our mother. We remember the times we were angered by her, or displeased at something she imposed on us because she thought it was best. We blush privately at the memory of our moments of rebellion, how we struck out at her, perhaps cruelly, in an effort to define ourselves. It hurts to think that we were striking out at the one person with whom we have a full and complete connection – a relationship bound by the unbroken golden braid of our birth, our lives and our love.

So, Mother’s Day is a good day. It is a day to remember that we are human. That we come from a human who bore us for 9 months and then suffered terrible pain and relief at our delivery into the world. We remember that this is something we share with all other humans. Everyone has a mother. Everyone started wailing and helpless, comforted by the warmth of the body, breath and arms of the woman who begat us.

Maybe Mother’s Day can be a guide back to becoming more human.

 

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