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| All photos in this post are from in or near Acadia National Park, Summer 2025 |
Everyone has a mother
although not everyone has been mothered
or has had the opportunity to know their mother.
Mother is both a noun and a verb,
a theme and a meme,
a cultural norm,
weaponized aspiration,
and part one of a classic swear.
Everyone,
and I mean EVERYONE
has opinions about mothering that
they base around their own experience
with with one or more people who
mothered (or attempted to mother) them.
Mother. Momma. Mom.
It's more than teacher or parent.
Mother is the giver of life, the foundation for
how we learn to be loved and give love,
and for female folks, the first mirror
we hold for what it looks like to be a person.
*****
Last week I was putting on mascara
and
(as one does)
I stabbed myself accidentally in the eye.
As I reached for a tissue, I happened to glance in the mirror.
For just one brief millisecond
my whole being thought the
person staring back at me
was my mother,
laughing sarcastically at my clumsiness.
I could almost hear her-
Good one, Grace!
or maybe I said it out loud.
Even all these years later, it can
be difficult to distinguish her echo
from my own voice in unguarded moments.
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For almost two decades, there
was no space between my mother and I-
no (allowable) difference between
what she wanted and what I needed.
My cells were hers and her cells were mine.
It of course began that way in utero
but our interwoven co-dependence
persisted right through early adulthood.
I was at her service,
laying all my offerings at the altar
of her care, her pride, her protection.
I could have stayed committed,
to that idol for my entire life if I abided by the tenants
of my family faith.
But I'm a sinner and so I rebelled.
Somewhere in the shift from girl to woman,
I drew a line between myself
and my mother that meant we each
had to choose how to move forward
as individuals-not as one.
I have learned since that this is a natural part
of growing up-this separation.
But my rebellion was not a partial tear
followed by repair and recriminations, hugs and new understanding.
It was a refusal to bow at an altar of abuse
and dysfunction in service of her title.
It was an insistence that I was allowed
to exist, separate from her, not a mirror.
I shifted the lens and said
You can have some of me but you cannot have all of me.
I am my own and I get to choose what to give you.
Some of anyone was never going to be
even close to enough.
She has always demanded all or nothing.
I don't remember the last time my skin touched
my mother's skin.
I expect to never share space or time
with her in this iteration of life.
The last time I shared physical space with my mother
was several years past the original line in the sand.
We had been apart but not completely severed,
I was exiled but not fully shunned.
In just the right light, we could pretend
for brief moments that I was still
primarily a reflection of her.
It was easier on both of us for a while.
Until she asked for a favor that turned into
another, much deeper crack.
Couldn't my youngest brother go to live with someone else for a while?
Just for a little while until she got out of trouble?
He wasn't safe in the house with her lover.
Nevermind that he'd never been safe with her.
Safety for others only mattered when she could no longer
receive the offering of respectability afforded by being a mother.
We had always done things in the dark
traded shame like cards.
This time, we did it in the cold afternoon light
of an Alamance County courtroom.
I wrote a letter of support
to explain why I recommended the transfer of custody.
It was barely a page, a clear outline that spared
a lot of detail that still no one can bear to claim
but it was filled with lines I
knew I should never cross as her reflection.
I sat in that courtroom while she was led to the front.
The judge asked if she wanted to dispute any of the content.
She declined with honeyed tones
and then he agreed....that the lines I drew should stand
for more than just me.
We had one brief interaction that day,
intense eye contact that was broken when one of us
(I don't remember which)
looked away.
The last conversation I shared with my mother
was when my son was five and my daughter was an infant.
She had been sending gifts to my children through Andy
and when I found out,
I popped off at the mouth.
If our mother wanted to talk to me
she should call me herself I said.
What I meant was that she was using him.
What I wanted her to hear was that she should leave me alone
and find someone easier to prey on.
I did not actually mean she should call me but of
course that is what she did.
She scolded me when I asked who
was on the other end of the line.
It's your mother for Christ's sake. Who else would it be?
As if we had seen each other just last week
instead of the better part of a decade.
I guess when a god calls you direct, she expects caller ID to be unnecessary.
There was no visual impact but the shape
of her arguments, the cadence of her heartbeat,
and the insistence of her need was loud.
During the next sixty minutes
she tried again to shape me into a something flat and reflective.
The lines I drew had been reinforced though-
by my own blood bound up in other little souls,
by my own rhythm, no longer drowned out by hers,
and by space in which to build that memory.
I am mine (but I am also theirs)
so I cannot ever be only hers again.
In fractured stops and starts
it became clear that
she wanted something, maybe several somethings.
I wouldn't pretend that we had
nothing between us that needed repair.
I wouldn't play along with the frame she kept
trying to wrap around me.
When I put up a clear line of inquiry
What do you want?
She answered in my cadence, direct and clear for once.
Fix this mess-but do it my way.
I declined.
She crescendoed according to all the rules
I remembered from my home training.
Deny, deflect, distract.
And when that fails, threaten.
I said go ahead, bring it.
I am water, deep and strong.
She looked away.
It's been decades
since we've interacted directly.
I know she's still alive because
my siblings occassionally give me reports.
Sometimes at her direction
(I can still feel the cadence)
and sometimes while they process their own lines
of demarcation or
deconstruct their own altars.
Knowing the tide still pulls is comforting,
catching glimpses of her in the mirror is
reassuring, hearing the timbre of her
voice in my own is a touchstone.
I am so grateful for her.
I love my mother.
I always will.
*******************
Loving her has taught me more about compassion
and grace and redemption than most
of my easier relationships.
Learning to love her as a separate entity,
to forgive her the damage done to her reflection in me
has given me a deep well
of self-love, regulation and generosity.
My own daughter is a force of living water
sometimes serene on the surface
but also vibrant, alive, and changing.
She's like me but not.
She began in me but she has already
become something unique and beautifully distinct.
One day she'll hear my voice from her own mouth,
see my face in a piece of glass
and I hope feel as much joy
from knowing her mother still lives
in her as I do when that happens to me.
My mother gave me the experience that I needed to have
as a catalyst to get help to create a new story.
I am so grateful for this wisdom.
I love my mother.
I always will.
If you listen to our shared culture,
what I did in breaking that connection was
terrible, unthinkable-a desecration.
No one asks what made that separation
the only possible choice.
Most project their own experience with the
deep well of love they tapped into
with their mother
and assume that the child is
being petty, willful or spiteful.
In cases like mine,
the only way I could continue to love my mother
was to separate, to choose myself.
I had tried (and watched many many other beloved people)
to find a middle ground and failed.
I was almost never a child but learned at an early age
that I needed to do the work of mothering for her
and my siblings.
Once I turned those skills on myself, I realized that
the girl I was needed a mother too.
One who would do the hard thing the child needs
even if the mother will be heartbroken forever because of it.
I thank her every day for teaching me how to be selfish
because it saved my life.
I love my mother.
I always will.
I can't tell you the number of times
someone has said: Your mom must be so proud of you.
Many people who love me and met me after
dissolution of this core relationship
think that my mother is either deceased
or that she must live
in some remote, exotic location.
It is unthinkable to them that I would be
so disobedient as to fail to honor my mother
in the way they understand that directive.
I rarely get into this with people
anymore unless we are going to
spend significant time together.
It's so discordant with what they want to believe
-about mothers, about me, about her.
I don't like to ruin people's world view
or expose them to how close trauma is to all of us.
There's plenty of overly simplistic examples on
the 24-hour news cycle of how we continue to
fail to see each other, love each other,
support each other.
I save the deeper dives for those who reach out
for real connection, not grounded in pride
or fairytales that elevate heroes and burn
villains at the stake.
I've come to learn that there are many of us
that have had to make that decision to separate
and many of us bear the shame of disconnection
from peers, family or community.
If you are one of these children-I mostly want
you to know that you aren't alone.
There are even more of us as the tide of MAGA
and MAHA and white supremacy and Christian Nationalism
infect even beautiful souls with something
that is anathema to connection.
And if you're feeling alone,
I would like to share that there is healing and wholeness
that exists when we become the living water
that our mothers (even the imperfect or missing or lost ones)
give us as we are born into this iteration.
Our hearts are made to swell, break and then swell again.
It's our super-power and we can find the way back.
Thank goodness for mothers.
I love my mother.
I always will.
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