MIRROR, MIRROR (MOTHERING THROUGH A WATERY LENS)

 

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 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.

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?

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 that mother's a due.

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 even now, no one can bear to claim.

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 hushed honey 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 picked up 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.

You only see my surface but

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.

She was a catalyst to get help so that I could 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 so I 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 fragile their deeply held beliefs are.

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 remember 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.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY (WHEN GRIEF OVERWHELMS)

There's a kind of human magic that happens

when we think about the years since an event

that opens a little bit of a door in our souls.

Anniversaries are special-

they help us remember where we've been,

think about our progress forward, 

or count our blessings like a dragon on top of treasure.

Some anniversaries are for celebrating

with cake and candles and off-key singing.

Some anniversaries are for reflection,

tears, and regret.

Some are layered with bittersweet-

like the birthday of your family member

who died years ago.  You still celebrate them

and all that they brought to the world

and you mourn the loss of them

at the same time.

The world is having a complicated anniversary right now.

There's a lot of shared grief that is loud and large

and deserves to be honored.

We're all marking time on a calendar

where something SIGNIFICANT

and TERRIBLE occurred

even if we're not all agreed on the specifics of that event.

The changes that have occurred over the past two years

have rocked our collective reality

in ways that will likely be studied and debated

by graduate students and pundits

for decades to come.

While the shape of the new us is unclear

and the reckoning of the impact is still

being tallied, there is no doubt about at least one thing.

We've changed.

Who we were in March 2020 is not

who we are now.

A really lovely cemetary in Chester, Vermont

While we're talkin about anniversaries,

let's be clear with each other about who is at the party.

Whenever there is change,

there is grief.

Grief the worst kind of party guest.

She's rarely listed on the guest list because

no one would intentionally invite her.

And yet, she is the 

required plus one of all kinds of A-list attendees-

like Joy and Love.

They will not show up without her by their side

so if you want them to come to the party,

she's coming too.

More than ever right now,

we are swimming in grief that we don't know how to

process or even see.

The world that we knew is on fire-

and the smoke that is coming from those fires is grief.

With smoke actively pouring from multiple places,

hanging thick in the air,

even people that are far from the conflict

will experience trouble breathing.

You are breathing in grief on every inhale

and breathing it out again on every exhale.

Even if you've stopped watching the news,

stopped socializing with people different than you,

stopped allowing new ideas to actively enter your universe

you're still living in grief because it comes 

along.

It just is.

The Chapel at Dog Mountain 

I found a post that I wrote in late 2019 

that talks about the inevitable dance

of grief and love.

It is helpful I think but probably more 

optimistic than most of us need right now.

What do we do when grief is too much?

When it has blocked out all the light

so we can't even find the balancing joy or love?

What do we do when we get buried by it?

I wish I had a 3 step solution to hand you.

Something nice and tidy to help you

move through and away from the amount of 

overwhelm that is in the world right now.

I wish there was a super secret cure for heartbreak

that would take it all away

and not send you deep into addiction of some form.

Sorry friends.

There is not a cure.

Grief is an inevitable, integral part of being human.

Kate Bowler knows a lot about grief.  

There are only a few things that I know that help 

when the grief is so thick that

it chokes you and none of them are quick or fully effective.

So take these next paragraphs with a grain of salt.

The smoke is still billowing, there are major

fires in the world and we do not yet

know when the fires will be tamped down in our collective life.

Even after the fires are out

it may still feel hard to take

 a deep breath for a while.

Maybe forever.

It never really leaves us-we

just learn to breathe again and see the sunlight

while we walk with the memory.

It's a terrible and beautiful thing how 

resilient we can be.

Eventually.

One thing I know to do with grief

is to sit with it, name it, get to know it.

Make space at the table of my life for it.

This is especially important for new flavors of grief

that seem to show up and need claiming.

Who knew I would grieve seeing people in passing

in a breakroom?

Or the small joy of a friend's new lipstick color?

How about greeting a toddler with a hug?

Petting a stranger's dog?

Singing in groups without anxiety about everyone's

vaccine and health status?

These things are so dumb and inconsequential

and yet I've named them so I can grieve their loss.

I may never get some of them back.

I have heavier things that I've had to name

and make space for in my life these past two years.

How about the grief I have at accepting the systems

that I thought were safe

are in fact dangerous for so many?

Immigration, traffic stops, healthcare, dress codes-

all have built in bias that are gentler to me

than to many others.

Or my naive assumption that we could

all understand and accept basic science?

Or that we had a shared expectation

that journalism included fact checking

and balanced viewpoints?

Even the basic definition of freedom

and justice must be grieved.

When I name it, it becomes more clear

and condensed;

less a bogey man, possibly a mortal.

Naming grief and sharing it (each note on the wall is for a pet who passed away)

Another thing that may help with grief

is to share it with someone else.

This is not a universal prescription though.

It may feel impossible to ever share it.

Not everyone deserves your grief or 

is a safe place to share it.

Don't make the mistake of believing that

finding someone who can share your grief is

like finding a unicorn though.

While, it takes a particular perspective to sit with another

who is carrying heavy loads of grief

there are many special people out there who can do it.

If one of us is a unicorn, we're all capable of being magical.

Let someone help you remember who you are.

Speaking of our collective magic-

It might be helpful for you to help someone else.

Someone who has similar grief to you

or someone who's grief is wildly different than yours.

When it feels like you can't breathe,

you can be sometimes be resuscitated 

by being of service to someone else who is struggling.

Reminding them to take a big breath in

and let it out for a beat longer than they took it in

can soothe your own injury just a tad.

ALL of our hearts are capable of breaking

which means ALL of our hearts are capable 

of holding more than we thought.

Help someone else remember who they are

and you might find a bit of yourself.

Fuel for a symbolic burning

And finally, a thing that is helpful is creating a ritual

to honor the fire that started the change.

A monument?

A parade?

A small token that you wear around your neck

or carry in your pocket?

A day you mark on the calendar?

You get to decide how to memorialize

the change that has occurred.

It's a useful step because it reminds us gently

that this is not the end of the story.

There is a before the thing that happened,

there is time while the thing was happening

and then there is the after.

If there is a ritual where you know

you'll touch back to this place, this feeling,

this loss-then you don't have to actively

carry as much of it with you sometimes.

You might not be there yet.

It's okay to be where you are

and to be mad at everyone who is ready

to start marking at least some of these

changes as past tense when there is still

smoke choking us in the air.

It's ok to be ready to memorialize some parts 

of the change and not others.

It's all ok really.

No.

REALLY.

Wherever you are in this season

I'd like to offer a toast on this anniversary.

Raise your glasses or tip your hat

or bow your head with prayerful hands.

Receive it or don't as you feel called

or send me an angry DM about how out of 

touch with the world I am right now.

My anniversary is ultimately about me

and my perception of how I understand WE.

Here's to two years in a new reality.

May we learn our lessons and need fewer of the 

same kind in the short term.

May we remember what is like to not be able to breathe,

may we witness that everyone is surrounded

by smoke and death and grief

even in the middle of light and birth and joy.

May we be just a little less rigid,

a little more kind,

and able to share what we have without fear.

May we remember that we belong to each other.

Whether we want to or not.

Detail from a tombstone in Chester VT

 

TURNING STICKS INTO GAUGES (Moving Myself Gently)

As someone who spent a lot of my educational years in labs,

the idea that something can be exactly right (or wrong)

has always held a certain appeal.

In labs, specifics are vitally important

to getting the experiment right.

Being precise, moving within the 

strictly outlined parameters,

and taking exact readings of the situation

are just basic perspectives of any scientist.

But in my own life,

especially in the voice in my head,

nothing good has ever come from having some hard and fast line

against which to measure myself.

From the number of pounds I weigh

to the dollars in my paycheck-

if I'm using hard numbers to somehow 

measure myself, it's sure to turn out badly.

And yet, for years I used measurements to be sure 

that I was somehow keeping myself in check.  

Whenever I felt anxious, I could dig deep 

and find a metric that would ensure my overall

success/happiness/safety if I just managed to achieve it.

Once I targeted that metric, I'd use my drill sergeant voice

to get myself back on track.

I beat myself back into submission until the next time 

I somehow didn't measure up.

a random stoplight in New York State from my summer road trip

I mentioned here that I took a very long road trip this summer 

and I had several revelations, including that I needed to get back

into therapy to support my mental health.
Another of those was that I needed to really pay attention 

to my physical health because many things were very off.

The old way I used to do this was through

my internal drill sergeant to break out the measuring sticks

so I could figure out exactly how far off the mark I was

and then get back within the lines.

The therapist and I agree:  that method is not good for me anymore.

It is important to me that I speak peace to myself

as the method by which I get back on track.

Until recently, I didn't really have a tool with which to do that.

I think and breathe in metaphor-

if you don't know this by now I don't know what

you think has been happening here.

This situation is no different.

The drill sergeant/measuring stick metaphor had to go 

and that meant it was time for a new one.

 Like many of my most useful ideas,

this one came to me while talking and walking with my spouse.

He was talking about something automotive

and since that is boring as all hell not my interest

my mind started wandering.

 I thought about the gauges on a car dash.

I have no idea what RPMs my car normally putters around at,

how much oil is needed for proper engine running,

or frankly what most of the gauges that I start at

every time I drive mean.

But if I ever see the needle up in the red

on any of those gauges I'll take action.

Even better, they're kind of designed to keep you from freaking out

unless you really need to do something.

They help you know that you're functioning mostly in the 

acceptable range for the car

AND they also make it clear when you're dipping into something

that isn't recommended for the machine as designed.

I began to wonder if that was a metaphor that would work

for me to approach this physical body.

Instead of focusing on a specific target or detailed data,

I've could try to stay in terms of red/yellow/green.

That sounds kind of simplistic

but it was really quite easy to begin with.

All of the gauges were buried in the red.

my daughter is a talented artist- this one is titled 'anxiety'

It will not surprise anyone who knows me that I took 

the opportunity of the pandemic 
to hit an all time record on ways to ignore 

the basic requirements of this body that I live in.  
I fought a weak and tepid fight for a few months-

attempting to work out daily using slightly adjusted tools.  

Attempting to draw boundaries around the start and end of my day.  
Attempting to keep some kind of structure with eating, sleeping, moving.  
And at some point, I forgot to care and just gave up.
On sleep.
On vitality.
On eating anything with nutrient value.
On moving.

I'm not exaggerating.
I was very successful at turning into a person who stares into the computer 
like it's the source of all my salvation with eyes that rarely blinked.
I had a slow slide into pod-person-hood.  
I wanted to just keep tripping down the endless zoom calls 

clinging tightly to that skinny connection with other humans.  
When that void wasn't filled, I found covid dashboards to watch

 and political news to mine through.  

Each day in an effort to retreat from all that ambiguity, 

I'd inevitably end up reading fanfiction or trolling reddit until 3am.  

All gauges were redlined by any objective measure.

semi-ironic advice from a Starbucks wall

But how to get the needle moving in the other direction?

For a while that felt almost impossible

to even contemplate.

So I decided to focus on just one of the gauges and see

if moving it out of redline had an impact on the others.

Sleep was the place I started and I gradually moved it from red

to orange and then a kind of puce green.

A few weeks after working on sleep

I bought a very basic fitbit and only

used it to see if I had hit or passed 10,000 steps.

More than that was mostly ignored.

Less than that meant dancing in the kitchen,

jogging in place while I watch my favorite rugby teams or

going for a walk on the greenway by my house until 

I felt the buzz.

I'm not back in the gym doing crazy weights

but I am really happy to say that

I'm moving my body every single day

and I actually enjoy the methods by which I do it.

The last area I've paid attention to is eating.

Eating has been such a complicated area for me.

But I think I've finally found a method that keeps me

from obsessing about it (calories, nutritional content, macros)

and allows me to just gauge how I feel.

I have a window in the day where I eat (usually noon-8pm).
I try to focus on getting a lot of veggies in that window 

but I also don't restrict or forbid anything.
I've noticed that I'm spending less time ruminating about what 

I might eat or could eat or should eat.
I just try and give myself the food that feels joyful for that day.

doughnut gauges from Portland Maine

I'm proud that I'm back on track towards physical health 

but I'm more proud of this shift from measuring sticks to gauges.
I have always been much more care-filled for other than people than for myself.
The pandemic forced me to be with myself so much, 

it's almost like I had to have any friends at all,

I'd definitely have to include myself in the party.

It seems really simple but I 
am starting to think of it as something truly radical.
I have proven to myself how much I can harm myself.
Again and again and again.
But over the past 6 months, I've started to prove to myself 

that I'm capable of something else.
Sitting still and listening to what is happening inside of me.
Taking care of myself as the first steps of my day

instead of the last fringes of energy.

This gauge metaphor may or may not be useful to you.

You might have some really strong reasons to keep

hitting yourself with sticks

or you might be one of the lucky few

who never raised a hand in harm to yourself.

I love hearing about tools and tricks 

that make a difference with real people's

actual lives so feel free to let me know what works for you.

slow as you go, anyway you measure it