A Mothering Eternity, not a Mother’s Day!
For the past few days, I have been sitting with my discomfort around the idea of “Mother’s Day,” which was celebrated enthusiastically in my real and virtual communities a while back. Why have I inherited my own mother’s scoffing rejection of that day and always refused to engage in it? Why am I reluctant to both wish my mom, and all the other moms in my life, a happy Mother’s Day, and at the same time also don’t really care about receiving that acknowledgment from my own daughter and other loving people who want to honor my own mothering work in the world? What really is the meaning of “Mother’s Day” in a world where I get push-back from students in a class on early Chinese gynecology when I use the word “mother” to refer to a body that is pregnant or has given birth?
My emotions these past few days have been swirling all over the place: There was a flood of grief unleashed by a deeply healing voice message from my daughter, who is old enough now to witness the challenges of mothering in the lives of some of her friends. She was acknowledging my years of struggles as a financially and physically and emotionally drained single mom just trying to make it through each day with a roof over our head and food on the table. So, there is bitterness here, about the irony of Mother’s Day as the invention of a country and culture that, at least from my perspective and experience, honors mothers far less than either my native Germany or the traditional Mexican and East Asian cultures that I am comfortable in and familiar with. I teach women’s health to practitioners of Chinese medicine and constantly find myself discussing with students and colleagues how exhausting, and even harmful, the experience of motherhood in contemporary US society can be. In addition, we all live in a popular culture influenced by a biomedical paradigm that is STILL, to this very day, deeply rooted in the misogynistic notion that uteruses make humans “hysterical” and weak.
You want to celebrate mothers? Then, my angry younger self used to want to scream from the mountain tops, don’t send a Hallmark card or flowers, desserts, or other feminine gifts that were most likely produced by mothers’ labor that took them away from their own families and the R&R and TLC they badly need and deserve. Instead, advocate locally and globally for better pay for “mothering” jobs, from teaching to daycare to elder care to cooking and cleaning. Or change your institutional structure, if you have this kind of influence, to give new mothers more time off after childbirth, flexibility around childcare, and better medical care around reproductive health, from menstruation to birth control to pregnancy and postpartum support.
In the end, if you want to honor mothers, stop the wars that kill the children (and everybody else)! Stop the plastic consumption, greed, and consumerism that choke our oceans! Stop the expansion of suburban MacMansions and high-speed roads that kill our insects and deer and forests! For crying out loud, stop the climate disaster that is endangering the future of our kids and all other creatures! Instead of selling cards and chocolates and dead flowers, switch your mindset from exploitation and extraction to regeneration and healing …
You get the idea. Moreover, what’s the deal with a culture and society that has to designate a special day to honor mothers???!!! And then, to make matters worse, this same society now designates a similar day to honor fathers! This makes the whole exercise feel like a bad joke, especially when you are a single mother trying to raise a family without so-called “child support,” the financial aspect of that either being completely absent or painfully inadequate, like rubbing salt into a gaping wound.
From a Chinese Five-Element/dynamics 五行 perspective, the last two paragraphs have now covered two of the five emotions associated with these groups of five: Grief as the emotion of the lung, associated with sadness, and anger as the emotion of the liver, associated with wood. In addition, we can throw in a fair amount of fear, associated with water and the kidneys, due to too many bounced checks, nights with a loaded gun under the bed, health scares, job losses, and who knows what. And then there are the sleepless nights of stewing or “ruminating,” recognized in Chinese medicine as the emotion of the earth and spleen. This overthinking only exacerbates the exhaustion when the daylight comes, and you must force yourself to roll out of bed no matter what, because of the farm waiting to be “mothered” in addition to the kid. Of course, we lastly have joy, as the emotion of fire and the heart, like the kiddo holding a newborn goat named “Nutella” in the pasture or galloping off on that gorgeous mustang, or a well-earned cigarette after a long day of filling the hay barn or planting the garden or making a fortune at the farmer’s market with the world’s best goat cheese (at least in my daughter’s eyes).
To be sure, it feels very satisfying to write these emotions off my chest and thereby to lighten the load with which I move forward in life. But my goal these days is not to indulge in any of these emotional excesses, whether we classify them as “positive” or as “negative” in our current popular culture. Instead, I aim to find equilibrium, to avoid expending my Qi too far in either of these five directions. This is a skill that I shall have no choice but to master as I age, if I want to live the next few decades, or however many years I still have left in this lifetime, to the fullest extent possible and show up in service.
As part of that adventure, I now get to step into my future as an elder and “wisewoman,” a mother in a much bigger, fuller, expanded sense than just the physical one. Given the fact that I have passed on my own proudly independent streak and willful spirit to my daughter, these days I am forced to practice leaving behind the beautiful, rewarding, exhausting, incredibly complex, and illuminating and transformative role of being the physical mother of a single child, to allow her to spread her wings and fly. Where does that leave me? I find myself in one of those uncomfortable friction-prone liminal in-between spaces, like international border regions, interdisciplinary or cross-cultural disagreements, or the tidal flats that my new desk looks out over, teaming with animals in the air and water and in between. Such spaces may be unstable and hard to hold, but they sure are fertile, creative, and hugely productive and transformative. This is where the growth happens. When we first leave solid ground and step into the mud, often we are afraid of sinking and drowning in the new element and wish we hadn’t left the safety of the familiar behind. I can see this pattern repeat itself over and over in so many areas of my life. That is the sentiment behind my desire to mother other people’s children, to find another academic appointment with a regular paycheck and health insurance, to move back to Germany or Taiwan or New Mexico, and to stay with any other familiar pattern.
A commissioned painting of La Virgen with my barnyard animals, by my daughter’s art teacher in elementary school, Amy Cordova, done in trade for farm products.
So here I am, having recently moved across the street. Physically, it barely even classifies as a move, but in terms of my lived experience it’s a complete world apart. It’s a steep hillside with crappy soil but there is definite potential for homesteading in a way that I haven’t had since losing the farm in New Mexico more than a decade ago. My old farming muscles are rediscovering the bliss in the familiar rhythm of a couple of hours of hard physical labor in the morning, balanced out with desk work in the afternoon. At the same time, the beauty of this place makes me stop and just be still, in awe of the moment, too precious to rush through, based on a lesson that only the sudden death of my best friend could have taught me. The large dining table in front of a row of windows that look out over the Puget Sound is reminding me every day of the potential of this place for hosting retreats and other small in-person events. And along those lines, I also see my current moment as an important step in this transition from one kind of mothering to another, even though I haven’t quite figured out what this new kind might look like. For my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations, the transition may not have been as radical as for me, since they got to slip into the role of grandma, mothering their many children’s many children. For better or for worse, I don’t get to do that. So I am back to wondering what mothering looks like for me as a person with strong mothering instincts but a child who lives far away and needs her space these days.
As a gigantic, limitless source of joy that moves me so deeply many times each day right now,— I admit in total self-indulgence,— I get to shower my animals with love, from snuggling with the dog and cat each night to watching over my happy goats and chickens as they fill their expanding bellies with lush spring growth and serenade me with the occasional happy sounds during our morning grazing routine. Beyond that, in my virtual and professional world, I get to mentor my students and colleagues with regular zoom meetings and emailed translation pieces and other posts.
With my friend Susi serving soup a couple of weeks ago at The Open Table (every Monday, 11-1, Third and Anthes, Methodist church)
So I have a rich life. And yet, what truly has made a difference in my life has been the ability to express my mothering instinct, if you want to call it that, in my local community: To give you just a couple of examples, I love to spread around the bounty that my goats gift me with their daily abundance of milk. Almost a gallon a day is more than I can consume myself, so I spread it around. That’s a really really easy way to make myself happy. And then, every Monday, I get to help out at The Open Table, our local soup kitchen, where I serve soup and occasionally make my rounds from table to table pushing butter-dripping garlic bread on happy eaters. The food is free or by donation and everybody is welcome. It’s such a beautiful scene that makes my heart sing and just restores my faith in humanity, old and young, rich and poor, all of us together sharing delicious sustenance. There is a power in this weekly event, organized by two human angels and supported by many more, a healing force of love that just touches me so deeply, perhaps because of the precarious state of the world right now, or the fact that my blood family is so far away, or because I am just older and a tiny bit wiser about the simple pleasures and have gone through a pandemic and some hard years…
Me rescuing two trash cans from the dumpster on the Hearts and Hammers work day of 2024
As one last example, I recently participated in a yearly local event called “Hearts and Hammers,” where this year we had over three hundred (!) volunteers meet up at the high school, get organized into teams, and work all day to fix up more than two dozen houses for people who just needed help. I was assigned to the waste and recycling team and had a blast filling dumpsters and occasionally rescuing treasures like the two trash cans in this silly picture. And I am not sharing these pictures with you to show off a stupid selfie but I hope you can see how happy I am in those moments. No therapist or drug (legal or not) could ever have that kind of effect on me! It’s simply me claiming my mothering instinct and giving myself permission to step away from the busy-ness of my normal life and to indulge in simple actions to spread love and kindness and thereby receive that love back a million times.
To conclude this very long essay, this is what I have been noodling around over this past week or so.
What does the verb “to mother” really mean? What is the essence of being a “mother”? How is it different from “parenting” or “fathering”? To me, the answer is related to the simple fact that giving birth has fundamentally and very tangibly changed my relationship to everything outside the boundaries of my physical body. And before you stop reading here because you are offended by my narrow definition here of mothering as physically giving birth, just hold on, because I will dig deeper in the next paragraph! For me personally, ever since the instant when my daughter slipped out of my body, life has not been the same: A part of me is running around outside of me, beyond the protective reach of my imaginary wings of mama-bear protection. This is a very simple, literal lesson in being one with the universe, which I am still learning to surrender to, because what choice do I have but to trust that she is okay, that she, and the rest of the universe, are just as they should be? And of course sometimes she is not okay, and these days the world sure doesn’t seem to be okay, and I have to digest that reality as well.
A gift created by my dear friend Sandra Garcia when I left Taos. The back says “Home is where the heart is.”
The key that is allowing me to make peace with the suffering in the world, to continue breathing and functioning and being present in spite of it all or because of it all, and to transform this suffering into healing in my little corner of the universe, has been to extend my mama love to the rest of the world. Given the horrendous state of the world right now and all the awful heart-breaking news coming at us, in the form of wars, protests, climate disasters, threats and news of violence, death, greed, and destruction no matter where we turn and what side we are on, maybe we don’t need a “mother’s day” but a “mothering eternity”!
Could we turn all the tears and love of all the mothers in the world into a tidal wave of peace and healing, and use that powerful force to turn things around? Isn’t it time that we listened to the mothering instinct in each of us, whether we are male or female or in between, human or animal or plant or whatever? What would the world look like if it were run by people who were fully in touch with their mothering instincts and able to express this mothering energy in their actions? Can we start a conversation around expressing maternal instincts that goes beyond raising physical children, and includes creative projects of art and music, stewardship of the land, and limitless spreading of unconditional love? And now, at this point of this essay, what are some pieces that I may be missing? What do you do in your life? What does mothering feel and look like for you? What about people who have not given birth in the literal sense? What is the essence of mothering for you?
Tag, you’re it! And truly, if you have read this all the way to the end, THANK YOU!
