Mother's Day Meditations

It’s Mother’s Day on Uncannery Row, and motherhood abounds. The peahens are playing hard-to-get with honking, fanning, thrumming peacocks, who’ve divided up the acreage into tiny little kingdoms. A house sparrow has taken over a wooden bird feeder, stuffing it full of leaves and peafowl down in which to lay her first clutch of eggs. The swallows are constructing their muddy teacup nests under greenhouse eaves. We have a new female cat, Rickie Lee, who’s taken over the pyramid building and calls each night for food & scratches. She’s my son’s cat, who at 5 or 6 years refuses to be litterbox trained, so she’s come home to Mama’s House of Permanent Retirement here on the farm. Even the hen & chicks are spreading out in profound fecundity across the flower garden.

I’m so grateful, this day and every day, to have been raised in a home with both my mother and grandmother. Though in occasional dark moments I brood over growing up essentially fatherless, I know that at least one result of my femalecentric upbringing is a sense of my own sufficiency and ability. Another result is that I have the mothering instincts of a lioness—hurt my offspring, and I’ll eat you. This intense parenting gene can be burdensome to others, because I have a natural tendency to [s]mother my husband, friends, co-workers, students, mail carrier, UPS guy and complete strangers. The upside is that in spite of my many, many mistakes, I was (and am…you can’t shake that gene) a dedicated and ever-present parent. And the most amazing thing has happened now that two of our four children have children of their own—they’re incredibly devoted, conscientious parents themselves.

I’d also like to say a word today about step-parenting, which slips through the Mother’s Day cracks. Maybe because of the lioness gene, I never felt differently about Ray’s son than I did about my own. Though intellectually I know I’m not his mom, and I have no urge to dethrone his mom, emotionally and instinctually, he’s one of my cubs; I scold, cajole, comfort, support and box his ears when I have to, as I do all the kids. We tend to think of step-parents as once-removed somehow, but that’s just symantics when a kid needs a bandaid and a hug.

So here’s my Mother’s Day poem, a poem about continuity, with gratitude for moms, step-moms, adoptive moms, foster moms, surrogate moms—we’re all part of the same flea-bitten pride…

INVOCATION

If you were any more alive in me, Mother,

my heart would burst, split open

like a ripe peach soaked in holy water.

Whisper from every corner of this clapboard

cathedral, Our Lady of Perpetual Chores,

your small and powerful prayers:

    white coral bells 
    itsy bitsy spider 
    battle hymn of the republic

Chant caramel pudding and corn casserole

recipes, ancient sacred texts handed down

from your own mother, that dark marble saint

atop the bell tower, one arm wrapped around

a gilded laundry basket, a silver pressure cooker

cradled in the other. Her heart, too, burst open.

Keep me, I ask, in your blessing of trying, failing,

laughing about failure. Grant me the grace

of history, repeated mistakes, promises.

Look down on me with love when they raise you

to the bell tower, at the way I sing your praises

off-key, from behind my daughter’s stove.