My intention was to post a Mother’s Day tribute this morning and then have a day of self care. This is the 18th Mother’s Day without her. My grief is now adult sized. It’s matriculated through the stages (a few times).
We take a vote, my grief and I, and decide to get out into the sunshine, even if it is just en route to indoor activities. When grief was younger it would sideline me from intended activities, so in an effort to avoid old patterns, self care takes precedence today.
I start with a machine Pilates class. I love how it taps into my yoga conditioned muscles but turns up the activation to eleven. Feeling stronger and energized I walk through Union Square towards the theatre for a matinee screening. Matinees used to be our thing. I pop into DSW to check out sandals and it takes a few aisles before I recognize the throng of Sunday shoppers are primarily mother-daughter ensembles. I have memories of us doing this too, but I have tarried long enough and don’t want to miss the movie, which I know nothing about. Because life is better than any fictional twist I can come up with, it turns out the movie Return to Seoul is about a young woman looking for her birth mom. Afterwards I debrief with a friend who had seen the film weeks ago; a friend my mom would have really liked if they’d met. I tell my friend this and she says she thinks it would be mutual based on what I’ve told her about my mom. This makes be smile because I know it’s true. It’s as true as the sudden sense my mom is there, as if in agreement. To be clear, it isn’t that I feel her presence like a ghost, but I have a sense of her, energetically. There is the briefest atomic shift, a tingle, a knowing.
In its maturity grief allows me to acknowledge my mother’s energy is ever present, ‘neither created or destroyed’. The energy is beyond a memory, although those float through the ether like pollen, with varying frequency dependent on the season. The essence of her just happens, in the space between moments, on the periphery of a thought, like a cloud in the sky; beautiful, ephemeral and real. Even if it can’t be touched there is comfort in it.
Still, some days I just want to fucking hug her. It’s a heavy cloud. But it too shall pass.
0 Comments