Tag Archives: Family

Mother’s Day Thoughts

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Indulge me while I think out loud. I’m trying to decide what to blather on about today…perhaps the “meaning of meaning” or the “intricacies of the time-space continuum” or even the old tried and true “How many angels can God sit on the head of a needle?” Now I spend hours and hours each day wrestling with these important issues, stopping occasionally to gaze for a few hours upon my navel which, after 62 years, is really one handsome navel! I kid you not!

But, I don’t know what is coming over me today as I want to “hold forth” about something that really matters…perhaps I took my medication today! So, well…oh, I know, mothers, as it is mother’s day!

Let me start with my beloved mother who is just into her 12th year of watching her six children from heaven, grimacing from time to time at the bad choices they make, trotting out one of her favorite expressions, “Aw shaw” after I’ve done something really stupid. But also, I’m pleased that now she has gotten the opportunity to get the education she wanted so badly when she was here on earth and just the other day she whispered to me when I was moping through the house immersed in a book, “Look yonder. The poor wretch comes reading.” Yes, she now has the wisdom of Shakespeare and can offer those words to me that Hamlet’s mother had for him.

Mother knew nothing about this aether that I swim in and I am so fortunate that she did not; for, she could not have been the good mother that she was if she had found her navel so enchanting. Under very grim circumstances of Southern red-neck poverty, she demonstrated great courage and cared for her six children and brought them all to maturity before the bitch Alzheimer’s claimed her in 2001. She was dutifully “under dad’s thumb” for the first 12 years or so of my life; but then he made a bad mistake in that he insisted that she go to work. She hated going to work and leaving her beloved children alone in the evening but she had no choice. However, she discovered that she liked working and she thrived on the job as a nurse’s aide. She thrived so much that within a decade she had acquired the status of Licensed Professional Nurse and became the administrator of the convalescent home that she had started out as a mere grunt.

It didn’t take Dad too long to see his mistake and when he did, his various interventions to stifle mom’s ambition could not succeed. He was right, articulating the hyper-conservative belief that “you better not let the women folk off the reservation.” Mother got “off the reservation” and discovered there was a world “out there” that she could find a place in and she did not have to live rest of her life “under the thumb” of my dad.

I have watched my sisters and other young women over the years get married and then suddenly they step into “motherhood.” And, I don’t mean merely that they have babies, but they magically know how to “mother” their children, intuitively feeling a connection with them and it is this “feeling” of connection that they offer that provides an existential anchor for the developing soul. And yes, it must hurt to me a mother and watch their “young’uns” grow up and make many of the same mistakes they did. And it must hurt father’s also. But, you can be impressed with me, as I avoided that mistake—-I DIDN’T HAVE CHILDREN!!!! (Now, on this final point, please remember I am pathologically ironic!)

(Btw, on Father’s Day, I hope to offer a more sympathetic note re my dad with whom I increasingly identify.)

A Man’s View of Maternal Connection

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One of my blogging friends posted observations about motherhood a couple of days ago and this prompted very touching discussion on the “mama and child” phenomena, And what a beautiful sight that is, to watch a “mama and child” do their thing together at school, or at Wal-Mart, or church. They are beautiful, a lovely dyad for at first the separateness that we see is not really there.

And I often think of my dear mother who struggled so hard to raise six children in Arkansas poverty in the Fifties and Sixties. My heart is deeply troubled as I reflect back on those years and I so wish I could have offered her more compassion in her later years than I did. She was a “mother hen” and indeed often used that image to describe how she would like to keep her “brood” underneath her wings and protect us from what I would later hear described as those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

I remember one vivid image from my childhood which reveals the attachment issues I had with her, issues which will never completely leave me. I was about two and a half and we were in a department store doing what mother loved to do when we “went to town”, walk through the bolts of cloth at West Brothers Department store and pine for the brightly colored patterned cloth. I was very much in tow, almost literally hanging on her skirt hem, but I must have been distracted because I suddenly looked up…and then around…and there was no mother! I vividly remember that moment because it must have been sheer terror and revealed how I would handle difficult emotion throughout my life—-I kept perfectly calm, rational, and under control to size the situation up and did so in a matter of a few seconds. I knew that I could not make it without a mother so, I looked to my side and saw a woman who would do and reached my hand toward her to ask her to be my mother when my dear mother came around the corner. In that split second of time “a plank in reason (had) broke(n)” and terror gripped my soul but I “categorized” the experience and was about to make a “good” decision though one that spoke, and does speak, volumes about me. In that moment of terror I experienced what Jacque Lacan was describing in France at the time as “the lost object.” And, I can today discourse at great length about that subject but I don’t know much about the experience.

But, I offer a poem from another man who I think does know something about the experience or he could not have written such a powerful poem about the maternal connection.

Taung Child by Alan Shapiro

What led you down, first mother, from the good
dark of the canopy, and then beyond it?
What scarcity or new scent drew you out
that day into the vertical-hating flatness
of the bright veldt, alone, or too far from
the fringes of the group of other mothers
following the fathers out among the herds
and solitary grazers, the child clinging to your back
when the noiseless wing flash lifted him
away into the shocked light as the others ran?
Two million years ago, and yet what comes
to me, in time lapse through cascading chains
of changing bodies, is not the tiny skull
I’m holding, not the clawed out eye sockets,
his fractured jaw, but you, old mother, just then
in that Ur-moment of his being gone,
what I’ve felt too, on crowded streets, in malls,
if only briefly, in the instant when
the child beside me who was just there
isn’t
before he is again, that shock, that panic,
that chemical echo of your screaming voice.