A Mother’s Day Card for You

 Motherhood….The unfinished work of love…

I once heard a woman in her ‘60s remark about her 40-year-old son who lives 3,000 miles away, “I will always be a mother.”

Not yet a mother, I thought, “How can this possibly be?  Didn’t he outgrow diapers, skinned knees, teen ego crises, career wobbles….?  Isn’t her work “over” now?”

Life as a mother straightened me out soon enough.  Soon, my son will turn 30. I still wake up at night worrying, remembering, hoping, and always, always, sending currents of love his way.

 The work of mothering isn’t limited to those who raise children, of course.  Anyone who has nurtured a pet, a beloved project, an aging relative, knows the fierce, ongoing labor of mothering that we call love.  If you have journeyed with a non-profit, tended a garden or a church group, you know that this work, too, never ends.

Back in the day, women wore charm bracelets, to which they affixed baubles that represented their passions – tennis, say, or painting.  My mother’s sported six tiny silhouettes, each engraved with one of our names and our birthdates.

I’ve adapted this tradition here, making a verbal charm bracelet of kitchen wisdom from my most active years as a mother.  None of us do everything right, but here, a few morsels for your Mother’s Day!!

1. Ice Cream 

2. Board games

3. Code words

4. Take-out in the car

5. Drive through the night when necessary

6. Listen

7. Reset, reset, reset

 

Ice Cream.

“Always have it in the freezer,” another mother (a Harvard MBA) advised me when I met her many years ago on one of my son’s first play dates.  “It communicates security.”

I couldn’t have been a less experienced mother – so took her word for it,and made sure I had a tub of chocolate chip on hand for quite some time.  But after a few years, I wondered.  What about sugar highs and the bad dentist visits?

It was around that time that I realized a deeper truth about ice cream.

Life with a small boy inevitably includes mapping the terrain of ice creams stands.  I’m sure I know every one from northern Maine to the tip of Rhode Island.  As I look back on those magical days, I see that the real value in ice cream wasn’t the keeping of it, but the capturing of it on the run, so to speak.  It is the way ice cream begets a road map of discoveries, laughter, and memories — times with baseball buddies, summer nights before fireworks, a cool treat after canoeing with friends, a balm when friends were scarce.

So, yes, to ice cream.  But don’t store it.  Don’t sock it away.  Like the fleeting years of childhood – go for it, with all you’ve got!

Board Games. 

I’ve passed along the used skis and the tennis rackets, the navy blazers and a good number of DVDs.  But I haven’t brought myself to surrender the board games.  Scrabble.  Life.  Parchese.

Apart from Gin Rummy, board games defined our family evenings by the fire come winter.  I am such a bad strategist that I was just along for the laughs, getting trounced each time the Monopoly board came out.  But what I remember today isn’t who won and who lost, but the triumphant glee with which young minds parried one another and discovered their unique strengths and pleasures, even as popcorn tumbled on the carpet with each roll of dice or flip of a card.  Board games are a brilliant tool for redirecting tension and conflict.  They shift the terms of engagement.  A lesson for many situations in life.  Apples to Apples.  Clue.  Trivial Pursuit.

I sometimes measure my choices as a parent by what comes back to me, now that my son is fully grown.  The first gift he and his girlfriend presented to us was – yes, a board game.  Codenames now has pride of place as the fodder for evenings of sport after leisurely meals by the fire.

Code words.

Not to be confused with the aforementioned Codenames.  Code Words are those early efforts to name something precious with the earnestness of beginning speech.  Code words are only “wrong” in that they don’t appear in any dictionary, except the one you keep in your heart.  They are the name your child first gave you, or gave a sibling or grandmother.  The way he or she first expressed his affection in words.

When we try to name with an innocence that lacks the conformities and categories that our rational minds eventually layer on – we speak, first and foremost, from the depths.  I believe that if we were to do this more regularly in every interaction, the world would be a better place.  But to do this, we need to trust the impulses of our own enduring, if buried, innocence.

In our house, because we love words and are writers, we kept notes of the earliest code words, cherished them, saved them up.  They became the lingua franca of the household.  Lines from favorite movies were bent to our local dialect.  Screen characters said things we wished we had, and we placed them on permanent loan.  We have adopted puns, and given one another so many “names” over the years that we can’t keep track, except that they continue to be the key to an ineffable treasure chest that only we can open.

Take-Out in the Car.

It was raining so hard I could barely see as I wedged into an illegal tow zone space behind a warren of academic buildings.  Noon on a Thursday.  My 27-year-old son was heading to a stag party in Atlantic City the next day.  I’d tossed all night about this, imagining – well, of course  you can imagine.  As dawn crested the garden gate, I texted.  “Falafel?”

Now, the car was filled with the scent of fresh hummus, pita, and falafel from a little hole-in-the-wall near his professional school that neither of us can resist.   He appeared through the rain, in his slicker, his satchel, and a clear attitude of having less than no time for this.

I had a short list of “wonderings” (always better than “worries”).   Was he going with a buddy?  What was the itinerary?  Did he have enough cash?  When would he be back home?

At some level, I knew my fretting was ridiculous.  But we all have moments of weakness!

Gone were the days when I had the luxury of a long commute to and from high school sporting events.  LONG gone, the afternoons when an hour sped by as we made dinner and reviewed the day’s highs and lows.  I was grateful that he understood how important it was for me to break bread with him again, before one of those many invisible thresholds of manhood that no one had warned me about.

As time goes by, we don’t get full cups of time.  Never give up.  Never shut down.  Never turn away.  We learn to be content with sips and morsels.  With take-out in the car.

 

Drive through the night when necessary.

Young parents:  File this under the Parenting EMT short manual.

There will be times when you will  wake up at 2 p.m., knowing something isn’t right – and you will discover that you are CORRECT in your intuition.

You will need to dress (or not), and dash into the infinitely lonely and terrifying night, not knowing exactly where you are going or what you will find when you get there.

I have done this (or my husband has) several times that I can remember, and probably there were others about which, as with the experience of childbirth, one is eventually gifted with amnesia.

This is about showing up.  Not going back to sleep.  The life of all changing, confused, roiling beings, need people willing to love them no matter what; people willing to arrive in the middle of the night.

The skills that one can draw on at such moments are few indeed.  A practice of meditation helps.  Faith and prayer help.  A standing intention to accept what life serves up.  A full tank.  Friends you can call at any hour of the night or day.

That is all that can, or needs, to be said on this topic.

 

Listen.

I recently heard a term new to me, “Deep Canvassing.”  It is used by public policy wonks to describe door-to-door political activism.  Instead of engaging in conflictual back-and-forth debate with those who don’t share their views (like the polarized public space we know too well today), canvassers are trained to simply listen, to ask questions that elicit high-quality, substantive, answers, and only when these are forthcoming, to engage in respectful dialogue.

As a journalist, and later a spiritual director, I have been trained to listen – for hours, days, weeks.  My opinions and suggestions, only get in the way in these contexts.

But listening when we care so passionately is a steep and treacherous learning curve, especially when what we have been doing for years has worked so well — setting expectations, boundaries, praising, encouraging, suggesting activities.  Come the age of independence, these strategies must be replaced by a monkish discretion and circumspection.

There are many excellent guides to listening, but perhaps not surprisingly, the best of these come from the literature on mental illness and trauma.  We cannot hope to change a riverboat rushing downstream until the captain develops some degree of trust in us.  We must learn to listen. The minute we are able to do this, we notice a shift.  A small opening.  The risk of vulnerability.  It takes a lifetime to master.

We need our friends on this one, believe me.  Whenever I need to vent, I call one of them.  They listen for a while and then they tell me, “Say nothing.  Be curious.  Listen.”

These days, I keep prayer beads in my bag to help me keep my mouth shut.  Prayer beads and M&M peanuts for the really tough times.

Reset.  Reset.  Reset.

 I’d vote in a heartbeat that we remove the word “pivot” from the dictionary for a decade.  What do we NOT know about “pivoting” after the last three years?

The list of our parenting reset moments could fill a book:  Canceled play dates, ear infections that don’t quit, games or jackets lost, bad sleep nights (times 10), relational crises, anxiety, dropping out, giving up.

The aim, wherever possible, is to stay ahead of the curve, attuned to possible shifts in the itinerary, and have a grab bag of tricks when you are, say, eating dinner at the home of a one of your child’s friends and said child has a meltdown because he lost the game and has been exiled to his room, while you and your guiltily victorious child are trying to swallow burgers to the sound of wailing above.  (This, incidentally, is when ice cream comes in handy.)

But ice cream won’t make most of what happens go away.  The humble but bedrock truth is that all we can offer at times is simply our presence – consistent love, compassion, and our willingness to walk the journey with them, even when we don’t understand where we are going, even when it seems that they don’t notice that we are there – even, when they need to push us away.

There are times when we just can’t fix, or control outcomes.  This is when we are called to be all that we have been in the days of ice cream cones and board games.  One operating metaphor I turn to in times like this is the frigid midwinter night when I blew a tire in the middle of nowhere on a country road, with my six year old in the back seat, hungry and tired and scared.  It was bad.

There was nothing to do but leave the car, and head out into the cold, down the exit ramp, hoping we’d stumble on help.  I saw a small house by the side of the road with a light over a modest door.  We pulled it open.  The smell of pizza assailed us.  It was a Friday night and the little place was doing a hopping business with the locals.  I will never forget, in hopeless moments, the kindness of strangers.  We were given something to drink, and a ride to our destination, a tow for the car, and a lesson in what I call no-matter-what-ness.

There are times when it looks as if we have no choice.  Be fearless.  Dig holes in the dirt, paint the dining room floor, adopt a guinea pig, “lose” the car keys, walk down a dark country road holding the hand of the frightened part of yourself, pray, store up the good times, sit counting fireflies.

My prayer for you is that this Mother’s Day will be its own sweet reset, restoring you to the deep purposes and promises of the journey.

Kathleen

[Image is a statue that stands in the garden of Bethany House of Prayer in Arlington, MA]