Mother’s Day has certainly been picked up by stores, plucking at our heart strings via a core concept so important to us all: our mothers.
Mother's Day arrives with the ideals of flowers, sentiment and the view of motherhood as a fixed, idealised thing. It presents with soft-focus advertising and the general implication that everyone has a simple relationship with motherhood.
Which is lovely, if you happen to live inside a greeting card.
Every day honours our mothers in everything we do and are. After all, the idea of who we are, and who we actually are, comes from who they are.
Because of all this, mothers are often judged and often feel judged (and judge themselves, because apparently they don't already have enough to worry about).
They are judged as a role, which is stereotyped and may not have any connection to who they actually are as people. As if they all should fit inside a neat, simple description. As if they had unlimited wisdom, resources, emotional maturity, support, money, safety, not to mention sleep!
Most of them did not.
They had themselves, their circumstances, their own mothers, their own wounds, and whatever tools, and colours, they managed to pick up along the way to create the artwork of their lives (and ours!).
Every mother arrives at motherhood carrying her own history: her childhood, her family role, her hurts, her beliefs, her fears, her unfinished dreams.
They also arrive with the compounded ideals and, often hidden, history of all the generations of mothers before them.
Each woman inherits something from the mothers before her: methods, silences, fears, recipes, beliefs, resilience, odd sayings, survival tactics, and occasionally a deeply suspicious attachment to family legends with no documentary evidence whatsoever (!).
Mothers, whoever they actually are as people, use what they have. A mother's job, really, is to make the best of what is at hand and somehow grow children into adults who go out into the world.
Mothers have a fierceness.
There is definitely something fierce in the attempt to keep children alive, fed, clothed, moved from one place to another, enrolled in another school, carried across another border, and somehow launched into the world.
My Mum was born in small town New Zealand in 1946, post-war, the youngest of nine.
She came into a family already full of stories, roles, expectations, emotional baggage and misunderstandings. Her mother was also the youngest of a large group of siblings, married young, worked hard supporting home life, and was musical.
Her father (from a very large group of siblings and older half siblings) was an educator who was raised by a strongly community-minded English immigrant.
To my mother's teenage eyes he likely seemed very conventional.
My mother has long described herself as the black sheep of her family, the one who did not quite fit. I have often wondered if this was projected onto her by her siblings, her parents, or something she thought of herself. I feel like she turned it into somewhat of a badge of honour as she moved through her life.
Things I know about my mother are not small things.
She is protective of her own mother’s memory. She carries concern over the later years of her grandmother's life. She has moved between New Zealand and Australia many times, lived with restlessness, reinvention and survival, and made her own non-conventional career.
She is a lifelong learner. She has studied and taught herself a way through life - books by mail, correspondence courses, evening classes, astrology, naturopathy, counselling, painting - gathering tools wherever she could find them.
She is not afraid of hard work in a garden, is a self-taught painter, an astrologer, a mother of five, a grandmother, aunt, cousin, great-grandmother, great-aunt, Kiwi, lover of landscapes and nature, and, in her own way, a gypsy.
There is something remarkable in the way she sees.
She taught herself to paint in her sixties, not by mastering perspective in the formal sense, but by noticing colour: the real colour, the one hiding under what the brain assumes it sees. This is important. She does not just paint what things are supposed to look like. She looks for the colour that is actually there.
Maybe that is also one way to think about mothering. Not as the clean, perfect image we are handed by cards, advertisements and cultural expectation, but as the work of using the colours available. Some bright. Some muddy. Some inherited. Some mixed in panic at the last possible moment. Mothers do not always get a clean canvas, good lighting, or a full palette. They work with what they have.
My mother raised children in trying circumstances, in times when there were no benefits for single mothers, and work was simply what had to be done. She did what she had to do to support herself and children and those children are now out in the world doing their own things.
That is not nothing.
My mother likes the idea of gypsy blood somewhere in the family line. I have looked, as the family history nerd and researcher that I am, and have not found any in the blood. I understand why the idea appeals to her and why it pulls her so strongly.
There is certainly a legacy of migration in our family that has roots many generations back. My mother's mother descends from people who bravely traveled, in times of austerity, across the entire globe to look for a place to build something better for themselves. To escape from a system of oppression and motivated by hope. Her life has mirrored this strongly at a number of crucial points.
She has certainly lived like someone with movement in her blood: back and forth across the Tasman, never entirely fixed, always half-looking toward the next somewhere else.
Despite the Hallmark imagery and conventional ideals, mothers and mothering are real, human, imperfect things.
This is a tribute to a woman who keeps moving, keeps learning, keeps searching for meaning.
She keeps making colour out of what she has in front of her, and does her best with the tools she has.
We are all made by people who were also making themselves as they went.
How have you honoured that mother figure in your life today?
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Three of the most recent generations of women in the long, complicated inheritance of mothering - doing the best with the colours they had (my Mum, her mum and her Mum's mum!). |
Happy Mother's Day Mum! I love you.
Thanks for all you have done and continue to do.
Thanks for being you.
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