Mothers. Mothering. Wow.
When I talked to my mother a few days ago, she was happy. At peace. Still.My activity was keeping tabs on her feeling state and being hyper-vigilant about intuiting what needed to be done so that she could be happy. And I could be safe.It never worked, of course, because it wasn’t up to me. I’m out of that job now and it feels like the door of the cage I didn’t realize I was in flew open. Oh, I think to myself, this is what it’s like to have a mother who is self-regulating. Who doesn’t depend on me for anything except to say “hi darling, how are you.” And as much as that freedom is startling after 71 years, what is equally as startling is her ability to drop who she was to be this new person she is. Which, I realize, means dropping any kind of resistance to her situation. “The food is awful,” she says. “But that’s fine. My table mate picks her nose and burps louder than a locomotive. Oh, and she picks her teeth at the table. But oh well.”I’ve been quoting Stephen Levine for years who said that “hell is wanting to be somewhere other than where you are.” Even when she was happily married, my mother wanted more. More money. A different house. More clothes. More vacations. More jewelry. More love. There was a hunger in her that nothing ever satisfied. Now I see that it was, in part, because she was always looking out there to fill something in here. But when she dropped the resistance and chose to have what she already had, the suffering disappeared. When I want to know what it looks like to stop saying “This isn’t it” and “No, I want something else,” I have my mother to remind me. Wow.I am amazed at both her happiness and the effect it has on me. I don’t ever remember when I was not her best friend, her confidante, her wise counsel. Well, maybe before I could talk but even then (I started talking before I was a year old) there was a felt sense of her loneliness and deep unhappiness and I took it upon myself to make her better. Some kids might have distracted themselves, gotten involved with other activities.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 