Mothers Day. I was brought up and loved by my grandmother. Nurtured by my grandfather. Disappointed and abandoned by my mother. Accepted and aided by my stepmother. Challenged and taught by my father. Welcomed and loved by my step-grandma. It's a complicated day for me.
My mother didn't play a big role in my life, except by her absence and by a couple of epic fails early in my childhood, and I keep coming back to her because we're still connected. I don't know where she is, or if she's alive. My feet look like hers, and every time I look down at them I'm reminded that when I was a little boy, I thought she was beautiful.
It's without a doubt that my perception of beauty is rooted in how I saw her then. Physical beauty, empty of spiritual meaning, steeped in failed promises, and accompanied by a keen longing for love and connection that wasn't there.
Think that had a lasting impact? No wonder I clung to every relationship like it was the only one left.
***
When I was 6, my mother, despite serious objections from my grandmother, "borrowed" me to go on vacation with her and a group of her friends to Georgia, somewhere in the Caucus mountains. I don't remember much of that trip. I was the only kid. We had shishkebabs in the mountains at a campsite, and eventually ended up at a seaside resort with one-room cabins. One night my mother wanted to go party at another cabin. I woke up later that night, in the dark, alone. I was scared and wanted to find her and ran outside, thinking I'd be able to recognize where she went. I was wrong. I remember running down the main street, hazy lights high above me, sea somewhere ahead, anonymous streets to the left and to the right, no idea where to look. I don't remember how that night ended.
My other memory from that trip resurfaced fairly recently. It was of me and my mother at the sea, at night, on the rocky pebble beach. I was really tired and didn't want to be there. My mother's suitor was there. He was really drunk; I don't think she was. He was drinking still, and confessing his love to her. He broke his beer bottle on the rocks and was using a broken piece of glass to carve her name into his arm, telling her he'd kill himself if she didn't marry him. He went into the water after that, she ran after him. I don't remember how that ended either.
I was there as her shield.
When I got back, I was exhausted and undernourished. That was the last time grandma allowed this sort of thing to happen. She wrote about it in her autobiography.
***
Back to the subject of the mothers' day. Taking the meaning in a narrow sense, which I self-pityingly did for years, it wasn't really a day of joyous celebration for me, all things considered.
A very welcome insight came one year when I realized that Mother is code for Nurture, and that what I *can* celebrate is not only the nurture spirit in all those who gave me love, but also the nurture spirit in myself, or, to put it more broadly, the nurture spirit in all of us.
That spirit is what feeds us, gives us comfort when we need it, encouragement when we feel down, a helping hand when our hands are tired, and a shoulder to cry on or ear to borrow when there are no more words left, or when all that's left are words alone.
So with that, it doesn't matter who you are - happy Mothers' Day to Mother Spirit in you.
Such a beatiful text, mate. You rock!