we are all mothers this year

Be the one who, when you walk in,
Grace shifts to the one who needs it most.
Even if you’ve not been fed,
Be bread.

~ Rumi

Spring is coming here in New Hampshire, but slowly.  In my garden the first blooms of delicately hued hellebores and sunny daffodils are welcome reminders that we really are emerging at last.  For both plants and people there are better, brighter days ahead. And yet, after all we’ve been through during this long hard year, perhaps it’s only natural to find ourselves stepping hesitantly into the new season.  The weather app predicts six inches of snow on Friday.  And although I got my second vaccine yesterday, when I think about actually resuming anything like normal life, questions abound.  What will the next chapter look like and how will it feel? Who have I become during these months of separation, uncertainty, and loss?

Thinking back over the many dinners I’ve made, the countless hours engaged in long heart-to-heart conversations with loved ones far away, the joy I found in spending time with my parents and the pain of not seeing our son Jack for well over a year, it occurs to me that while some things have certainly slipped away (old grudges, taking anything for granted, and recreational shopping, to name a few), other qualities have grown stronger.   Perhaps it was because so much was under threat and siege that we who nurture by nature became even more fierce in our caring, more determined than ever to mend, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes so aptly puts it, “the part of the world within our reach.”

The truth of this was brought home to me as I read each of your heartfelt, stunningly powerful comments in answer to the question I posed in my most recent blog, “What have you made this year?”  Your answers covered the entire gamut of loving and healing, caring and creating, giving and accepting, mourning and celebrating.

You made masks and donations, quilts and meals and loaves of bread, 8 million stem cells for a sister’s bone marrow transplant and new babies to cherish, safe homes for rescue dogs and struggling teens and terminally ill partners, loving places for elderly parents, milkweed gardens and pottery bowls, Zoom choirs and online support groups and a podcast from a closet. Inner peace.  Room to mourn.  Reasons to hope.  So much love and courage and grace and nurturing.

To say I was overcome with emotion reading all these stories is an understatement.  And I wasn’t the only one.  So many friends and readers have reached out to say they read through last month’s comments through tears of recognition, kinship, and gratitude. For it seems we’ve all been engaged this year in one great communal enterprise, each of us in our own way responding to our shattered world’s urgent need for more light and more love.  Or, to put it another way, more mothering.

There was so much we couldn’t do, couldn’t change, couldn’t control.  And yet, just look at what we DID do. Gesture by loving gesture, we’ve found ways to comfort and care for each other, for our families and communities, for the earth, and for ourselves.  To be a mother is to extend grace, again and again, to the one who needs it most. It is to be bread, allowing the gifts we carry – whether abundant or scarce or seemingly non-existent — to flow through us to others who are in greater need of sustenance.

As Mother’s Day approaches, it seems worth pausing here to acknowledge that we’ve all been mothers this year to someone or to something.   For being a mother, in the true sense of the word, is less about physically bearing and raising children than it is about tenderly nurturing life itself, in all its forms and guises.

I need only look around to be reminded of the vast wealth of maternal energy we women of all ages and walks of life have to offer.  We are aunts, older siblings, stepmothers, grandmothers, foster mothers, adoptive mothers, and soul mothers.  We are neighbors, teachers, mentors, counselors, and friends.  We are pet parents, gardeners, caretakers, advocates, and allies. We are protectors of trees and oceans and other living things.

If ever there was a moment to expand our definition of mothering, the pandemic has provided it. Amid unprecedented challenges, we’ve learned to mother in unprecedented ways. From the exhausted Covid nurse who sings to her patients, to the school bus driver who delivers meals to the homes of hungry children, to the housebound reader who makes at least one phone call a day to a lonely friend, we’ve been there. We’ve devoted our maternal energies to those at our own dinner tables and we’ve carried that powerful energy out into the world, offering affection, care, and shelter where ever the need arose.

As mothers, we know one thing for sure: we’re all connected.  Or, to quote poet Mary  Oliver, “I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one.  The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list.  The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and our selves – we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together.  We are each other’s destiny.”

It is the work, the very purpose, of mothering to continually embody the truth of these words.  “We are each other’s destiny.”  We may come from different backgrounds and different points of view, but I’m convinced we do share something deep and profound in common: an innate sense of life’s sacred cycle, and our own deep-seated impulse to protect, to nurture, and to cherish it.

This morning, bundled up in wool hat and down coat, I watered the tiny arugula seedlings that bravely chose this cold day to poke their tender leaves up through the dirt. Would they survive a blast of April cold? Had I been foolish to plant anything so early?  Filling the suet feeders and pouring warm water into the bird baths, pruning back the lilacs, setting out a handful of walnuts for my friendly red squirrel, placing bits of leftover embroidery floss on the stone wall for the nesting robins to find, I feel all of my own maternal instincts stirring.  There’s new life everywhere, and the mother in me wants to be right in the middle of the action, tending and weeding, feeding and watering, marveling, encouraging, noticing everything.

And maybe herein lies the answer to my own question about what’s next.  As we make our way forward into an unknowable future, we can choose to bring with us the inner qualities we’ve drawn upon and nurtured in ourselves during this darkest of times.  We can be bread.  And just as the day-in, day-out responsibility of raising children can be seen as a spiritual path, so can the work of mindful care-giving be recognized as the highest form of mothering there is, an urgently needed response to our fragile, precious, hungry world.

None of us will get it right all the time; mothering is, by its very nature, more a winding path of trial and error than a direct route to an end. And yet, every day we do show up, ready to try again.  To be a mother means to stay the course.  And the moment, this moment, calls upon us all to be mothers in the most expansive, most creative sense of the word.

Let’s celebrate Mother’s Day 2021 by rising as one to meet that challenge. May we each step into our own true mothering nature. May we allow our gifts to flow, giving comfort where it is needed, love without condition, shelter for the vulnerable, care for the world within our reach. May we take time to honor those who have mothered us along the way. And may we recognize and support each other and our unique mothering journeys in all their many forms.

Who (or what?) are you mothering this year? Who are the mothers who nurtured you into being?