Isolation Newsletter: A Mother's Grace
No Parent Is Perfect. Age and Time Show Us This To Be True.
I’m thinking about my mother today, and the ghosts that followed her through my childhood home, invisible to me but so present and vivid and harrowing to her at every turn. I’m thinking about her sense that the world was unsafe, and how—with all of her muster—she tried to create a world of make-believe for my siblings, to search for vivid mysteries in blackberry brambles and rain puddles, to find delights in the mundane. She illustrated the world with curiosity so we would not see its faults, its inherent suffering and its cruelties.
In hindsight, I see she was painting the world with brushstrokes that can fade with adulthood, that era when the world informs us that curiosity and play are a sign of immaturity, that they must be retired for the rigid conformity of responsibility. She was trying to keep the colors in her life from dulling into a permanent grey. She channeled her experience through our eyes, gifting us a sense of discovery that she had been told to abandon countless times and stubbornly, courageously, refused to put out to pasture. Children as avatars for unresolved pains. Children as vessels into the past. A chance to rewrite it all.
Still, she could not protect us from every danger. We were hurt immeasurably at times, often by circumstances outside of her control. What grief a parent must experience when they are unable to shield their children from traumatic suffering, I cannot fathom. And what grief children discover when their parents—once walking Gods who brought us sustenance and shelter and care for our very survival—are revealed to be mortal, at times shockingly imperfect beings.
Then we face adulthood ourselves, and with that, the mirror that romantic love holds up to our innermost selves. And when our own imperfections are revealed, we might turn to our parents—and our mothers—as a root source for our suffering. We might become enraged at moments of neglect or absence or unintentional harm. We might comb through our memories with microscopic criticism. We might forget the delight of childhood curiosity that our mothers gifted us without asking for anything in return; the silent, unseen support that was provided when we cried through the night as newborns; the invisible labor of keeping us alive. We might forget these sacrifices altogether. We might dwell only in the fractured times, and let them rule our narrative, our sense of past and present.
Today, I am gazing out on the golden willows shimmering in the westward wind, watching them shimmer and dance, and I know that without the teaching of my mother, I might not take in the natural world with such reverence. She taught me how me to look around, to explore, and to pay attention as a means of resistance to a muted life.
I live as someone constantly juggling magic and rationality. For years, I treated them as dueling forces vying for dominance. Only one could win. Only one could exist. I am 35 now, and I have failed more times than I can count. Oftentimes publicly. I have reached for great heights and plummeted to even greater depths. I am only beginning to see something my mother showed me before I could even speak: magic exists everywhere. It never disappears. It’s found in the way your hands delight at the texture of a redwood bark, at a single sunflower arched across a fencepost on your walk, at the moment you feel wholly, entirely present with someone you love.
There was never a choice to make. And damn, she knew it all along. Just took me this long to catch up.
POETRY
The Lanyard by Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.