Exactly six years ago, on May 7, 2016, I touched on this topic for the first time, and looking at the post ("Mother's Day, for women who are not"), I am stunned not only by my confidence as a writer, but also as a person. I keep thinking that I am gaining personal confidence, yet as I strip away old layers of pain, new ones come to light and the process continues. The pandemic and the particular risks of the war in Ukraine weigh heavily on all of us in 2022. So today's post, which I hand wrote yesterday, is clearly less exuberant, but it's where I am at in these singular times:
It is a world where women are still "the other", so those of us who never had children may be even further off the map. Whether for the sake of profit or in a spirit of genuine appreciation, "Mother's Day" honors women in their specific role as mothers, and every year it's a bittersweet weekend for me, and no doubt for other childless women. It's the weekend of the year when I feel ten times more invisible than usual...I sometimes wonder if the people who have criticized me for "doing nothing worthwhile with my life" would have said the same if I had had several children. Of course, it is as broad as it is long, isn't it? If I had had children, I would have been forced to make a number of different choices, moving even further from my dreams and values and closer to conventionality, simply for their safety. I would have been less free, by far. I would have had a whole different palette of joys and sorrows.
The hardest thing to imagine is the physical reality of having a human being growing in my belly. What would that have been like, and the moist, messy reality of childbirth and child rearing? What would it have been like to hold a tiny baby in my arms, to nurse the child at my breast, to have a little toddler run to me, arms outstretched, saying, "Mama!"? To clean up constant messes, and nurture, and guide, and make moment-by-moment decisions, and fall into bed at night, exhausted, only to start again the next morning? What would it have been like to measure my own life with the easy yardstick of, "That happened when Eloise was 5"? What would it be like to have an instant rapport with other mothers and grandmothers, and not to have to fumble for common ground? To devote these retirement years to my grandchildren? I will never know these things in this lifetime. Mother's Day is an annual reality check about that.
Strangely, right this moment, I feel more like a mother than I ever have. I feel a stronger connection to the Great Mother with every passing day, and more of a motherly protectiveness for the earth. I feel a deeper sense of what She is going through as she propels the higher energies infusing all life in the Universe and simultaneously adapts to countless manmade threats to her earth body. I feel Her pain as she watches humanity race headlong into a high-tech future that it is not spiritually ready for, and which is not healthy for the planet. I can sense Her attempting to do what most mothers must have to learn the minute a child is born, how to love and let go.
All women constitute the Goddess. Most women do some form of mothering (most people do, for that matter). All women, mothers or not, are a reflective image of the divine feminine. And there is no one Goddess "savior". Yes, every time a woman is authentic and speaks her truth, there is a higher ripple in the world's energy, so it's important that all of us do that. But whether I, Liz, have one reader or a million, nothing in this blog will save the day. Nothing I do in my life or write in my journal will give me ultimate power over people or events in the world, nor would I want such power. Every few days, I write then let go. Write then let go. Observe the world with curiosity and compassion -- even, sometimes, fury, fear or frustration -- then let go. The next few decades will be like humanity's "teenage years from you-know-where". I guess all of us with even a slight mothering instinct will have our work cut out for us.
