On Mothering
Anytime I'm laid up sick in bed, I become more contemplative and introspective than normal ("Yes, as we should!" a friend recently exclaimed).
Between rest and medicine, “the mothers” return from the great beyond to care for me: my grandmothers, my mom and my aunts. Of all of them, it's my paternal grandmother who I sense the most - the one who raised me - reminding me to care for myself as she cared for me:
gargle with warm salt water,
rub my chest and the bottom of my feet with Tiger Balm, and
boil chopped lemons for tea, peel and all.
Night after night I dreamed of them, my mothers. In one dream, an aunt's house was on fire, and my belongings were strewn about the street, saved from the purifying purge.
In another dream, my grandmother and I were standing across from one another in a library turned hospital; when a young man opened his mouth to sing about clouds, his voice transformed into visible rolling clouds and blue skies, barreling between me and my grandmother.
My mom's sojourn isn't as obvious; I saw her shadow in the dancing trees outside my window and remember her in the barely-there scent of my neighbor's gardenia bush as my sense of smell slowly improved. I felt my mom in my bones and muscles as strength returned to my body, a reclamation she wasn't afforded in her most recent lifetime.
Amid my coughing and sneezing, I received an email from a distant cousin on my mother's side. The message was non-sentimental and to the point, much like the vibe of these relatives who I don't know very well. He let me know that my maternal grandmother's sister died 7 years ago, yet his email landed as I navigated this viral bout. Perhaps this was a quick hello from the grandmother I never met.
And the advice-nurse's suggestion to use a nasal rinse reminded me of another aunt who, years before she died, enthusiastically praised the neti pot to cleanse one's sinuses after learning about it on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Admittedly, I hadn't used mine in years.
These mothering spirits were right on time, and not just because I was sick. They reflected the same messages that I’ve received elsewhere:
The article recommended by a friend by philosopher and professor Joy James, The Captive Maternal, which “emerges within the ‘end of the world,’ which becomes the New World of conquest, chattel slavery, and genocide.” This speaks directly to my paternal grandmother’s model of matriarchy born in the countryside of Jim Crow Louisiana that “created political and spiritual families.”
The House of Spirits tv adaptation of Isabel Allende’s book, recommended by another friend, illustrates the integration of intergenerational trauma and wisdom by those who live near the veil between the living and the dead. As the title implies, the visitations are palpable.
The powerful and charming book The Friendship Bench: How 14 Grandmothers Revolutionized Mental Health, which I found after listening to the Zimbabwean psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda on a podcast. He locates roots of mental health care in voodoo where “The highest power…is a woman, an elder woman – usually a mother who is gentle, loving and forgiving…[and] the reason people had gone to her to be healed was perhaps less about the magical properties of voodoo and more about the space she’d created for people to tell their stories.”
Mothers of Magic by the non-Catholic rosary devotee Perdita Finn that asks, “What if we could ask of every being that we met, ‘are you my mother?’ and know that the answer would be yes, that there was not a single mother, a perfect mother, just for us, but a world that was nothing but mothers who had loved us, and could guide us, through the depths of time?”
Last but certainly not least, there’s the mama crow I witnessed on the lamppost feeding its young.
They’re all saying the same thing: mother–mine, yours, ours, The Great Mother, the archetypal mother, the mama born from the ruins, is here. And she loves, as a verb.
I’ve long thought of myself as a childless orphan, having no little ones of my own to look after and primary family members deceased for decades now. But there’s an echo inside of me. The gardenia, the crow, the distilled water in my neti pot, the lemons, my ancestors, the barreling clouds in my dream, not to mention the friends who dropped off chicken tortilla soup, agua de jamaica, and recommend wisdom in its various forms all prove that I am indeed still mothered. And they insist on caring for me so that I may return to mothering - my pets, plants, loved ones, clients, strangers, our beloved dead, as well as myself.
Care is mothering, I’m learning, and it’s actually our only assignment.