Mothers & Daughters

When my daughter was a baby, I thought I understood what it meant to be a mother.  It was clear that my purpose was to keep her safe and supported and growing in curiosity, strength, and resilience.  The loving had a clarity and reciprocity that was overflowing. But, as she was constantly changing and needed different things from me, how to do these things of mothering and what it meant to be a mother kept changing.  It wasn't always easy to know what she needed from me or didn't need any longer or what loving meant across the divide of adolescence.  

I have sweet memories of my beautiful mother as a young woman and how she cared for me as a child.  I have a sense of her always in the background keeping the family fed, the house clean, bringing in money from her job at the bank. She was a loyal wife, daughter, and friend.  She never imposed herself onto others but went along to make things easier for everyone else and tried to keep the peace. 

We were very different from each other in our natures and emotions. She didn't really have strong emotions and was more comfortable on the surface of things.  I wanted to dive deeper in, stir things up, and mostly just be myself even if it didn't conform to family or culture. I grew up in the 60's and 70's when women's roles were changing.  She never held me back or closed me into the kind of small space she was forced to grow up in. This was one of the greatest gifts she gave to me, the generosity to allow me to be myself. 

After my father died, I thought I might have a chance to be closer to her.  But there seemed to be a limit to what would be possible because of how different we were from each other. And by then, there might have been some of the cognitive decline which might have made it difficult for her to articulate feelings and emotions.  In the last few years, she has become more withdrawn and quiet.  She is no longer able to live on her own. I grieve the mother I had and that now feels lost to me.  But what I also experience, in the quiet times we share, in the conversations she repeats during my visits, in my caring for her like a mother, is the strong connection between us that runs below the surface of words, emotions, actions and that I did not see before.  Like the umbilical chord that linked us when I grew inside her, I see now as we navigate these dark waters how utterly, deeply and ceaselessly we are connected.

I have began to find this deeper thread of connection with my daughter, that runs beneath our conversations, the distance between us, the confusion that clouds what is complicated between mothers and daughters.