Mother's Day Revisted

This year Mother's Day was a quiet day. My mom seemed happy...she usually is these days. We spoke for a little while. She drifted in and out of the conversation. She told me she loved me, her "first born", and I told her I love her, too. My daughter and her family moved to another state recently, so we spoke on the phone as well. Quiet...too quiet...and the mind wanders. It kind of meanders back in time to other Mother's Days. Whether those recollections are true or not, they are real. What is reality, after all? We each have our own version.

I went online for a while. There I found a trilogy of poems written as a tribute to a friend's mom soon after she died. One of them hit home that day. I was missing my mom, the old mom who drove me crazy more often than not. I was missing my daughter, now a mom herself, who also drove me crazy for a while...it's in the genes. That poem floated through my mind. In it was the love and pain that only a mother and child experience. It would not let go of me, so I did what I do when things get stuck in my brain. I made art with it. A meandering book...kind of a fold-out puzzle of a book. Relationships are puzzles. The pieces fit together somehow, but not as you might expect. Even so, it is a whole entity no matter how you look at it...forward, backward, upside down or right side up...there it is.

My back was giving me a hard time. It hurt so much I had difficulty walking after a while, so I had to sit and rest it. It's funny how your body makes you pay attention when you choose to ignore what's good for you. Those nasty panic attacks were not going away, either. The last thing I wanted to do was think, ya know what I mean? Resting in bed with The Kindly Ones was not helping. I dove into my mini book creation...measuring, snipping, painting and lettering for hours. What a joy it was! When it was complete, I called Scott to tell him I was sending something by snail mail. Off it went on its journey and did arrive safe and sound.

Now, a week later, my back is still killing me. My brain is still having the occasional short circuit. My feet still get a tad numb if I'm up and about too long. My dear friend, Helen, who has known me for about thirty years, observed the correlation between my back pain and my brain pain. She reminded me how they seem to feed on each other. She also reminded me of how happy I felt while making art. Guess that's pretty straight forward.

Sometimes we carry things inside us that seem too heavy a burden. Just when we think we are handling it, we stumble. It's not because we're weak. The bump in the road is a safety bump, meant to slow us down for a reason. Best pay attention and rest a while. Smell the daisies, watch the clouds or make some art. The weight shifts as the mind does.