On my mother: Riffs on Mary Oliver's Thirst
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.
Which is yet another way of saying:
Not enough love; no love enough for this greedy girl whose desire for love is also the desire to quench the world's thirst for it.
But the world's thirst is infinite; as long as she is part of the world, her thirst will never be quenched.
But it wasn't always this way.
[G]rant me, in your mercy, a little more time.
Lately, I've been thinking and writing about my mother. The usual version in my (completely unreliable) life script has it that I mothered her since I was 12. But where did it come from, the love I claim to have dispensed on her, and my siblings, and the love I felt I had, always in excess, throughout my childhood? The usual answer: Grace. Tout est grace.
I realize now the possibility that there is a connection between this sense of overabundant love, this sense of an untapped power that could save the world, and the emptiness my mother felt deeply throughout my childhood and beyond.
I realize now the terrible weight of her words, after I had given birth:
"You felt it, right, the moment they pulled it away from you, something moved inside, like your spirit, something was taken away?"
I didn't. Not then. But now, I think I know what she meant.
Something then was taken. Or, more accurately, given away:
Love for the earth and love
And time.
I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
Which is yet another way of saying:
Not enough love; no love enough for this greedy girl whose desire for love is also the desire to quench the world's thirst for it.
But the world's thirst is infinite; as long as she is part of the world, her thirst will never be quenched.
But it wasn't always this way.
[G]rant me, in your mercy, a little more time.
Lately, I've been thinking and writing about my mother. The usual version in my (completely unreliable) life script has it that I mothered her since I was 12. But where did it come from, the love I claim to have dispensed on her, and my siblings, and the love I felt I had, always in excess, throughout my childhood? The usual answer: Grace. Tout est grace.
I realize now the possibility that there is a connection between this sense of overabundant love, this sense of an untapped power that could save the world, and the emptiness my mother felt deeply throughout my childhood and beyond.
I realize now the terrible weight of her words, after I had given birth:
"You felt it, right, the moment they pulled it away from you, something moved inside, like your spirit, something was taken away?"
I didn't. Not then. But now, I think I know what she meant.
Something then was taken. Or, more accurately, given away:
Love for the earth and love
And time.
I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.