devotion | motherhood
I have my mother’s hands. Piano hands, I call them, because they can stretch across a whole octave. Men are often shocked that my hands match their own or dwarf them in size; I love seeing that shock play out on their faces as we line our fingers up against each other. There has always been an innate part of me that enjoyed seeing men grow smaller in my estimation. At nine years old I declared to the packed mini van that “I want a boy to ask me out because I love turning them down.”
I’ve never been considered a dainty woman, in any sense of the word.
My grandmother is a poet, but I wasn’t blessed with the same metaphoric gifts. Brevity was never my strong suit; I need a long and winding sentence to get my point across. I’ve always been a talker—watch how I can turn the answer to a single question into a seven-minute soliloquy. Last year she was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer after many decades of smoking. I think of her when I light up a lucky strike, counting on god to keep me safe in a way he couldn’t for her. As she gets closer to the end of her life she’s been adamant about getting organized. Her computer, her file cabinets, her closet. After bringing her home from the hospital one day she sat me down at her desk, and asked me to take a look at the manuscript of her second collection of poetry and copy-edit it.
She has a folder on her computer entitled DEAD CLASSMATES that I scroll past. I wonder if she opens it when she writes, or if she does so just to remember. I think about the four thousand photos I have on my phone that I don’t even look at. What’s the point of memories if we never revisit them? And yet memory itself is so tenuous—the very act of recollection makes it vulnerable to change. I wonder if the photos I have of her will mean anything to me when she’s gone, if they will change shape, become infused with some more profound truth I have yet to grasp. Somehow, I doubt it.
She doesn’t seem afraid, just tired, the treatments for her cancer practically their own disease. She helped my grandfather with thoughts of his own death, even though they had been divorced for decades at that point. He died when I was twenty, and his death roused me from the years-long estrangement we had been embroiled in. I remember visiting him in those final days. I remember him asking me to stay just a little bit longer. I didn’t. I didn’t know how. I have one singular photograph of him on my ancestor altar, and it feels like all the meaning I need.
My mother is the one with the memories. Boxes stacked high, filled with photographs. Two external hard drives loaded with videos and pictures. Shelf after shelf of mementos: a wooden nickel from her father’s house, a crocheted doily from her grandmother, a bag of marbles she found at a thrift store that remind her of her childhood in Indiana.
When she dies one day I will be the one sorting through it all, dividing her life into piles. Keep. Toss. Sell. Not my siblings—because they look at me and they see her. My face is just an echo of my mother. I carry their resentment no matter how much I try to put it down. The youngest, the baby, the favorite. Am I only my mother? I would love to be judged simply for my own failings, yet my the threads of my fate cannot be unwrapped from her in their minds.
Our mother. Our mother’s mother is dying, and she drives back and forth across the state to help my uncle take care of her. Bringing her books, doing the crossword over coffee. Making her favorite foods. Liverwurst and ketchup sandwiches. One day it will be our turn, and I selfishly, resentfully wonder if I will be doing it alone.
I travel to the mountains. I stare up at the peaks and can see the Virgin Guadalupe’s stony white arms reaching down for me, asking me to come up to their embrace. Even though I was raised in the flattened farmland of middle America I was born at the edge of the mountains and I hear their call, whispered on the sharp breeze that enters you right at the throat. From the city plaza where I stand the entire eastern horizon is eaten up by the mountains. We are in the mountains now, in one of many valleys. Cradled like a baby in the soft curves of our sleeping mother.
I walk softly into the church at the far end of the plaza, the crystal tears of the Virgin Mary sparkling in the candlelight. In the second pew there is a woman praying, my friends are waiting outside for me. The gentle hum of silence fills the chapel, and I pray. Mary looks out at us softly, hands open.
What does it mean to be pure? The question comes to me under the watch of the two virgins, my heart constricting as the tears that have been threatening to fall for months hover behind my eye sockets. Perhaps it is not one who never sins but one who can transform their sins, alchemize them back into the sacred oneness of the universe. Pure in the chemical sense, not mixed or adulterated with any other substance. To be able to see god in all things, to be perfectly at home in oneself, living as oneself, perfectly in tune with the divine. Perhaps to be a sinner is simply to forget who you truly are.
As I step out of the church the rain begins to fall, darkening the cobblestones in slow patterns. The city remains unaffected, used to the mercurial weather patterns, trusting this will be nothing more than a drizzle. I try to do the same, savor each raindrop that contains an entire universe—time and memory extending not only forward and backward but in all directions, falling infinitely all around us. I slip back into the rhythm of our day easily.
My mother ends many of our calls asking me to move back to the Midwest. You can live here, she offers, completely in earnest. I love my mother, but I need the distance to hold onto myself, create some semblance of separation. We may be one, but we are not the same.
When my grandmother was young she moved to New York City. She worked with troubled teens and hated that she could never see the stars. The day her roommate robbed her of everything she owned she walked all the way to Traveler’s Aid in Time Square in her leather pumps; they gave her a voucher for a bus ticket back to Michigan to go back home to her mother.
What will I mother in this world, if not a child?
When the spring comes I’ll be in my garden planting seeds, hoping that I’m able to grow enough to feed not only myself but others. I feel the earth as my mother in a way no different than the woman who gave birth to me; a lineage of women that extends backwards into infinity. My mothers, my sisters, my daughters. I pray that I will be able to do right by them all.
Almost four years ago I came out to my family as a sex worker. I did it in an email, and I dressed it up nice so they wouldn’t judge me quite as much. I gave them an ultimatum—accept me, or I won’t come home again. My mom quoted scripture at me to tell me that I was being judged by god, that my actions were taking me further from a righteous path. I reminded her to be kind and compassionate, to forgive, just as christ forgave her. In the end, she wanted me back. All mothers want their daughters, even when it doesn’t seem like it. There is a thread there that simply cannot be severed, no matter how much shit gets in the way.
During this fight a friend’s mother told me I could be her adopted daughter, that she could be like my mother. I imagine that it’s easy to see your child in all children. It’s easy to see my mother in every mother. I wonder if it’s the same for fathers, as I wasn’t raised with one. At times I’m grateful for that, but it has created in me a feeling that fathers, that men, are vestigial organs. Something you could easily live without, even when you love them.
Though I threatened to, the truth is I could never leave my mother. I am devoted to her, and to the life she has created in me. I am learning that what we show devotion to is what shapes our lives, the center around which we situate ourselves. What do you love? Even at it’s most painful and complicated I could never say anything other than that I love my mother. To love her is to love myself, and to accept her is to accept myself. From there it extends out into the further reaches of the earth—suddenly I can’t help but see family in the faces of strangers; their suffering becomes my own until I fold in on myself into infinity. To be moved to action requires me to see others as my own, and what better lens to do that through than a mother’s eyes.
What is a revolution without mothers?
I found myself in a sweat lodge, praying. Praying to the grandmothers, the grandfathers. To the mother earth, the creator. Praying to the spirits that weave the fabric of existence together, seeking clarity, offering gratitude. I can’t imagine a life without prayer, for all devotion comes home to prayer. It is what comes in to fill the empty spaces, what shifts the nothingness into everythingness. I used to think of it as an asking but now I understand it as the receiving itself. Prayer is what brings us close to god, to all that is holy. Bring us home to the purity of our own selves and our interdependence on every other single thing in the galaxy. As we crawl out of the lodge on hands and knees, feet muddy and clothes soaked through, we touch our foreheads to the dirt and say I’m so grateful to be born.
Every week I call my mother to see how she’s doing; I send her pictures of my cat, I tell her that I love her. Every time I visit her I see myself more. I try to envision what life would be like to move back to the Midwest to take care of her in her old age. The thought used to terrify me, but now it brings me peace. There are trees everywhere—and sky, and laughter, and an open road to drive down. In the true spirity of nonduality samsara has become nirvana; I no longer seek to escape anything. I’ll care for her as she’s done for me, as she’s doing now for my grandmother.
Because no matter how long life feels one day we’ll close our eyes and just like that we’re gone, and eventually it’ll be as if we were never here. We think that our absence won’t be felt, but mothers remember. Our mother remembers those that didn’t make it here, those who have left. The earth remembers even that which hasn’t happened yet. All I can hope to do is keep coming home to her, to them, to myself—to all that has brought me here, by whose grace I have the opportunity to exist, to alchemize that devotion into care.