I confess, Mother’s Day has never been my favorite holiday, much as I love being a mother and now grandmother.
As a kid, I hated Mother’s Day. That’s a strong word – but true. Mother’s Day was the day to remember that mine had vanished before my second birthday. A day to note, up close and personal, that not every family looks and feels like a typical Hallmark card. I wrote about this in a 2013 post: Like a Motherless Child. I noted then that for many, for a wide mix of reasons, Mother's Day can be a day of pain.
This Mother’s Day the pain will be shared more widely as nursing home doors are shut, as social distancing keeps us far apart.
In that 2013 post I wrote about the spring I was sixteen. My grandmother complained of chest pain and went off to the doctor, from there to the hospital, leaving my older brother to report the news: she’s having a heart attack. It sounds bad.
After sharing the news, my brothers disappeared into their shared room, leaving me alone.
I’m not sure I had ever felt so alone. The years before had been years of upheaval and change. This felt like the last straw. The bridge too far. The end of any possible safety or solace.
My grandmother was my only parent or guardian, but also the person I talked with most. The single hint of stability in a fragile, fractured time.
I remember kneeling beside her bed to pray, but mostly crying, inconsolable.
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| Resettled Farm Child, Dorothea Lange, New Mexico, 1935 |
What would happen next?
I don't remember how long I cried.
What I do remember is when my eyes were burning from tears and my head was aching from crying, I had the strange sense of a warm hand on my head, a strangely familiar voice speaking, not audibly, but somehow very clearly: All will be well. I will be with you. Now get up, wash your face and go to bed.
No one had ever told me to wash my face after crying, but that seemed right.
I got up, washed my face and went to bed.
I got up, washed my face and went to bed.
And slept. And woke the next morning, on time, to go to school, to finish the final week of classes, papers, projects. To take my final exams still not knowing if Grandma would recover. To navigate a lone trip to the laundromat, to help pack clothes for my brothers and me to head off to planned summer jobs at different Christian camps.
Sifting back through memories of that difficult time, I find no conversations with caring adults. No one who sat with me and said "your grandmother’s had a heart attack and this is what that will mean.”
It was clear our lives would change, but how? When? Where would we be?
It was clear our lives would change, but how? When? Where would we be?
I don’t remember interpreting “all will be well” in any specific way.
It wasn’t a guarantee that my grandmother would survive. She did.
Ad it wasn't a guarantee that nothing would change.
Everything changed, in ways I wouldn't have chosen.
I came back from camp at the end of the summer to learn we’d lost the place we were living and I’d be starting my senior year living with a family I didn’t know, attending a new school I didn’t choose, while my grandmother convalesced with family friends many miles away and my younger brother went off to boarding school.
Our family was never again together in one place for more than a few days at a time.
Ad it wasn't a guarantee that nothing would change.
Everything changed, in ways I wouldn't have chosen.
I came back from camp at the end of the summer to learn we’d lost the place we were living and I’d be starting my senior year living with a family I didn’t know, attending a new school I didn’t choose, while my grandmother convalesced with family friends many miles away and my younger brother went off to boarding school.
Our family was never again together in one place for more than a few days at a time.
What I knew then, know now, have held to all these intervening years: there is more to the story than the current challenges. Loved ones may die. Safety may vanish. All we think we need can be swept away in a moment’s storm, or flood, or fire.
Change is inevitable.
Change is inevitable.
But God is still with us.
And all will be well, in ways we can’t explain or understand.
I shared the Porter's Gate song, Nothing to Fear, in my March 29 blog post. The message that resonated then was the title, Nothing to Fear, challenging words at the start of a pandemic. Yet the greater message sings to us all across the days of social distance: however isolated or alone we feel, Christ is with us, always.
This Mother’s Day that’s my prayer for those I love, those I know, all those who struggle with loss and grief, anxiety, anger, fear.
All those feeling isolated and alone.
All those feeling isolated and alone.
That God will meet you in that place and speak to your heart in a way that you can hear.
"What can separate you from my perfect love?
Do not fear.
"What can separate you from my perfect love?
Do not fear.
For I am with you.
Always."
Always."
