To loving till it hurts and letting go like it's the only thing to do...

This Mother’s Day is bittersweet. My heart is so fully aware that my child will leave home in a few months. It stills a little or beats a little faster with every conversation about leaving, every preparation for leaving. It’s all very exciting and wonderful, a new chapter, an unknown path ahead waiting for her to make it her own, a certain taking stock of all the work she’s put in, pride in who she’s become. Why then will that little ache inside persist?

I brush it off, I’m not ready to deal with it, I want to stay in the present. It will hit when it hits and I’ll deal with it then, I tell myself. Good plan. I will try and enjoy my time with her (Sigh… I wish I could tell you that makes all the arguments go away. It doesn’t. Sorry to burst that bubble).

Once we become mothers, our lives are forever intertwined in those little and eventually not-so-little beings. A tiny part of our being is no longer our own. Some mothers navigate the giving that small piece more gracefully than others it seems. They remain themselves first and mothers second. They are the ones who put their oxygen masks first.

Perhaps it hits me harder, because somewhere deep down, I suspect she is the reason I am alive. She is the sense of purpose I needed to get out of hospitals and near-death situations. This small, energetic, wonder child may have saved me. A friend had once told me that children need their mothers till age ten or eleven. She was a few months short of ten when I was in a near-death situation. Stuck in the hospital for over a month and a half, I spent countless minutes and energy I didn’t quite have wondering and mostly driving myself crazy: Is it age ten or is it eleven? If it’s ten, whew… it’s okay, she’s almost there. But what if it’s eleven? Sh** I got to get out of here – alive. Sigh…let’s just blame it on the meds and not the innerworkings of my mind.

Will and sense of purpose are strange things. And the human heart and brain will perhaps never comprehend them. I am growingly aware that she would have been fine even if I had not made it. Not to give this all a morbid twist, but it comes from a place where I’m trying to figure out where she ends, and I begin. And we are separate and there is beauty in that. Even if it hurts to separate.

So, if this child kept me alive, who do I become without her? Who am I without her? I suspect it does not have to be a near-death situation for mothers to relate and feel the way I feel right now.

I draw inspiration from the mother bird who pushes her chickie out of the nest. She’s simply pragmatic and knows when it’s time and goes about it without much fuss, song and dance (or writing a blog). She is in tune with nature and respects its laws and lives her life by it. She kicks the chickie out, makes sure it can fly, and resets. Her life starts anew. Build a new nest, lay some new eggs, new chickies…okaaaay, we’re not going down that path, for sure. Whew! True, we will never know her innerworkings, her heartache, her apprehensions, her worries, or if she’s even capable of feeling any of it. Oh, the miracle that is nature.

As I stand at this cusp, watching my daughter’s excitement (and apprehension), maybe I should draw on her excitement and ask myself what the future holds for me. Is this a time for mothers to reset their lives? To take back the piece of ourselves that we gave away. I wonder if there is any taking back. Okay, we’ll leave those pieces where they want to be - how they want to be, to change organically when they’re ready. For I also hear it never ends. Not when your child is five, not when your child is fifty. I suppose there is no other recourse but to live our lives with our mixed bags of heartache and excitement, of enmeshed and separate lives, of loving till it hurts and letting go like it’s the only thing to do.

Thank you, mamma bird - I’m trying to be just like you. Even if that little ache inside persists.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful mothers - may we figure ourselves at every stage - not simply for who we are as mothers but who we are as ourselves.