"Your children are not YOUR children; they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself." Khalil Gibran
Tarot: The Fool (0) / LENORMAND: Child, Book, Lily / ADINKRA: Odor Nih-ra Fih Kwine
I will be away from my computer next week, teaching Lenormand in Canada. Therefore, I thought I’d write a post today, and hope that it will suffice to tide us all over until the following week. Here are our cards:
I asked that I be given some words on the subject of Mother’s Day, which will fall both here and in Canada on next Sunday. I expect that I will be reading cards for lots of mothers and their daughters in Elora. Could we not all use some insight into a relationship that is frequently as confounding as it is intimate? As coveted as it is resented?
I always knew I would have a daughter. When I was a child myself, I would dream of her. I knew she would have lots of dark hair, and that her eyes would be the same as my own mother’s, which were wide and tipped up at the outside corners, kind of like those Precious Moments figurines which were all the rage way back then. When my daughter was handed to me, after an emergency C-Section, my first thought was, “Well, yes. This is who I have seen in my dreams all these years.” What I felt in the moment was not surprise but rather a deeply satisfying awareness that one can indeed manifest into existence one’s heart’s desire.
Mine was what was referred to in my chart as a “geriatric pregnancy.” Hahaha and lol. Whatever. Originally, there had been twins, as a matter of fact. An early scare meant that one was lost, but my daughter’s DNA bore witness that she had had company for a while in the dark, close quarters of my womb. When she was grown up, and I told her about her status as a “chimera,” she took it in stride. The next morning, she was up before me. When I commented on it, she looked at me with those beautiful, sleepy eyes and deadpanned, “Well, one of us is awake.” Growing up, she always talked about her brother, “Charlie.” I don’t think Charlie was developed enough to have been either gender or something entirely other, but both I and my daughter feel the energy of Charlie is with her, cheering her on, urging her towards a life well-lived for both of them.
In recent days, during the events at Columbia and elsewhere, I have thought of my daughter during her college years: how proud I was of her; how proud I was of myself that I was able to provide her a college education after the untimely death of her father, my husband, when she was 15. Here we are, bookended, so to speak:
My daughter is beautiful, as you see, and brilliant, and was all I might have hoped for. I had a beautiful and brilliant mother of my own, but she was damaged and violent, and I left her behind before I turned 16, to find my own way in a wider, kinder world. I was the opposite kind of parent, but motherhood is far less science than art, I think, and balance is hard to achieve and equilibrium easily lost. Once I decided to move to the West Coast to be with my new partner, after 14 years of widowhood, my daughter cut off communication with me. On Mother’s Day, it will have been 2 years.
Today’s cards have thoughts for me about this, and I hope, for all of this as we navigate the holiday. Sweet-intentioned as its origin may be, it is a fraught day for many, for myriad reasons. The Fool card from the Rhythm and Soul Tarot by Stacy Williams-Ng begins the reading. In this depiction, a child plays a guitar while running down a lane, hair blowing in the wind and butterflies following her concert in motion. Motherhood is the Fool card personified, I think. If we are mothers who have given birth, from the very beginning, we walk off a cliff, we run down a lane playing a guitar without thought to where our next step might take us. Our bodies morph and expand. We must watch what we eat and drink. Our backs ache and our ankles swell. Even for those of us eagerly anticipating the birth of a child, there are moments when we feel as though we are hosts to a parasite. And, I mean, technically…we are. Our entire beings are given over to the care and feeding of what grows inside us. As an aside, and for the record, no man has a right to any say about any of this. No person should have the right to dictate how a woman receives or responds to news that she is pregnant. FUCK YOU, SCOTUS.
Anyway…
So, you are pregnant. You read all the books, quiz all your friends. Perhaps you have a mother to whom you can turn for advice. And then Zero Hour arrives. Nothing prepares you for that, I don’t care what anyone says. I’ll leave that right there.
Every single person who has ever lived was born to a woman. There is no test a mother must pass, no document she must sign, no committee she needs to convince. The baby is hers to (ideally) take home and keep alive and thriving. There is lots of advice out there about how to do that, and thank goodness. After what feels like too short a time for some and not soon enough for others, we are required to give our children over to the wider world. We hope that the manners we have taught them stick; that they bite their sandwich and not the child on their left at the lunch table; we have taught them their colors and their numbers and their ABCs, and now they will have other teachers and peers and teammates and friends and rivals. We carry our children across streets and then hold their hands across them, once they can walk. Then, we watch from afar as they cross streets alone, until finally, we live life unaware of what streets they cross at all. We learn to perfect the art of standing in a catcher’s stance, metaphorically speaking, while never being actually caught that way by our children. The very skillset we’ve mastered is the one we have to drop like it’s hot, while we simultaneously try to learn a new skillset, which I suppose could be labeled The Art of Letting Go. I suppose that is harder for some of us than it is for others….Oops.
Anyway…
In my 30 years of teaching, I heard many tales of woe from students who had mothers who didn’t understand them, understood them too well, weren’t available, were too available, and were every other iteration of WRONG you can imagine. I always reminded these young people that their mothers were doing the best they could, even while acknowledging that their best could very well be pretty bad. I would refer them to Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse.” Here’s the first stanza:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
The good news is that our job and our obligation and our opportunity, once we are adults, is to re-parent ourselves in ways that make us feel whole. Ideally, part of wholeness is an awareness of just what a crapshoot all of this is, and how hard it is to get it just right. Lenormand’s commentary consists of Child, Book, Lily. These cards acknowledge that the carrying, raising, and letting go of children (Child) comes without a one-size-fits all handbook(Book.) The Lily is the card for maturity, for peace and an easeful mind in navigating this most changeable of relationships. The Adinkra message is the symbol for “Love Does Not Miss Its Way Home,” or as JRR Tolkien wrote, “All who wander are not lost.”
When I was a child, I lived in a residential drug treatment center run by my father. The two busiest days of his year, when he was on call and most needed by tearful residents, were Christmas and….you guessed it….Mother’s Day. Blessings on all mothers everywhere next Sunday. And blessings on all their children, including my own, and that goes for Charlie too.
Amen and Ase
Blessings ❤️❤️
OMG, the tears in my eyes.