It’s Thursday evening. I’m usually 45 minutes into my Anthropology of Media class, but I was given a welcome gift of having my class cancelled. While I regret the illness of the professor which caused the cancellation, the unplanned-for bit of space/time allowed me to go and do a good food shopping. I’ve been running on empty all week because of the non-stop work schedule, which includes copious amounts of reading for this class. I’ve been eating take-out for days and days!
As I was putting away the fresh food, I discovered a bag of brussel sprouts. It’s what was left of a big stalk of them I’d bought at the last of the season’s pop-up farmers’ market that comes each Wednesday from May to early November. The brussel sprouts needed cooking and so, as I write this, I’m roasting them and they’ll be the centerpiece of a dinner whose other parts I have yet to devise!
The farmers’ market sets up in the little playground I used to take my now 30-something kids to when they were toddlers. My neighborhood, which I love for its urban beauty and relative quiet, has many such reminders of the passage of time and the stages of life. This very park is the one where my mother enjoyed sitting when she could still be social; and which she could look out on from her kitchen window — watching the kids playing. She loved that kitchen window. Now someone else’s mom has taken up her position there. A good legacy, I hope.
Will my mother’s death ever stop puzzling me? On my next birthday — at the end of November, it will be 6 months to the day she died. It will be the first birthday I’ve ever had without her in the world. Not that I’ve spent each one of my soon to be 67 birthdays in her presence, but it means something to me — this first one, out here on my own. There’ll be many firsts in the 12 months following her death. Thanksgiving, Chanukah, New Year’s Eve, and oh yes, Mothers’ Day.
Mama, c. 1954
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t sad or angry at how it felt like she never loved me, how I always seemed to be disappointing her, how she was sure I didn’t love her — though I did. So here’s the puzzling thing: as my brussel sprouts roast, as this early darkness turns to night, as I wonder what else I’ll have for my dinner, I notice that my heart hurts and that I miss my mother, who loved brussel sprouts and probably, in her fashion, loved me.
I think perhaps missing the woman who birthed me shouldn’t come as such a big surprise. Her body housed my body. I suspect that that right there is a forever-and-ever bond that psychotherapy doesn’t really need to “fix.” Even if our lives together went badly from my very first breath, here I am nearly 7 decades on, relatively healthy, with wonderful kids, friends, and talents. Somewhere, being grateful for my life got lost in a shuffle of what it seemed she wanted in return for giving me that life. But I am grateful. And I love her. And it’s puzzling.
My prayer is that Mother-love becomes simple for me and for so many others who struggle with it; may we be able to simply honor these beings who gave us birth — whether they raised us well or not, whether they raised us at all. I mean to walk the rest of my days in a way that honors the memory of my mother. May she rest in peace, if there’s a place of awareness where she is now, may she feel my love for her.
Whether through Shamanic practice, through ministry, or through art, Riva finds peace and practice in spreading love, compassion, and empathy for the self and others. 