A Mother's Day tribute: Is there a Hallmark card for a mom who WASN'T my best friend?

For years, the rituals surrounding Mother's Day have driven me to the edge of madness. I was OK with the whole take-her-out-to-brunch thing, though I always prefer to cook at home, but what was I supposed to get as a Mom's Day gift for a woman who is a compulsive hoarder? Maybe a bulldozer? And the expensive floral arrangements just got lost in the other junk. Yet, if I DIDN'T get those things for my mom, I felt guilty. This is What a Loving Daughter Should Do, right?

Don't even get me started about the cards. It's been my annual custom in early May to spend 3 hours in the Hallmark store, looking through every Mother's Day card on the rack, and then looking again, sweating blood because I couldn't find a card that didn't make my internal bull-bleep siren start wailing. "Mom, I'm so glad we're best friends..."  "I've always been able to come to you for advice..."  "You were a great example to me and you still are..."  "You're my hero!"  What in the great big blue sky happened to cards that simply say, "I love you" or "Have a wonderful Mother's Day" or even "You deserve the best on Mother's Day"? In the World According to Hallmark, apparently my mother and I were supposed to be carefree, giggling gal-pals who shopped for prom dresses together and told deep, dark secrets to each other during sleepover nights.

Well, we weren't, and we didn't. It's hard to say this, but my mother wasn't my hero, or my best friend; she wasn't always there for me, and there were many years during which I felt that if she hadn't been my mother, I wouldn't have had anything to do with her. Bless her heart, it wasn't her fault - she had a horrible childhood, a rocky marriage with my father, an early and reclusive widowhood, and just about nobody to model fully functional relationships for her at any time during her life. Despite her god-awful upbringing, she was pretty nurturing when I was little. She was never abusive and I never felt unwanted by her. Maybe just unseen; she was often preoccupied with her own pain. But even after I realized all these things and (mostly) forgave my mother her human failings, I couldn't find it in my soul to pretend, on Mother's Day or any day, that we shared some kind of ideal mom-daughter bond. That might be the feel-good marketing pitch, but it just wasn't true in my case, no matter how much I longed for the myth to be reality. Every year I bought the most noncommittal Mother's Day card I could find, and I soldiered on through the Eggs Benedict and her unwrapping a gift that would never be used, until the day was over and my daughterly duties were discharged. It never felt good and I never knew what to do about it.

Then, in late 2008, my mom had a fast, steep cognitive slide and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. My brother lives clear across the country and I moved Mom here from California in 2001 to be geographically near me, so guess what? - TAG, I was It for caregiving. My life changed almost as much as hers did. I went from avoiding visiting or calling her for two weeks at a time (she lives 11 miles from me) to seeing her every couple of days, making sure her needs are being met and taking care of virtually every aspect of her day-to-day living: paying her bills, shopping for her, taking her to medical appointments and hair appointments, doing her nails. Though she's amazingly stable now and her decline is slow, AND she gets competent daily help at her retirement community, she still needs a lot of my time and energy.

So here's the weird thing: even though I don't like giving up so much of my life to see to Mom's care; even though I wish I had uninterrupted time to write, and cook, and garden, and figure out what I want to be when I grow up, this forced shift in my relationship with my mother has been a liberation from all the daughterly angst of the past. What she did or didn't do as a mother, and the kind of mother I wish she had been able to be, is laughably irrelevant. This woman whom I rebelled against, and was embarrassed by, and did not want to be anything like, is like my child now. She depends on me, follows my guidance, looks to me to calm her anxieties, laughs at my jokes, constantly thanks me (she rarely did that before) and tells me she doesn't know what she would do without me. I feel fiercely protective of her even as I roll my eyes about having to go over to her place to feed "her" hummingbirds again, so she won't worry about them. I'm committed to doing everything within my power to ensure that my mother is comfortable and well cared-for until the end. She's STILL not my best friend. But she is important in my life, and I am important in hers.

I guess it's time to get to the point: This post is meant as a tribute to and a virtual hug for children (esp. daughters, because, well, you know how it goes with mothers and daughters, and you know if I'm talking to YOU) whose mothers were/are something like mine: difficult, and not the best role models in the world; needy, and often oblivious to what we needed from them. If your mom's still around, life may change her, but YOU can't. What you can do is figure out what she IS giving you (whether she knows it or not), and what you are able to give her. Don't waste time feeling guilty; that only SEEMS as if you're doing something (you're not). Let the relationship be what it will, learn from it what you can, and don't ever buy into the Mother's Day myth that it has to be ideal. Your mom doesn't have to be your best friend - that's what your best friend is for.

If your mother is not still with us, then let her go gently into that good night. You can be sure you don't know her whole story, just as no one will ever know the whole story of you - we would all be more compassionate with one another if we could know, but it's not possible.

Oh - and if you ARE one of those children whose mom was/is your best friend and your hero, I'm so very happy for you (really). I hope you're on your knees every day in gratitude. Buy those Hallmark cards that I pass up, and give them to your mother.

As for me: though I've never been a biological mother, and I'm old enough for grandmotherhood now, in the past two years my mother has taught me how to care with a mother's relentless love, even when it's hard. Oddly, I'm thankful. Happy Mother's Day.

Potatoes and Life 101

I planted potatoes - oh, must have been 5 or 6 weeks ago. Got good seed potatoes; planted them according to instructions, in the best soil in the garden; watered lightly (the usual Portland late-winter deluge had abated for a few days); kept the bed weeded. Then I waited. And waited. Examined the soil surface almost daily. Nothing showed up. So I waited some more - a lot more - doubt and near despair creeping into all the formerly optimistic corners of my gardener's heart. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch. Looked at the calendar. After six weeks it seemed time to surrender to the inevitable: no potatoes this spring.

Went out in the yard two days ago for some non-potato-related reason. Two teeny-tiny potato plants had broken through. Yesterday, one more. I know they're laughing at me. In their potato language (gardeners learn this language by osmosis, through the dirt under their fingernails), they're saying, "You dear foolish thing, sometimes all you can do is WAIT. So go do something else for a while and let us take care of the business of growing."

Sigh. They're right. I'm a product of my good old, all-American, let's-fix-whatever's-wrong culture - such a strength and such a weakness. When things don't follow my timetable, I want to dig around and find the problem and apply some magical elixir that will GET THE PROCESS GOING. But if I'd rooted around in my potato bed, disturbing the little quartered spuds to see why they weren't hurrying to burst through to the light, nothing would ever have come up except muddy potato quarters. 

In the climactic scene of the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," lovers Joel and Clementine, played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet - who have broken up messily, each of whom has attempted to have the other erased from his/her memory, and who have wildly chased each other down through multiple time- and mind-streams after they find they really kinda sorta DO maybe love each other - are on the verge of a final, sad breakup. Clementine walks out of Joel's apartment and down the hall, ready to disappear from Joel's life forever. He steps out the door and shouts, "WAIT!" "What?" she says. Joel, anguished, cries, "Wait...just wait a while."

Clementine and Joel DO wait. They commit to starting again, fears, warts and all. We don't get to see the end of the story - whether the relationship lasts, whether it's good or not, whether these two people are "meant" to be together or whether that even matters. All we know is that they've simply decided things aren't so bad that they can't afford to wait a while to see what might put down roots. They give themselves the time to rediscover what brought them together in the first place.

Hence the Life 101 lesson, in a classroom full of potatoes. Sometimes all you can do is wait, knowing you have done your part: Prepare the soil well, get good seed or strong starts, plant properly, water when necessary but not too much, cultivate to keep weeds from taking over. Your job is to learn the language of what you love, and let the seeds you have planted do what they do best.

Sorting through the wedding hoopla - what was the point again?

What do you want to remember most vividly about your wedding day - the ice sculpture, or the ceremony?

WARNING (1): I'm going to engage in some shameless self-promotion. WARNING (2): It will probably take a while to get around to that part.

Think about a wedding ceremony. What part does it play (or did it play) in the experience of your wedding day? The ceremony represents a small fraction of the entire time spent preparing for and celebrating your marriage, and a smaller fraction of the overall cost of the wedding - but it's what MAKES you married. Without the ceremony, you're just throwing a big, expensive party. This is the moment you get to say that your love is special, and why. This is the moment you get to claim that you have what it takes to make your relationship work for a lifetime. This is the moment you get to thank the people who helped make you the person you are: an adult who is able and willing to commit to loving another adult, what Rilke calls "perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation." Wow. Perhaps this is a bigger deal than we sometimes acknowledge.

So do you want that ceremony to be boilerplate text that says nothing meaningful or memorable to you or your guests, nothing significant about you or your spouse-to-be? Do you want the person conducting the ceremony to waltz in as a complete stranger and mumble the same old same old in a sleep-inducing monotone? Do you want to feel as if your ceremony came out of a vending machine that dispenses countless copies of the same thing to anyone who has the right change?

I didn't think so.

I know that weddings aren't inexpensive, and that lots of individuals are struggling with their budgets in these gloomy economic times. Couples planning their weddings are being far more careful about how they spend their money, trimming back on all the extras and being pretty tight-fisted about the "gotta haves" as well. The wedding industry, of which I am arguably a (small) part, is feeling the pinch, too. My little secret, for which I probably need to apologize in advance to every wedding vendor within 500 miles, is that I'm not all that sorry for the pullback by couples planning a wedding or commitment ceremony. I think it's healthy for couples, healthy for the industry and healthy for our culture as a whole to stop pushing weddings as lavish as Broadway productions. Oh, and don't forget the cost of the honeymoon, the bridal shower, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, the spa visit,  the rehearsal dinner, and so it goes, ka-ching, ka-ching. Ouch! - did I say that? Afraid I did.

Well, look - in practical terms, drowning in debt and financial troubles, even when the party was great, is no way to start a marriage. Believe it or not (and I do), more marriages break up over financial conflict than over sex or just about anything else. Why would you want to start your married life trying to scale a mountain of bills from your wedding? Even if someone else, say, Mom and/or Dad, is paying the tab - ESPECIALLY if someone else is paying the tab - being a grownup means not taking advantage of the generosity of those who love you. And if you're paying for the festivities yourself, you know there are always a thousand other financial priorities clamoring for your attention. There's no time like the present to learn the discipline of staying within a workable budget.

Beyond the financial aspect, larger-than-life weddings can take a subtle spiritual and psychological toll on the participants and guests alike. The glitz-and-glam trappings tend to distract from the underlying meaning of the event. They're designed to impress people but not necessarily to reach them where they live. When those fun and pretty extras are marketed to us as necessities, yet we know we can't afford them, we tend to start thinking of ourselves as deprived. The next step is to start thinking of ourselves as entitled. That's when we're vulnerable to whipping out the credit card so we can have the same things "everybody else" has. Including crushing debt.

Don't get me wrong: if your heart's desire is a big, pull-out-all-the-stops, glamorous wedding and you can afford it; if it's meaningful to you and will bring you joyful memories throughout your married life, by all means, go for it. Just don't let wedding industry marketing make you feel as if you aren't having a "real" wedding if you don't pay for ice sculptures, a chocolate fountain, a caterer who puts four-star restaurants to shame, and a tightrope walker teetering overhead at the reception dinner, playing the violin above the guests' Chicken Kiev. The steadfastness of your marital relationship is not measured by the dollars spent on special effects.

With all these warnings to be cautious, thrifty and mature about the scope of weddings, where did my warning about "shameless self-promotion" go? I guess, now that I get to it, I don't want to self-promote as much as I want to promote the ceremony - to a somewhat higher rung on the planning ladder than where it's traditionally been. When you plan a wedding, think carefully about what will create the most joy on the day of your marriage and the most lasting memories for the future. The ice sculpture or the photos? The catering or the flowers? The shoes you'll wear once or the smile you'll wear for weeks as you remember the vows you wrote yourself and exchanged with your dearest and only one?

I hope you'll consider that the ceremony is the beating heart of the whole day. The words you say matter. The words the officiant says matter, and the WAY they are said matters, too. Years after your wedding, you may remember nothing about the food, little about the decorations, and your memory of the shoes may involve only how much they hurt your feet. But you will remember the ceremony - the solemn, holy feeling of that moment suspended in time; the joy of sharing it with your family and friends; the sense that the words said belonged to you and your partner alone.

As for my attempt at self-promotion? Pfffft. Let it go - I never was any good at that stuff. Of course I'd love to have you come talk to me about your wedding; I know what I'm able to do for you and I'm more than pleased to do it. But many other officiants can do wonderful things, too. I'm asking only that you give the choice of your officiant, and planning your ceremony, equal time with planning for flowers and photos and food (and equal consideration in your budget). Make the effort to find the right officiant, one you trust and whose approach serves your needs. Your officiant is the one who escorts you to that doorway which only the two of you can pass through: the land not just of generic marriage, but of YOUR marriage. That's too important a role to entrust to someone who doesn't appreciate the uniqueness of your relationship and the sacredness of the path you've chosen to walk together.

Many blessings and much joy to you! - Diane

The Daughter of Quiet

In my last post I talked about a specific kind of quiet: an internally-generated moment of repose which can be triggered in myriad ways. But I didn't cover WHY that kind of quiet is important and what's born out of it. First, a bit of background:

Being a highly social species, most of us homo sapiens want to feel we belong to one or more communities, and the communities we participate in to get that sense of belonging are usually composed of other people - biological or extended family, neighborhoods, churches, political groups, schools and so forth. These interconnections with one or more other humans are satisfying and rich - also (sometimes) difficult, frustrating, puzzling and occasionally just plain tiring. The effort they take isn't a bad thing: it can be compared to the effort of working your muscles hard at the gym, after which your body needs to restore itself to complete the process of getting better at doing what you ask of it. Similarly, we work hard at forging the necessary bonds in human relationships, creating a lot of internal noise in the process - What does he think of me? Why did she just say that? Did I hurt his feelings? I like her but I can't stand him... Our chattering minds and unsettled hearts need an occasional rest, to get better at doing what we ask of them.

The self-generated quiet I wrote of earlier takes us to a place where we can rest mind and heart for a moment, unencumbered by the "noise" of striving to achieve some goal. And from that place of quiet emerges - possibly, sometimes, no guarantees in this life - a different kind of relationship and belonging from that which we experience with other people: a connection with the immensity of existence. Virtually every religion and wisdom tradition, whether Western, Eastern or indigenous, has practices that claim to induce this transcendent experience, but many of us have shied away from those practices because we feel they're associated with belief systems or dogma we can't subscribe to. Uh-uh; I don't buy it. The belief system, the dogma, is only a model some people use to explain to themselves a mystery that is essentially beyond words. The experience of inner quiet is the doorway into the mystery (sometimes open, sometimes shut). The practice is the bicycle - or maybe the unicycle - we ride through the door (no helmets needed or allowed).

So what DOES happen in that instant of quiet and connection? I can only speak to my own experience, but perhaps it will serve. Let's go back to my example of brushing my hand over that large rock every day when I walk at the mall (yes, darn it, you'll have to read the previous post). When I engage in that practice, here's what it seems like to me - in a kind of analytical "slow motion" deconstruction of an instantaneous event: The first part of the encounter is sensory. I respond to the rock visually as I approach - see the beauty in its solid presence, recognize its familiar, varicolored markings, its irregular shape, the flecks of mica that sparkle in the overhead light. I greet the rock as I come near (non-verbally, so as not to startle other mall walkers who don't habitually talk to rocks). I brush my hand over it as I pass. Touching its sandpapery, hard surface, I get a sense of its age and the deep roots of stone out of which it was pried. It feels patient. I take a deep breath.

The second phase of the encounter is entirely - spiritual? Psychological? Emotional? (Ah, well, often all those roads lead to the same place.)  At the risk of sounding painfully New Age-ish, I believe that every time I touch that rock I reaffirm what I can only call a relationship - better yet, a kinship - with it. Without any intellectual effort, in a flash of perception, I know that my existence and the existence of the rock are both contained within and nurtured by the life of the earth. And the existence of the earth is contained within and nurtured by - indeed, was born from - the heat and heart of stars in an unimaginably immense universe. In this moment, I feel very much smaller, but my life feels very big. And very connected. To everything. Often I bring this awareness of participating in the immensity of things back to my "ordinary" day. It's great for perspective when being human gets tough.

The most wondrous part of this capability, I think, is that we can enter into this relationship with the mystery of existence through that most corporeal of pathways: our senses. By seeing, touching, listening, smelling and/or tasting - by paying rapt attention to the world - we transcend the limitations of this package of skin, bones and neural synapses that each of us calls "me."  We belong to the entire universe.

Try it. Try really seeing light dancing on the river's surface or the spider building its web. Try really hearing a birdsong or the wind roaring through treetops. Taste your food. Touch the bark of a tree. Smell the night air. Watch the stars. Let them tell you what's really going on. And find your place in the interconnected world of what Taoism calls "the ten thousand things" - that is, all of existence, from sawgrass to supernovas.

Every time the daughter of quiet is born, catch her in your arms and rock her as if she were your own. She is.

Quiet, please - expansion in progress

It's not a quiet world out there. The television shouts; our electronic babysitters incessantly nag with calls, emails, texts and tweets; traffic whizzes by, and in the midst of all this cacophony we expect - and are expected by others - to multitask as if there was an entire committee living in our heads (yet most of us know, to our sorrow, how well things get done by committee). But that's just the way the world is these days, right?

Well, I don't know. Seems to me there is some choice about how we experience the world, a choice that's independent of being able to control rush hour and modern technology and what your boss expects you to deliver before five o'clock. Because there's a world inside us, too, devoid of committees, traffic, electronics, the constant pressure to Get Things Done. You can visit there for a month of internal vacation in a split second of "outside time." And it's an expansive world that gets bigger every time you visit. The ticket to that world can be purchased with two things: quiet, and its daughter, connection.

WHAT? Didn't I just say it wasn't a quiet world out there? Yes (I never promised not to contradict myself). "Quiet" doesn't mean everybody else has to shut up. It means YOU have to. For one second, one minute, one hour or whatever span you choose (or that chooses you), you can opt out of focusing on all the things you've been trained to think are important. Really. The world isn't going to end if all you are doing for the next few moments is breathing. In fact, it's probably beneficial to the planet if that's all you do from time to time.

Since this quiet is generated through you and not outside you, it comes in different flavors. You might get quiet in the middle of that booming traffic, or in a grove of trees by a pond. You might even get quiet while you are singing or dancing, or riding a bicycle. By taking a deep breath. By smiling at a child, praying, meditating, looking at a candle flame or across a mountain valley at Douglas firs roaring in the wind. There are a zillion possible paths that can lead you to that place where you set aside - for a moment, anyway - your high-functioning, complex and very self-important brain/ego. The point is that the quiet I'm talking about is an internal stance, an opportunity you give yourself to let everything else fall away other than this huge, amazing miracle of simply BEING A LIFE.

I'll reveal one of my triggers for internal quiet because it's deliciously silly, it came to me unbidden, and it perfectly illustrates the process I just mentioned. Five mornings a week I walk, usually at the local mall because it's safer than my sidewalk-less neighborhood, and dry any time of the year. I'm not thrilled at sharing my early-morning space with chattering people and glaring retail signs. But. On every early-morning circuit around the mall I pass a day spa that has a big, beautiful boulder sitting outside the closed doors, a gorgeous yellow-orangeish stone with purple patches and dark veins running through it. One morning, for no particular reason except perhaps the wish to touch an object not created by humans looking to market something,  I reached out and lightly brushed the surface of the rock on my way past it. I think I may have even whispered to the rock, "Good morning." BOOM! - A sense of transcendent peace permeated me. Go figure. Now, every time I walk by that rock I brush my hand over it in gratitude and greeting. And every time I touch it I am unaccountably blessed with a moment, sometimes more, of inner, complete quiet. My life expands at the same time my ego steps out for a cup of coffee.

Is this daily caress of a rock merely a superstitious ritual, a meaningless gesture? Perhaps, on one level. So is - on one level - crossing oneself, or visiting your grandmother's grave, or always staying in the same cabin at that funky little riverside resort you've gone to since you were a kid. Yet, on another level, even the most rational human has to admit that these rituals do something for us, or to us. Whether the effect is psychological, spiritual, emotional - choose your preference - they quiet us. And in that quiet we find...well, I've gone on long enough and I'll talk about connection on the next post. Time to get quiet.

Why am I here?

Many people find a measure of comfort in the belief that life has intrinsic meaning, that there is a "plan" for each of us. That's understandable. After all, if we're not here for some identifiable reason, then we must be here for no reason, right? And from that premise it follows that if there is no reason for our existence, there can be no purpose to our lives, either.

Faulty logic, I think. That view dumps us into a tight crevasse between conventional religious belief and conventional non-belief: it's all God the Interventionist or it's all random chance. Neither of those explanations ever entirely satisfied me, so some years ago I began exploring this idea: What if the purpose of our existence - through whatever means that purpose arises - is to MAKE meaning? It's one of the things we humans seem to do best. We're makers and shapers, not just with our hands but with our minds and hearts. We take random, everyday events and order them by the calendar, by seasons, by stages of life, by astrological sign, by who we happened to meet on the street corner this morning - and in that ordering we create mileposts. Significance. Relationships. Art. Memories. The story of our lives. The feeling of belonging to something vast and beautiful.

One of the ways we make meaning is through ritual (or ceremony, if you will). When we welcome a child into the world through ceremony, we symbolically give the child to Life and claim the baby's vital importance to her family and to the earth. Who knows what gifts that new human creature will bring to her world? When a wedding takes place, we celebrate the magic of bringing together into one family, through love, a group of people who were once strangers to one another. We have voluntarily extended our notion of who we are obligated to care about. When we gather for a funeral or remembrance ceremony, we not only ease our loss through being in community, but we ritually usher the loved one who has died into the new status of "ancestor." He or she has become part of a family story that reaches back countless generations, into a history lost to us. All of these rituals tie us to each other, to our home the earth and to its creatures, to the long life of the universe and, for some, to a spirit they know as "God" (or any of a thousand sacred names).

So why am I here? Because I love the making of meaning through ritual: the peace and pause it brings into our busy lives, the stories it generates, the unguarded laughter and tears that spring from what it opens up in us. I love the possibilities of joy. I love guiding people to the mirror, to face their own creativity and make their own meaning. I love stories - telling them and hearing them - and I want you to share yours with me.

Why are YOU here?