My 17-Year Mother’s Day Update

I’m on a small plane flying to Asheville, NC. When I arrive, I will serpentine up the Blue Ridge mountains to Hot Springs to co-host my first women’s retreat—an event I’ve been planning for almost a year and dreaming about for much longer.

Here in midair, there’s a new flutter in my brain, which for the last 17 years has been 99.9% mama-brain. I am giddy! It is an actual physical feeling, this reallocation of cells, this increase in energy for poetry and life as a poet.

While I’m gone, my son is staying home alone for the first time, taking care of the animals, getting himself to school and back, and generally managing his own life without me there. After school on Friday, he’ll fly with his teacher and a couple of students to Orlando for an international business competition.

We’ll meet back at the airport in a week + a day with lots of new to share with each other.

Here’s why that feels particularly extraordinary: I haven’t had a week’s worth of new to share with anyone in a while. All my new has simply been Leo’s new. He was born! He talks! He walks! He rides a bike! He plays viola! He plays baseball! He goes to high school! He drives! He looks at colleges and stays home alone and flys to another state for a competition!

Mothering is so much ushering in their new and honoring their outgrown. And while it may seem like they’re do all the growing while we’re doing all the ushering and honoring, we are doing all the growing too.

So this Mother’s Day, let’s usher and honor our own selves because chances are we have outgrown a few things of our own. (Which is what our retreat was all about—I’ll write more on that in the next newsletter.)

Motherhood was a dream I wasn’t sure was going to come true for me since I got such a late start. But Leo and I found each other at the exact right time, and I happily, purposely gave him 99.9% of my brain for as long as he needed or wanted it.

But now I’m at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet and the flutter of my own new is a wild and sweet thing. I’m getting a part of my brain back! And what am I going to do with that part? Well, poetry has been waiting patiently for some extra space, and I do have a few (thousand) other ideas too.

If you have any thoughts about growing up, brain space, and particularly outgrowing ourselves, I would LOVE to hear them. I’ll meet you at the fire pit in the backyard. I’ll bring the tea and/or the tequila.

Poetry heals. Love wins. And mothers are out-of-this-world AMAZING.

P.S.

Women give and sustain life for everyone and everything on this planet. So whether you’re raising a human or not, if you are a woman, you ARE a mother. THANK YOU for everything you bring to this life!