I am, of all my mothers

This Mother’s Day, I’m thinking of my sister who warms my heart several times a week, and with whom I can be my truest self and share all my secrets; my first cousins who have become dear woman friends with whom our shared threads go back to childhood, our mutual admiration and love growing as the years pass; and my dear, dear aunt, my mother’s sister, who loved me as a baby and took me in as a wily teenager, and who cheers me on today in such a special way it brings tears just thinking how appreciative I am for her love.

I am a product of my mothers. Those mothers I’ve invited into my life, friend mothers, my sister mother and sisters-in-law mothers, my cousin mothers, niece mothers, auntie mothers, my own dear, dear departed mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, and their mothers too.

It’s easy to feel them in me.

My father’s mother, growing up in a small town near Regina, Saskatchewan, moving to Victoria after marrying and starting a young family, going on to raise 8 children. She was a teacher and later a school-board trustee and staunch NDPer, on telephone-friends basis with Dave Barrett, and before that, (with grandfather) a personal friend with Tommy Douglas and supporting the CCF, and whose name still presides over a Langford school auditorium. I feel her in me. I have her stature and some of her features; and although I can attribute my social-left political leaning to my own mother, perhaps grandmother is responsible for the fire in my belly with the politics of today.

My mother’s mother, the eldest in a large family growing up farming in the Cariboo, moving to a gold mining “company” town to raise her four kids, being struck down with polio and losing the use of one leg when her youngest was a baby. I remember my Nan best after she’d moved to the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, insisting that her kids and grandkids visit her on a regular basis, she became the Queen Bee and we all acquiesced several times a year, feasting on the banquets she prepared; playing in their beautiful garden full of Grampa’s flowers, in the surrounding woods and at the river. Gathering around her when tragedy struck. If not for her, our childhood would have been quite different. She formed a high Welsh/English standard that we tried to meet, yet she held us in so much love, she was funny, interesting, and was always making elaborate artistic things. I never knew how much post-polio pain she must have been in until much later in life, and now I think perhaps some of her gifts were passed down to me. Today, I’m especially grateful.

Wishing a very happy Mother’s Day to all my mothers, past and present, to my friends who are mothers (and a special wish to my women friends not biological mothers, yet engaged in mothering), to my extended family mothers, to my dear sister, to my nieces who are also mothers, to my first cousin mothers and my second cousin mothers, and to my dearest auntie. Thank you for your mothering of me, for all the mothering you do for those in your life. ❤️

Image: Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, Forest Edge 1884 (Russia)