Mother Love

The photo at the top of this post is of my mother, Rauha, and her older sister, Ingrid. Mom is on the right. The picture was taken at Pikes Peak. My memory is that Mom and Dad were on their honeymoon. They’re all gone now—Mom, Dad, and Ingrid. But “gone” doesn’t mean gone. When I look at this picture, I feel both Mom and Ingrid so strongly, it’s as if they are with me. They were both mothers to me, in different ways. I had many mothers, growing up—my other aunts, my grandmothers, even some of our neighbor women—but I’ve been thinking, lately, about Mom and Ingrid especially. They were in some ways opposites. Watching them, I learned that there are many ways to fill the world with mother love.

You might be wondering how to pronounce my mother’s name. It rhymes with POW-ha, accent on the first syllable. It’s very appropriate to link a word associated with comic book fist fights to my mother. Pow! Her family characterized her as a spitfire from the moment she was born. She’d been a preemie—born at home on the farm and kept warm in a large shoe box on the open oven door of the wood stove. Having had to fight through those challenging first days apparently stayed with her throughout her life.

My husband Bruce hadn’t seen the picture before. As I was working on the first draft of this piece, with the photo open on my computer desktop and the draft open next to it, he suddenly noticed the photo and said, “Who’s that?” He remarked that Mom and Ingrid look elegant. He added, suddenly, that Ingrid looks like a Colette. I exclaimed, “Yes! I love this picture! It captures both of them.” Notice Ingrid’s boyish haircut and funky combining of jeans and a pearl bracelet. Notice Rauha’s discreet pearl necklace, elegant wrap, and carefully coiffed hair.

Bruce said Ingrid looks like Colette. I expect that most people have no idea who Colette was. She was a French actress and writer born in 1873 who lived what I would call an intellectual and bohemian life. She wrote about love and marriage. Married and divorced a number of times, she passed the last part of her life in a Paris apartment (as the entry “Colette” on Britannica.com puts it) “surrounded by her beloved cats.” I don’t suppose I need to elaborate on why that detail tickles me at this point in our current political life.

The women in my mother’s immediate family were strong-minded, strong-spirited. They weren’t against intimate relationship—they loved and lived in partnership, in each of their cases with men. I have no illusions that their lives or their relationships were perfect and without struggle. But whatever my female role models faced, they knew their own minds.

Ingrid moved across the country to California, far from the family homestead in Upper Michigan. My mother stayed close to home—in fact, she and my dad eventually took over the farm from my grandmother. Rauha and Ingrid couldn’t, on the surface, have lived lives more different. But the basics were the same—strong family ties, esteem for learning. I learned from both of them to value and feed my intellect.

Ingrid’s ties to home were so strong that when she and her husband retired, they built a home down the road from my mom and dad. That’s when I really got to know her. Even before that, though, her gift to me had been her love of logic, her seeking for knowledge and meaning.

Ingrid was a reader. She was smart. I would call her a feminist, not in that she wanted benefits for women, but because, even in our early interactions, I could see she believed that women have an outlook, derived from a long tradition of nurturing, that can better the world, and she believed we should be claiming and acting on it.

Her first marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1960s, when societal disapproval must have made it hard to make that decision. Because they lived so far away and got home only periodically, I didn’t really know her first husband. I was about eleven years old when they separated—Ingrid’s daughters, a bit younger. My understanding of the situation was limited, but I sensed that a tidal wave had washed over my aunt, and she had chosen to swim, not sink. When my own first marriage ended up similarly washed away, I had Ingrid to look to, to understand that I too could swim and not go under.

My mom was married to the same man all her life. In her forties, she became an LPN, but her early focus was her kids. She took us to the library every week and made sure each of us found books that would challenge us and broaden our worlds. She had taken Latin in high school and talked me into taking it too, so I would really understand how the English language works. She was right—I learned more about English in Latin class than in any of my English classes. My mother must have had a sixth sense, seeing that I would eventually pick up a pen and start writing myself.

Mother love works by indirection, sometimes.

Neither my mom nor Ingrid was a church-goer, having questions they had never found answers to. They experienced the sublime walking the woods and fields surrounding their quiet houses. My spiritual life echoes theirs, but not fully. I use my unanswered questions to fuel my curiosity, and I maintain ties to established religion. I support the good that the church does, and I have a strong sense that there is life after this one. Ironically, I have it in part because of stories Mom and Ingrid shared.

I remember, once, sitting at my mother’s glass topped table with Ingrid. She told me, suddenly, she’d had a dream in which she was standing along a street. It was some time after both my grandparents had passed on. A large bus suddenly rolled up beside her. The door opened, and a deceased member of the family—I can’t remember who—stepped to the opening and greeted her. Ingrid was taken aback. She had the sense that others from the family who had passed were on the bus, and that they were happy to see her. She asked if it was her turn to step up onto the bus. The answer was no. She still had life to live.

Now, I believe in the wisdom of dreams. I even believe that a dream can open a doorway to another dimension, whether “out there” somewhere, or deep inside us. Ingrid was a searcher, even in her sleep. Since she has passed, I’ve often wondered, when the time came for her, did the bus pull up again? I can imagine her happiness, stepping up the step and finally knowing what’s next. When I think of my own life’s end, I see myself stepping up and onto that same bus.

My mother had a similar otherworldly experience. Only hers wasn’t a dream. Rauha’s mothering went in two directions, both down the generations and up. After she and my dad took over the farm, she worked with her siblings to watch over their mother, my Grandma Hilda, in her last years.

Grandma had moved to a little place down the road. Mom’s shepherding of Grandma was close and constant, and she told me that her literal first thought every morning as she woke up was of her mother. The day after Grandma died, Mom woke in a terror, thinking, “I need to call Ma.” Immediately, a voice spoke into her ear. Mom described it as very small, as if it were coming from far away. The voice said, “You needn’t worry about that any longer.”

Was it stress talking? Her imagination?

I’d call it mother love—not limited to the human, or the female. A writer that I’ve found soothing to my mind when I’m in need of hope is the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, who lived in England during the Middle Ages. She experienced a series of visions while close to death, in which she saw Christ as our mother. Julian survived, and over a period of twenty years, wrote the revelations down. I would love to sit and talk with Julian of Norwich. There are many ways to fill the world with mother love. Some of the men I know are naturals at mothering.

Those who follow my blog know that in graduate school I studied the writing of poetry. I’ll close with a poem I wrote for my mother, for Rauha. It’s addressed to her. I wrote a small first version, the germ of the poem, many years ago. I was only able to expand and finish it after my mother passed and I became old enough to see a long way back. A biographical detail that will help you as you read is that my family lived for about a year, when I was six, with my dad’s parents on their small farm. They still had cows then, and my brother and I loved to be out in the pasture with them.

     * * * * *

I Speak to My Mother about Light

Tell me, was it with joy, or fear,
that I first encountered my rocking horse?
His flat torso gutted and hard, white
and wide, the red saddle. You lifted me,
steadied me on the seat—and then the gentle
rocking began, the surprise of it,
the wondrous terror of body and mind freed
from earth, suspended in light.

Did I love him? I see now,
when I conjure the memory of him,
the unkind shaft through the top
of his skull, my fingers wrapped around,
around, his far-seeing eyes of no color.

It was love, of a kind. What became of him,
I don’t know. What became of you, I do—
the sudden way your head fell back, your eyes
so focused on a brightness beyond the window
that no voice could call you back.

And so I sit without you now in the droning,
dappled shade, sipping sweet jasmine
from your favorite cup. Do you see the way
I swish the tea leaves, hoping for
illumination? It was the rocking horse that sired
the stallion of my childhood dreams, invisible
in buttercups. When I drove the thick
cows home in the evening, their swinging bags
evoked a reverie—my pig tails undone,
then his golden back down to receive me,
our bright hair mingling and free.
He carried me through fields impossibly deep
with flowers, the small sounds of woods
creatures all around, settling in, keeping
watch, trusting the promise that light
will rise again in the east.

We have all lost our horses. Their soft sides
rise and fall in empty stables. Mother,
loved mother, can you hear them,
from so far away in heaven? Pretty patterns
light the bottom of my china cup,
had I eyes to read them.

    * * * * *

I was alone with my mother when she died, having been the one to care for her in her last years. It made sense for her to come to Bruce and me after Dad died, when she couldn’t live alone at the farm anymore. I was close to retirement, and we had no children. I had time to give that my younger siblings weren’t in a position to offer without bringing enormous stress into their lives. I could devote myself to mothering our mother.

This poem raises two questions: what will happen in the future? Can we find again our lost dreams? I worry about our world. Even here in this country, where we profess to honor the integrity and rights of every person, we’ve lost “us,” any shared dream. It’s sad to surrender, as so many have been doing, to forces intent on dividing us for personal gain, rather than coming together for the good of everyone. We have a chance to change that, this fall, and I hope we take it. It’s ludicrous to blame all the ills around us on “those people” (whoever those people are to us). It’s ludicrous, for instance—and yes, this has obviously been on my mind—to imagine that childless people through the centuries haven’t contributed unique forms of mothering to the world.

I was lucky to have aunts, like Ingrid, who blessed me with motherly love and attention. I have nieces and nephews of my own, for whom I’ll do everything I can to ensure that, after I’m gone, they will live on a healthy earth and enjoy lives as full and rewarding as mine has been. I taught hundreds of college students through the years: mostly Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. They were, in a sense, my children.

Each new semester, I loved walking into the classroom on the first day—seeing the looks on the faces, the uncertainty or bravado, each with a personality, on their own timetable. Most very soon began to see their own gifts and where they wanted to use them. Each brought to the world unique possibility, and my hope is in them to turn around our present dysfunction. Mothering sees potential, protects and nurtures it, then steps out of the way. What I suspect is hidden in the metaphorical tea leaves in my late-arrived poem is that it’s mother love we have to look to, for a world that’s kind to everyone.

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