Big Love
Well, it’s the lusty month of May and the pink rhododendron about to bloom at my front porch is signaling that another Mother’s Day is upon us.
I consider myself exceedingly blessed that I was given the opportunity to experience the most miraculous, amazing, challenging, growthful, delightful wonder that is motherhood. Becoming a mother helped to heal my own heart. It introduced me to a facet of myself that I didn’t know existed. It was and is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done. Most importantly, it gave me the experience of pure love.
You can know a lot about love, or imagine that you do, but when you have a child, you discover your vision was limited. Now, I realize that not every mother is happy to be one, and not every mother is good at the job. I am well aware, hearing as many personal stories as I do in my work, that some people have painful maternal memories: more Mommy Dearest than June Cleaver. But I think I speak for many when I say that there is no love like mother love: it is a love set apart.
What makes maternal love so different from any other kind of love is that it is truly, utterly, unconditional. Marital love is full of conditions, whether we admit it or not. Love between friends comes and goes. But as I told my children every night when I tucked them in bed, "No matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter how big you get, I will always love you."
And it's true. It was true when they were growing inside of me, before I even met them; it was true when they were delightful little people who demanded all of my time; and it’s true now as they totter on the edge of the nest I built, preparing to fly and break my heart a little bit more.
Big Love.
If love is, to paraphrase the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled, the willingness to extend oneself for one’s own or another spiritual growth, mothering is the very definition of love. It is a reflection of Divine love: a love that has no caveats, no deal-breakers, no end point. It is the purest kind of love that wants nothing more, or less, than happiness and fulfillment for the other. To love a child completely, selflessly, without condition, for all of time — this is the gift that a mother gives. And it reflects the all-encompassing love of creation.
When I was pregnant with my son, I drew a picture of him encompassed within my belly and then I added a “Great Mother” around us both, like Russian nesting dolls. This is the image that I hold of both mother love and divine love. They are indistinguishable. We are, each of us, always surrounded by Love.
Whether your experience of maternal love came in the form of a birth mother, adoptive mother, soul mother, mother figure, Mother Nature, or the Divine Mother — know that that love is surrounding you — no matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter how big you get.
And then, maybe, say thank you.♥️
