A Tribute to Those Who Nurture

Longing for the child she abandoned at 14, Annette Bening’s character in the movie “Mother and Child” lives a grouchy life. The scene opens to her reluctantly caring for her ailing mother and her own dour spirit. The grief of releasing her baby when she herself was still a child turns into the wall we all know a little bit about, any of us who have ever longed for something we lost or something that never was.

Checking on my sleeping daughters I flash back to the days as toddlers when they came to me and the long nights of pain and sadness they endured when they had been moved around from group home to my home. Safety brought with it the remembering of trauma endured and our first year was marked by both great joy and deep sorrow. Once, after a solid two weeks of interrupted sleep, I was stunningly awake as I had never been to this god of nurturing and loving two helpless human beings.

“As the world goes by, all I know is I want to be wide awake/Seekers of status quo, I say let them go, I want to be wide awake/fear for all of its fury can’t hold a flame to any soul that cries, I want to be wide awake, awake.” (Christine Kane, Wide Awake)

Awake. Like jumping into an icy pond. So at times I have fallen asleep. Nurturing while sleepwalking changes my creativity and my parenting, I see that now. My mind wanders to my mother’s obsession with feeding the seven of us. It was/is her creativity – her deep joy channeled into the thing she had to do. And anyone who nurtures others 24-7 knows the drain of energy that comes with outer focused nurturing. And yet, it is our creativity, our soul’s joy channeled into caring that feeds the life force. I bake bread weekly; make soups, have learned Indian, Chinese and Thai cooking. I make cookies and scones; tend a garden in the summer. How many artists: painters, potters, songwriters, writers and sculptors works are channeled into people who were fed well in childhood? Am I my mother’s novel?

Elizabeth Layton raised five kids, battled depression for 35 years and became a published painter in her 70’s. Her depression went away.

Watching the movie Secretariat the other night with my daughters who are now 12 and 13, one comments and the other agrees that it is “wrong for that mom to abandon her children for the sake of that horse.” I breathe in deeply that sentiment, knowing I might be my mother’s great works and they might be mine.