Happy Mother’s Day: Growth and Love in the Face of Passing.

Mom and me in mid/late 70s (as you can tell)!

May 10, 2020

It has been 14 years since my Mom passed. Yesterday a beautiful friend asked me if I felt connected to my Mom. I said yes. I explained that I envision my Mom as my cheerleader on the sidelines of my life.

It hasn’t always been this way. For many years I felt cheated; I felt the natural arc of our relationship as Mother and daughter was eclipsed. I struggled and was unsettled with her death. Over time, my understanding evolved. I’ve come to know that the arc of the relationship with my Mom continues in spite of her passing.

In this cheerleader image, my Mom is holding me up in a hip-hop-rave kind of way. My Mom isn’t cheering adorably on the sidelines with the perfect skirt and smile (the latter image representing the rules she liked to live by). In my image she is raw, consistent, and in her bathrobe no less! She isn’t following any rules; she isn’t making any judgments; she is just there with her support.

What’s wonderful about this image is that it represents pure, unconditional love, a love not saddled with rules or questions that had unconsciously caged me in the early years after her passing. It’s not that I didn’t break those “rules” after her passing, oh I did! But without my Mom around, I didn’t know how she was feeling about my choices. Since she wasn’t there, I didn’t know we were growing together.

It has taken me a while to understand that the arc of the relationship with my Mom continues to grow even in her passing. In fact, I have come to know another meaning for the term passing. My Mom’s passing marked the point at which she passed the baton to me. After passing that baton she now cheers unconditionally, on the sidelines, as I participate in this game of life. She reminds me that this game is only a game with myself, that I’m not competing with anyone else. When I forget and am jealous that someone has gotten ahead, she reminds me to examine that feeling and explore what that feeling is telling me. Importantly, she has dropped her rules and has put full trust in me to play by my own.

That brings me to today’s featured work of art, Mary Cassatt’s On a Balcony. I first saw this painting many years ago (with my Mom) and was struck by it on many levels, so much so that tried to draw it the first time I used pastels (I am no artist as you can see!). In this painting, Mary Cassatt chose to feature a woman reading the newspaper, demonstrating her commitment to women thinking for themselves during a time when women were confined to the home (notice the woman is wearing a housecoat). Cassatt herself was a trail blazer. She was one of a few women on the forefront of the Impressionist Movement. Her career choice was initially scorned by her parents who thought she might adopt a bohemian lifestyle. Thankfully she lived by her own rules, and we are now the beneficiaries of her trailblazing works, many which feature women, mothers, and daughters.