Right here

Sunday was Mother's Day. I woke up to my beautiful daughters in my bed, hugging and kissing me. My husband brought a cup of fresh latte and some beignets he scored from a restaurant he plays a gig at once a month. The girls wanted to stay and snuggle, and gave me a massage. They brought me beautiful gifts they made at school. Breakfast came, in bed, and I didn't have to do a thing. I watched the girls' show with them on the couch, and we went to mass (Gillian asked why we had to go to mass if this was a special day, and Sean said "well, moms just like to go to mass, ALL THE TIME.").

Somehow as I was there in that church, on that crisp spring day, I felt my mother all around me. I felt her in every other mother with their children in the pews..every mother who had lost a child..every mother carrying a child...and every mother who had moved on. Addie asked why I was crying, kneeling at the pew. I told her I was happy and sad and humbled. I get to be counted among the masses of those who have given life...who has been given the privilege to manifest creation. After communion, our priest asked all the mothers to come to the front of the church, and we got a standing ovation. And I could see my little family in the back of the church waiving and proud, and I couldn't stop from getting teary-because of all those people in that sea of people, that little family belongs to me. No matter how terrible or distracted or angry I get, they forgive me and love me in spite of myself. And as the entire church extended their hands to bless us in prayer, I started counting my blessings....for love and faith; for family and friends; for health, meaning, and work.

Because no matter what I do for the rest of my life, nothing will compare to creating Gillian and Adelaide. And I wish my mother, who loved to brag on me, could have met them-my greatest achievement.

Mothers are our conduit to conscious existence and our portal to this plane of being. There is divinity there. And they carry the balance of the family on their backs...there is something spot on in the reverence the Catholic church has for Mary, the virgin mother. The one who manifested the savior.

So, I'll get off my serious kick here, and will explain my long absence. Suffice it to say I am ruminating as the seasons change, in spring, and how life bursts forth out of nothing and how beautifully that parallels motherhood.

                                 Addie and I at the Mother's Day Tea at her school last Friday