We never celebrated either Mother's Day or Father's Day in my childhood home. We were too "clever" to fall for those commercial holidays, where an industry has decided that you show your love with flowers and chocolate. Or too left-wing. Who knows, I never thought about it.
Anyway. There's a picture somewhere in an album at my parents' house of a young woman in a green shirt, big glasses, 70s liberation bangs, sitting on a serious 70s striped sofa with a guitar between herself and a little boy of about a year old.
The boy doesn't yet know he's lucky. He doesn't yet know that the room he's looking out from will form the foundation for the rest of his life.
It's my mother. And it's me.
She played for me, sang for me every day the first many years of my life - not because I was supposed to do anything particular with it, but because there was a current in her she couldn't help letting overflow onto the little boy sitting beside her.
That way I learned to listen, before I could speak. That way I learned to feel, before I knew what it was. It's not something a mother plans. It's something that happens when a woman wants her child so much that she simply carries it with her into everything she herself loves.
What I know today, but couldn't put into words when I was growing up, is that it was her who shaped the soft interior in me. Her unconditional love. Her comfort when the world was too big. Her warmth and presence. Her hands. Her faith in me - even when she herself was in doubt. It was her who opened the door to the creative space in me - to the music, to the words, to design, expression and identity - all that I later came to live off - even though in her own heart she wasn't at all sure whether one could even live off "that sort of thing" - and briefly, when I was drifting in youth's many wanderings, she called and thought it probably best if I bought myself some nice chinos and let myself be employed and trained at a small local bank branch where I had moved to.
It was naturally an impossibility. But she never stopped me and never mentioned it again. That was her greatest gift.
Because a person can pass something on they themselves are afraid of, if they love the child higher than their own fear. That's rarer than we think. That kind of love doesn't require guarantees. It doesn't require that the direction first be proven defensible before it may run its course.
She gave me the warmth, the comfort, the faith, the love. My father gave me the will - the indomitable and untameable nerve and flame that doesn't accept being extinguished and that didn't know how to bend away. Separately it wasn't enough. But it was the love that came first. It was that which lay underneath. It's that which everything else since gets built on top of. It's that which keeps one upright, when the will is no longer enough in itself.
And she bathed me in that frequency the first many years of my life.
And when I sit with the picture in my hand, I feel like saying what we rarely say aloud.
Every single man who has ever lived has come into the world through a woman.
Literally. And deeper than literally.
We came through her body. It created us. From a design we don't quite understand where comes from. But we also came through her gaze. Her voice. Her ability to see us, before we could see ourselves. Her trust that we were worth receiving, before we had earned anything whatsoever.
That's what Woman carries. Not biology alone. Not care alone. The gate. That opening through which Love, Life and human worth seep into a little body that otherwise wouldn't know where to rest.
When we honour our mothers, we honour that principle in existence which carries life forward - Sophia, the receiving, life-giving force, without which no Human would stand here.
A man can become many things in his life.
But he becomes HUMAN through a woman.
Thank you, Mum.
For the songs. For the music. For the warmth. For believing, even when you couldn't see where it would lead. I know now where I'm heading. And a large part of the reason is the song you placed in me.
I'll never be able to repay the love I received. But I can try to pass it on.
Thank you that it was you who was the gate I came through.
❤
