Birthdays are for remembering our connection to the mother
The body remembers what the conscious mind forgets. I stare at her picture on my altar. I breathe her in. It is our day. How shall we honor this continuation of mothers and daughters, of generations.
The body remembers what the conscious mind forgets
Part 1: Three types of crying
Have you ever noticed there are different types of crying?
For me, there are three main categories. There’s the kind that starts in the throat, a throb, pushing its way up, it can be swallowed back down, though I don’t advise this.
Second, there are the tears that leak out of eye corners — I’ve always found find these quite hard to restrain, much to my chagrin.
Third, there are full body convulsions; a heaving, a sobbing, a moving, that may or may not involve tears at all.
To truly experience this last one is to give up some control.
It can be cathartic, yes, a clearing, a wiping out. A letting go. A giving in, and if we’re lucky, a moving through.
I lay on the floor of my upstairs bedroom, my body racked with sobs — type #3.
My mind digs to comprehend. Why was grief hitting me so hard today, on my day?
My body itself was crying out, it seemed of its own accord.
I could feel the answer moving through me, the flavor of grief an answer in itself.
This was not mental anguish. The grief was a simple and severe body-based longing for its source of creation, for its long-standing wellspring of the purest love and comfort it had known in this lifetime.
Though raised on the tradition that my birthday was my day, my body remembered a deeper truth.
I longed for my mom on birthday.
I longed for the one who did the birthing.
Exactly four months earlier, four months before my 30th birthday, I said goodbye to my mom. She slipped out of her physical body in a hospital room before noon. I’d felt her release through my entire body. There was no mistaking it.
Part 2: Nearly 3 decades of birthdays
Growing up, birthdays were lovingly orchestrated by mom.
In my earliest years, I’d choose a color and she would sew me a party dress.
I am 5 and wear a red dress with pink, floral sleeves that puff over my shoulders ever. My doll, Annie, sports a matching get-up.
They fit us perfectly .
This is my mom’s bright and colorful, “I love you, darling girl!”
As I grew, dresses gave way to snow-clothes and you could find me squeezed in a sled, three or four kids deep, sailing down our front-yard hill. My mom is in the background, ensuring everyone has enough warm attire and hot chocolate, or starting the bonfire out back. Marshmallows always followed sledding.
Away on my birthday for the first time, my mother’s attentions followed me. There I am on a Tuesday night, sitting on the floor of my freshmen dorm, biting into a rich chocolate cake my mom arranged from a local Boston bakery.
I don’t remember all the friends who sat with me, just the cake’s rich chocolate and my mom’s love tingled with just an edge of self-consciousness.
Who’s mom sends them such a decadent birthday cake to a college dorm!?
As the years went by, I rarely saw my mom on my birthday, yet she was always there, confirming the passing of another year and blessing my entry into the next.
When I was 21, she sent me a card with cash and the suggestion of champagne.
When I was 25 and bemoaned my job in South Korea, she bought me a plane ticket to come home for a visit — I didn’t take the return flight, instead thankfully moving on to the next chapter of my life.
The next year it was a yoga mat, thick and a deep magenta that seems to remain as vibrant today as it was then. Yes — she/it told me, yoga is part of your path now.
On my last birthday with her, 29, we sat at the dining room table and picked out warm weather clothes for me to wear during my newest activity — 6:30am outdoor workouts in Baltimore. The clothes were a luxury I’d never buy myself on my grad school budget. After her passing, when I turned to the hills of Boulder for mothering, these garments would keep me warm, hugging my body through the cold winter.
Each gift gently nudged me forward, a hint, a permission, a seeing of me, an affirmation from my mother. You exist. You have grown. You are loved.
These birthdays were precious. I felt loved, nurtured, seen and wanted.
They were a gift from my mom I accept gratefully.
Everyone deserves to be celebrated on their birthdays.
Part 3: Our bodies, like our minds, process grief
On the day of my birth, my mother fought to give us the gift of time, of a vaginal emergence, of increased exposure to her microbiome, and the immune and health benefits that follow. She wanted the full physical experience of birthing me.
Of my birth she wrote:
“This, I thought, is how it happens, how millions of women are victimized into unnecessary surgery and deprived of the power of their own experience. I knew without a doubt that I was perfectly capable of giving birth but was not going to be given the chance. And yet somehow, lying on my back as nurse after nurse poked and probed for a vein without success, I finished dilating and got the unmistakable urge to push. Lily was born in triumph…an hour and a half later.” — Fran Djuna Sussman, a letter to friends
Imagine that.
A perfect orchestration of our bodies.
This was the day I left her safe womb. My lungs would fill with air for the first time. Though direct physical connection to her was a drying stub at my navel, my mouth would learn to take in nutrients at her breast. The organization and relation of our bodies changed that day, yet remained largely physical.
Her body producing hormones and nourishment connecting her to me. My body, vulnerable out of the womb, relying on her completely.
This was a dance of her body and mine.
Without my mother physically present to celebrate me, I connect to these deeper truths.
This day was always ours and never just mine.
To honor the mother may be intellectual.
To feel the deep connection through our being transcends intellect.
Through my mother’s absence on my birthday, I feel the force of her love, which coursed through my life, which made my life.
I feel my connection to not just her, but to all the women that came before her, each having a baby girl.
Each carrying the gift of life one generation forward.
My body is part of this line, my body remembers.
Mingled with this grief, is awe, joy, and appreciation.
I feel this in my heart, my ovaries, my uterus.
There are no tears now, just a dull ache in my throat.
Part 4: Birth days
A few weeks ago, I turned 34.
I counted on my fingers like a child, not trusting the math, not trusting this could be the 5th birthday without her.
And yet, it is. And yet it is not.
For she is here.
It is only that I must learn to connect with her in new ways now. The paths are there, though they look like little more than narrow, overgrown deer trails to my untrained eye, and I hesitate, still more comfortable on the main thoroughfare.
I wish she were here. I wish I could stand on my new pedestal of understanding and reinvent birth day celebrations with her.
Oh how we’d create! How we’d celebrate! My heart leaps.
Yet, it is only through her absence that I have gained this perspective, so I must venture down these overgrown paths and learn new ways of meeting her.
I say overgrown, because aren’t my new ways the old ways, really?
Connecting with those who have passed is as old as humankind itself.
I stare at her picture on my altar. I breathe her in. It is our day.
How shall we honor this continuation of mothers and daughters, of generations, and interconnection, and our independence too, for yes — I have lived another year, and that journey is also worth marking.
I find her in books — hers I carry on and my new ones on gardening and herbs. I find her in my friends and the familiar smile of a stranger.
I find her as part of the great mother, mother Gaia, our earth.
I find seeds she planted in me.
I find her in her vast body of work, that lives on, and through her writing.
I find her on my own path, which is filled with glimpses of her.
Thank you, Mom. Thank you on your birthing day. Thank you on my birthday.
