This essay was originally exported to Substack from my old blog— hence, the comments don’t appear below—but, one year on, it’s never felt more true. With love to all the mothers, in all the ways they have mothered.
"We must never forget any part of ourselves ... all the ages that we have been,” writes Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water: Reflections on Art and Faith.
These beautiful and powerful words, I think, could also apply to motherhood: we are all the mothers we have been.
Despite all the familiar advice about giving our children roots and wings, one of the hardest parts of seeing them ‘launch’ is a kind of loss that’s not talked about so much.
A particular kind of grief.
It’s not, I think, simply about ‘losing’ our children, who suddenly got taller, broader and funnier when we weren’t looking (besides, my Italian heritage refuses to accept any suggestion of the concept of actually ‘letting go’).
There’s a sense, too, of leaving behind the different stages of motherhood and the different mothers we’ve been. The ones that seem to have zipped past in the click of a Lego brick, a shake of a Christmas stocking or the flip of a sleepover pancake.
Who hasn't passed a framed baby photo, or scrolled through their phone Favourites, and time-travelled to a moment they could almost touch, feel and smell?
Also, how is that, while they’re sleeping, the most mature teen or twenty-something can, somehow, look seven years old again? That old trick of the light.
Motherhood, too has its milestones. It’s just that, most times, we don’t realise we passed them until—oh!—we have.
When older children first leave home for an extended period, all the well-intentioned comments about how we’ll find ourselves missing the clutter and chaos, the daily round-up of old coffee mug and laundry, turn out to be, devastatingly, true.
As I write this, our eldest is home for a stretch and I’ve never been more ecstatic about stepping over stacks of college books and online returns to Urban Outfitters, or to play hunt-the-abandoned-Earl Grey.
Like other college mothers I know, when my daughter sets off for uni again, I find that the first day or two after she leaves—the off ramps of motherhood—the toughest. One of the cats always stages a lie-in protest on her bed, externalising what the rest of the house is feeling. Often, he’ll climb into her suitcase when she’s mid-packing.
Something I’ve found that helps? Straightening up her room while she’s on the road back to college. Not that she leaves it in chaos, not at all, but it’s a distraction, a comfort and the biggest help.
Also, it’s a way I can mother her in that moment. It’s the mother I am right then, in that moment.
It’s easy to forget that the off ramps are hard for our children, too. As I tidy, I’ll find things that she forgot to pack–a book, sweater or favorite scrunchie. I'll gather them up, to pop into a future care package (speaking of which, I’m pretty sure those have as much do with caring for the sender’s heart as does for the recipient’s).
For our girl’s twenty-first, which, due to the first UK lockdown, we couldn't be together for as a family. It was weird and hard but also an adventure, arranging for a cake—half rocky-road, half double chocolate brownie—to be collected from her favourite coffee shop in the city, and giant rose gold number balloons to be delivered in the morning.
While it was the first birthday for which I couldn’t lay out all her gifts on the coffee table the night before, I did curl all my love into each iridescent ribbon as I wrapped and packed them up (last minute, as apparently some things don’t change).
That’s how being a mother looked this year, on this particular birthday.
As L’Engle might suggest, all the mothers we have been–each stage of the motherhood–can never be taken from us. They have brought us here to this moment, and the way we are called to mother our older children today.
Hard as it is to imagine, God willing, these, too, are the times that we will look back on one day and feel those familiar pangs of nostalgia for, too.
Motherhood is a constantly changing, ever adapting gift, from the moment we discover that we are carrying the miracle of life, or from the moment we carry a child home through the gift of adoption, foster or become a stepmother.
Miracles, all.
Everything that’s said about children growing and changing so fast could be said for mothers, too. We've been all those mothers. As those further along the road did for us, let’s not forget to look over our shoulders at the mothers just behind us on the journey and encourage, them, too. Just the other week, my friend Heather told me to treasure these back-and-forth college years, which, too, are flying by so fast.
Trust me, I’m listening.
Looking back on it, being a mother right now feels a lot like being the one who encouraged a nervous four-year-old into her reception class for her first day at school.
Friends, by the grace of God, let’s honor the spirit of L’Engle’s words and celebrate all the mothers we have been, the ones we are today, and those we hope to become.