Per le Madri

INCEPTION | to my sisters

I was in a dream state but very much awake. The brain bleed Christmas music was too real for it to be a delicious dream. But my perception started to bend as I felt myself lift just enough off the ground to look down and watch them play. They were little girls playing with their dolls. Laughing with each other, pretending to make their dolls talk and waving their little arms in those cute little stiff-elbowed floppy-wristed motions.

I’d been drawn back through time by a moment of the present to witness something that I could have never seen in this reality. To be a big brother watching over my sisters as they played with their dolls. It was a strange thing to suddenly feel a deep nostalgia through a perspective I’d never known. It was an unfamiliar perspective playing out as a deep and vivid memory.

But like I said, it wasn’t a dream. I was still the little brother and they were still my big sisters. But now their dolls were real babies, their babies. And it was not me that had been transported back through time, but them that had been transported, not back to childhood, but to the wide-eyed excitement and sheer playful presence of it. They’d come full circle together. I had witnessed a moment that, for me, marked the closing of their generation cycle by seeing them as children, playing together on the floor with their pretend babies while they were women, playing together on the floor, with their real babies.

Now I watch their babies at play, Leccy double-pumping his food and excitedly telling stories, and Rosie stacking cups with intent and infectiously, cheekily smiling. Like mothers like children. And I can’t help but fall back into that dream. A day-dream where I see my sisters as babies, just the way I could never have remembered them. But now I do.

Happy mother’s day and thank you for the unexpected gifts of your motherhood.

~

TRANSITION | to my mother.

They say the dragonfly represents transition. I wonder if this is because of it’s incredible instincts that allow it to know more about where it's prey is flying than it's prey does. But sometimes, it is caught in a web, and becomes the prey itself. Maybe it represents a sure death. An ego death.

They also say that Saturn comes around every thirty years or so, to lift you up like a child or sink you down like a stone. Our Saturn return presents us with opportunity to grow and install our wisdoms, but it is up to us to take it. Some of us languish and clutch onto our past, our grievances, and our traumas. Others move into a renewed childhood, seeking new adventures and new lesson, creating their wisdom.

There is a time when the relationship between a mother and son transitions from one of mothers instincts, knowing more about her child than her child does, to one of friendship. It can only become friendship if they both choose to grow, to choose an ego death, and transition together.

Mum, it’s been really nice becoming friends, as Saturn returned to us both around the same time. It's been nice to grow together and to lift each other up, like a child.