A person tells me that they love me the way they loved their mother. Their mother didn’t like it, but put up with it. I don’t have to put up with it. This person is just superimposing on me what they brought to the table with their mother.
How often are you projecting, or being projected onto? I am not loving you based on your ideas. Thank God. Have you examined your ideas? Have you ever asked yourself some basic questions about your relationship with your mother?
Did you respect your mother?
Did you believe your mother?
Did you obey your mother?
Did you value and cherish your mother?
Did you compete with your mother?
Did you win with your mother?
Did you love or power your mother?
Did you model yourself after your mother?
What did you bring to the table around your mother? How was it received? Did it get you the love you wanted?
So much of Mother’s Day is really about the child, not the mother. The mother we each had was a person, and an idea we projected on them, and an ideal/abstraction we also projected on them, and who they really were. We tend to conflate person, ideal, and projection, without ever seeing who our mother really is. As children, we loved our mother as best we knew. The question is always who it is that we loved. As adults, will we cling to our idealizing and the resulting deep disappointment, or can we see our mothers as our first teachers, who were unique for each of us?
As teachers they brought the lessons we were to learn from life. They presented these lessons in so many ways, and yet, true to where we were, most of us did not understand them. We misread and therefore took in or rebelled against the lesson, and so ended up in the center of a play where the scenes changed, the characters changed, and the lines and outcome remained the same. We were the stars of a boring drama.
Our mothers wanted us to be happy; the question is what that meant and what it now means.
So again:
Did you learn from your mother?
Was your mother happy?
Did she love?
Did she pleasure?
Did she power?
Did you imbibe the lessons she presented and become the spitting image?
Did you rebel and therefore ironically become the spitting image?
How much did you really look at what you brought to the table, or were you so lost in your mother that all you cared about was what she brought to the table?
What did she bring to the table?
What did you call what she brought to the table?
What did you call what you brought to the table?
Are we now ready to learn our lessons and free our mothers from the box we put them in? What a great Mother’s Day it would be to free both our mothers and ourselves from the rigid misunderstanding of the words “mother” and “child”.
To honor our mother means for us to grow up into who we each were meant to be, truly ourselves, and to manifest so we are true reflections of God. Isn’t that really what God wants for us? Isn’t that really why God gave us each the mother we needed to fulfill our true destiny? We can either remain small and trapped in our boring drama, or we can give up our smallness and play in the most magnificent theatre.
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