She is distant to me, she is close to me. She is foreign yet familiar. She is an enigma, she holds the world in her hands, my world, and her world, the rules changed for us halfway through living in it.
In theory and in practice she loves me more than food and sleep and has gone without both for my sake. In theory and in practice she has uprooted homes, displaced paternity, and stared into the jaws of institutions for my sake.
I have always tried writing of her but have always fallen short. Even the theoretical cannot contain or touch her essence, her godness. To this day she hasn’t read much of what I’ve written. But she knows I write. She supports me yet she gives me privacy.
She carries the wind on her shoulders, to fly and to breathe (life) with. She steps on the clouds each day after opening her eyes. She carries a beauty, which she selflessly portioned out from her infinite supply--allowing some to make up myself and my sister. She contains light and lightning in her toes, in her eyes are multitudes of realities, understandings, visions, and choices.
In her breath is wisdom, vitality, grace, deity. Her lungs are power and flowering soundwaves. Her skin blankets all who encounter it, her hands are ready and willing to serve and be served.
Has anyone looked at her like this? Like a lover. It’s what she deserves.
For so long I’ve done my best to acknowledge her and to honor her as a mother. She has a few who honor her as a sister, a companion, a friend. Then there are those who honor her as a mentor, a teacher, a guiding light, a standard, a beacon. But I know that soon there will come someone to hold her the way that I long to be held.
I know then that we will walk out the process of being loved at the same time. We will have to learn surrender and trust together yet separately.
She has not been able to go before me in this way.
Step by step by step, we walk. The three of us: my mother, my sister, and me.
Who will receive us? Who will accept our womanhood in all three of its dynamic, billowing, undulating-like-waves-crashing stages?
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