I am a proud logophile.
What say you is a logophile? According to Merriam Webster a logophile is a lover of words.
Words allow me to communicate my heart and soul’s, desires, pain, joy, and anger. They allow me to quiet my mind in the midst of an increasingly chaotic world. Once I wrangle my myriad of thoughts into words and release them out into the world, I can let go of the tension and chaos they’ve created.
What word am I ruminating about right now? As we quickly approach the annual celebration of Mother’s Day, I can’t help but contemplate what those words mean, to be a mother. Being a logophile I google “to be a mother” as a verb. According to Google, when the noun, mother, becomes a verb, or an action word, it means: to care about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own.
The problem with words is they need context, a point of reference, otherwise they’re just a collection of letters. Like Hellen Keller spelling the letters W-A-T-E-R into her teacher’s hand, she first needed to feel the water flowing from the well.
I am the mother of 3 grown children. What I’m not is a grandmother. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m definitely not putting pressure on my children to become parents. But what I realized is once you become a mother, celebrating that life changing event with your children is exasperatingly impossible.
As my children prepare to “celebrate me” this weekend, I recognize that they are completely unaware of what that word actually means. Where does the tension lie in that knowledge? As a logophile I want to put into words, what bringing them into the world meant to me. But without a point of reference, for once words fall short.
How do you communicate how a single event changed your world forever? Is it possible to explain the cellular, spiritual, shift that occurred? My children understand the word “love”. They love pizza, they love me, their partners, their friends, and they fiercely love their pets. But without having experienced childbirth, they can’t understand the seismic shift that the word “love” undergoes when you bring another human being into this world.
The most intimate relationship I will ever have is with my children. Before I even felt the “butterflies” in my womb giving concrete proof of their presence I would tenderly rub my belly. Before they even entered the world I shared my love of words with them, quietly and conspiratorially sharing my fears, my dreams, and my hopes with them. How do you explain to them that it’s possible to fiercely love someone you’ve never actually met? How do you communicate the gravitas you feel upon bringing another human being into the world, one whom for 9 months your body singularly nurtured and protected, but from that moment forward you must share with the world.
The simple fact is… you can’t.
My mother died five years ago. Like many mothers and daughters, we had a complicated relationship. Once, as she feared our relationship was terminally fractured, she asked me why I didn’t love her anymore. The truth is I will always love her. This year it’s hit home that the only person on this earth who rubbed her belly when I was just a possibility, who shared her deepest desires with me late at night when her growing midriff made it impossible to sleep, and who cared about my welfare as much as her own is no longer with me on this journey.
To my children, as we celebrate “me”, I’ll be honoring how you gave birth to my understanding the true meaning of the word “mother”.
To all those mothers out there who understand what it means to be a mother, Happy Mother’s Day.
To all those daughters who’ve become mother’s themselves but who’s mother’s no longer inhabit this world, I understand the enormity of that liminal space.
I include in this reflection all those mothers who came to experience the word mother through adoption. We may have come to the word through different paths but take on the life changing moniker all the same.
