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Mother Love
Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to grow up to be a ‘Mother’. Dreams of marriage to my ‘knight in shining armour’ always included having children. I would have been devastated if I was not able to conceive a child. When I finally did marry and became a mother, I felt I had fulfilled the natural role of being a woman.
The maternal love I felt for my first born, a daughter, was overwhelming. I felt as if my heart would burst with love for this precious little infant I had carried in my womb for nine months and whom I had given birth to as my child. All the maternal chores involved with looking after a new- born infant were more than worthwhile.
I had the same feeling of overwhelming love for my son, who arrived two years later. When my son was a couple of weeks old he developed a feeding problem and was losing weight rapidly, and the doctors thought he might require an operation. The thought of this little infant, my son, having an operation was unbearable. I remember refusing to leave my baby in the hospital and insisted on staying with him even if it meant sleeping on the floor beside him. The authorities finally gave me a room and allowed me to remain with my baby and to continue breast- feeding him in hospital. This feeling of maternal love was stronger than any other love I had ever experienced. Then surprisingly, my son made a remarkable recovery and did not need an operation after all.
This unconditional feeling of maternal love has continued with me over the years as the children grew up and has never left me. Unconditional love in other relationships has not been so easy and yet with one’s child it is so spontaneous and natural. There have been many, many times over the years when the worry and frustration over the children’s actions have made me more than furious. Yet there is absolutely nothing in this world that my children can do that could make me stop loving them. The purity of a mother’s love is incomparable and divine in nature. Other relationships appear to come and go, yet the love and bond with one’s children is there, it seems forever.
Both my children went to boarding school at an early age and so I had to learn to let go of them and get on with my life till their school holidays. Over the years as my children matured, they returned home, sometimes to stay for awhile and then flew from the nest, periodically to spread their wings. I really believed I had let go of my children and I suppose on one level I had let go. However, I was soon to discover that there were deeper levels of letting go that still had to be released.
My daughter returned home a couple of years ago to work in Reading. My son and his girlfriend also returned home so that they could save money to buy their own home. It was wonderful having my ‘brood’ around me and when my son and his girlfriend married and moved only a mile away, it was comforting to know that I could still see them whenever I wished, especially when my first grandchild arrived a year ago.
I welcomed the opportunity to baby sit and bond with my grandchild, when my daughter in law returned to work. All the old familiar maternal feelings came to the surface and once again overwhelmed me. It was such a joy to watch this perfect manifestation of the divine develop and grow.
Recently however, every thing has changed. The divine plan unfolded and circumstances necessitated my daughter moving out and simultaneously my daughter in law had to give up work, and my baby- sitting duties were no longer required. I had, without realising it, become attached to my role as ‘Mother’ and ‘Grandmother’ and suddenly I felt redundant of both roles. I had looked after my grandchild, two or three days a weeks for nine months and had become naturally very attached to her. Spiritually I had been working for some years on feelings of attachment in my life, knowing that love and attachment are two different aspects of love. When life’s changes suddenly cut the umbilical cord from me and my family, I experienced a feeling of great loss. I knew that all of life’s experiences are opportunities to grow and yet this was a tough one. I began to realise that I had become very attached to my family, especially to my grandchild. I have often said the divine plan is perfect in every detail and I could see the perfection of the changes in my circumstances, painful though they were, as an opportunity to flex my spiritual muscles.
Once I observed my response to these changes from a detached witnessing of them I could see how I had inadvertently slipped into feelings of attachment that were the cause of this feeling of great loss. I began to experientially understand the difference between love and attachment. The process of understanding and healing continued and I learned to let go of my attachment on an even deeper level. My feelings of mother love were still there as strong as ever, nothing could change them and yet my recent experience had made me let go of attachment and fear of loss, reminding me that I could not lose what I could never possess. Love is never a problem. Attachment to love is the cause of pain. Attachment to love is because of insecurity and a fear of possible loss. We get confused with the ‘forms’ of those we love, imagining that if they were not present we could lose love. We can never lose love – WE ARE LOVE. Love is the spark that gives us life. Without love we wither and die inside. All our feelings of love for others are evoked only because they reflect the love that we are in essence.
There is always a purpose in every detail of life, even if we cannot see it with our limited vision at the time. It appears my nine months spiritual gestation period had ended and my maternal ‘role’ and physical involvement with my immediate family had come to a natural conclusion. My family were now following their own destiny and I was free to continue with what was my own spiritual destiny. Within ‘hours’ of these changes, synchronistically, various opportunities began to present themselves to me, to attend conferences and meetings in London, which I could never have been able to do before, because of my previous family commitments. I began once again to practise the piano and was requested to play in a hospice and at other meetings. I was now also free to continue with my writing and other spiritual interests.
Letting go of my attachment to my ‘Role’ as Mother was the most difficult part. We often identify with our roles. Over the years I have let go of identifying with different roles ‘roles’ as wife, businesswoman, etc. This has been a year of letting go of my role even as a ‘healer’ knowing that all healing is ultimately ‘self-healing’. I am still used as a catalyst to remind others that they can heal themselves. It is just my ‘role’ as healer that I have let go. I have also endeavoured not to get attached to my ‘role’ as a multi-faith minister. Eventually one realises that all these labels are only ‘roles’ in the play of life that sometimes we believe are real and we then fall into the trap of identifying with these roles.
Any pain and feeling of loss that I felt when the umbilical cord of attachment was cut from me and my immediate family unit was because I had identified with my ‘role as Mother and Grandmother. Sure I was still my children’s mother and the grandmother of my grandchild and the love I feel for them is still overwhelming and unconditional. IT is only the attachment that I have endeavoured to let go of. I have also realised that I feel the same maternal love for many other people. I remember once, some year ago, someone said to my daughter that she must be very proud that I was her mother. She wisely replied then, that I was everyone’s mother. And she was right. I had for awhile just forgotten that ‘Mother Love’ was not contained just within the immediate family unity. Mother love was about being a woman with natural maternal feelings of nurturing and love for all.
As mothers we often do not want our children to suffer and only want them to be happy. How can we deny them the right to suffer from the vicissitudes of life, the God Consciousness in them knows exactly what path they should take to learn whatever they need to learn. Our problems are only because we try to decide what we want for them or what we feel is for their good. This is where we need to let go, especially when the children have grown up and become adults and allow them if necessary to fall and pick themselves up, dust themselves off and continue on their journey.
Ultimately we are not son, daughter or mother, father, we are manifestations of divine consciousness and like the waves on an ocean not different from each other. The rest is just ‘roles’ we play in life and we must play them well, never forgetting however that it is only a ‘role’ and not ‘who’ or ‘what’ we are in essence. And yet, we can learn a lot from our ‘role’ as Mother. We can learn to express the same unconditional love we have for our children to all humanity.
MARIA JORY
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