Gratitude Practice 2020 Day 26: On Grief, Gratitude and Grace

Today marks four years without my mom. Four years of change and growth and difference. Lots of healing. Lots of growth. And even more gratitude. Today I am full of gratitude and perspective about the woman I call mom and the tiny person who knows me as her mama. For all that EmilyAnn and Sarah Kate are helping me understand and for all they are teaching me about life and love and motherhood. On the one-year anniversary of her death I wrote the following and it seems just a relevant and real today as it did then.

On Grief, Gratitude and Grace

Today is the one-year mark for my mom's passing and my mind has been racing through the master class of grief and gratitude and grace I've just completed 365 sleeps in a brave new world. Burying your parents, no matter your age is an unavoidable task on the bucket list of life and it changes a person forever. Saying goodbye to the grown up's in your life is a harrowing and clarifying and a stretching journey that most of us experience at some point and yet we are never really prepared...you can't really prepare for it. Arranging funerals plans. Writing thank you notes and hoping you did not forget anyone. Shifting through document after document after document. Sorting through clothes and shoes and purses and jewelry. Dividing up books and art and furniture. Unearthing photos and a lifetime of letters and notes and memories many of them scratched on scraps of paper and always written in pencil and always in her signature cursive. Finding multiple post-it's with quotes and To Do lists and the instructions for how to cut, copy and paste tucked in pockets, saved in books and stuck all over her home. So heavy. So many hours and days sorting through a lifetime of treasures and emotions and feelings and expectations and roles and responsibilities and even more memories and in time an empty house ready to be gifted to a new family. A rush. A puddle. A heavy heart wrenching hustle. A new world. All in the course of a year and all requiring a delicate balancing act of both grief and gratitude...some moments full of grace some moments naturally with less but grief and gratitude a constant undercurrent throughout.

For the last year my heart and head have been focused on my mother and my daughter and all that it means to be both...a mother and a daughter. This divine partnership is not something I fully understand but started to become more clear when my baby girl was placed in my arms and then eight months later when we laid my mom to rest. What an incredible eight month stretch When you agree to a Go Big or Go Home kind of life things can sometime happen with dramatic timing and the events of the last two years have confirmed if anything a sincere sense of divine timing and preparation. Grief has pierced my heart over and over and over again and gratitude has sewn it back together time and time and time again....and after an unwanted year of hard core emotional work all I can say is...It's complicated this business of mothering....it's equal parts messy and magic....it's divinely inspired...it's the hardest and the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced and and my connection to EmilyAnn P. Robinson and her imprint on me has everything to do with how I show up for my baby girl and how I'm learning to love myself...flaws and all! These two women...and this divine intersection of femininity...it's teaching me more than I could have ever imagined and I could not be more challenged or more grateful and oh, how I hope for grace...grace in the coming the going...grace in the happy and the sad...grace with the easy and the hard. Grief. Gratitude. Grace. Over and over and over again.

Last night, as I rocked my wiggly baby girl to sleep she asked me to "Sing Mama?" and so like every night, I held her tight and started our normal collection of lullabies...the very songs I remember my mother singing to me. With a million melancholy memories floating through my head, I started to sing what is so ingrained and familiar to me and now to her as it was in my mother...but last night I did not get very far and it did not take too long before my eyes welled up and my throat closed off and I was a puddle of emotion. And then when I could not sing a note my sweet baby girl finished the song with happy little babbles that resemble the sounds of words and through grace...born of gratitude and sprouted from grief...she carried this loving melody right into my heart helping once again to heal up the broken parts and refocus my love and attention towards our very very bright future. Being her mother...and being her daughter...and simply being the me in-between both of them...this dynamic connection of love and loss are stretching me to become the woman God intends me to be... and it's requiring equal parts grief and gratitude and grace and time and time and more time but it this divine healing and refining work of mothering...it's working...I believe it's working on all three of us...and that is all that matters in the end.