Between chattering and playing with a two-year-old and helping my daughter and son-in-love as they adjust to life with a newborn, I enter into a moment of quiet.

My grandson has gone off with his dad for an adventure. Ivy, my granddaughter, is sleeping skin-to-skin on her mother’s chest as her mother tries to rest too.

“The midwife says you should try to get a minimum of an hour a day of skin-to-skin contact with a newborn,” my daughter tells me.

I smile and breathe into the wisdom of midwifery and skin-to-skin contact.

My granddaughter Ivy was born on Friday, June 26th. On Sunday, I drove the 1,000 kilometres to the coast to be with my daughter and her family for a couple of weeks. In these days of Covid, flying feels too risky.

I feel so incredibly blessed. So grateful to be here. To be with them as they navigate this new territory. As my daughter exclaimed on Monday afternoon, looking at her husband and son who surrounded her and the infant Ivy on their bed, “We’ve got two children! We’re a family of four!”

I smiled at both the surprise in her voice and the delight.

Along with fidelity and faithfulness, Ivy means, “God’s Gift.”

Ivy is a gift. Ivy, my granddaughter, is named after my grandmother. My two aunts, one in her late 80s the other in her early 90s are both ‘over the moon’ with gratitude and delight.

Auntie Eveline phones early in the morning from France to express her pleasure. Aunti Maggie phones from Pondicherry, India where she lives. It is the same city where she and my mother and their 8 siblings were born and raised.

“Thank you so much for bringing our mother back to us,” Auntie Maggie says. “Thank you for giving her our mother’s name.”

“We didn’t choose the name,” Alexis, my eldest daughter says. “Ivy did. Before she was born.”

Alexis was very connected to my mother and her Euro-Asian lineage. She always asked her for stories of her past. To share with her tales of long ago days in Pondicherry, a place my mother called her ‘Shangri-la.”

It is as if those stories are imprinted within the DNA of this tiny infant. As if, India, the land of sacred cows wandering crooked streets and incense wafting in smoky tendrils into the sky and monks chanting and moonlight shimmering over the Ganges and waves of the Indian Ocean crashing into the shores of Pondicherry, has come alive with her birth.

I am, like my aunts, over the moon. Delighted. Ecstatic.

And my grandson comes in, looks deeply into my eyes, turns and looks into his mother’s and looks back at me. “You have mama’s eyes,” he says and my heart flutters as gracefully as a butterfly drifting on a warm ocean breeze redolent of frangipani and sandalwood and the smell of spicy curry wafting up from a street vendor’s stall.

I breathe and say a prayer of gratitude for this moment. For these days of holding a tiny infant in my arms and feeling the threads of history weaving their magic through time and space.

I give thanks for the laughter of a two-year-old who delights in YiaYa’s French Toast (said with an over-indulgent French accent) and who insists the meat on his plate is not le poulet as YiaYa tries to tell him. It is chicken. And who then smiles so beguilingly my heart flutters again and I am lifted off on a flight of fancy, spinning tales of race cars spinning their tires and pandas who like to spin tales like the Walrus of Lewis Carroll‘s lore and talk of many things…

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
      Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot — and whether pigs have wings.

I breathe and give thanks for the strong, resilient women who are my ancestors, the story-tellers and story-makers and story-keepers of this web of love that is our family circle. Flung wide across this globe, we are connected in a circle spun as tight as ivy weaving a lush green blanket of leaves along the path of history meandering its way through time, leading me to this moment where I sit and hold my infant granddaughter and am surrounded by love.

These are the days my friends. These are the days.

Namaste.

Becoming a mother to another human being is a leap of faith. It matters not if you came to motherhood through your own womb, a surrogates or donors. It matters not if you chose motherhood or it chose you. Of if you held onto your infant or gave them as a gift to another.

It matters not how you came to it. Becoming a mother is a leap of faith. Sometimes blind. Sometimes, joyful. Hesitant. Resentful. Scared. Motherhood and faith walk hand in hand.

Faith, love will be enough to sustain you in the moments of sheer exhaustion, an exhaustion you truly have no idea will descend upon you once your infant emerges and is nestled at your breast or in your arms or the arms of a partner. And when that exhaustion hits, as it inevitably will, again and again, trusting faith will carry you through your tiredness, your fears you have made a huge mistake, your doubts that you are worthy of becoming a mother to this precious, defenceless human being.

Becoming a mother is about trust. Trusting your instincts. Trusting you are doing okay, even in those moments when you feel like you’ve made the most disastrous decision of your life because you truly do not have what it takes to sustain the life of another human being. It’s about trusting in Love. That it truly is enough. That no matter what state you’re in or how you turn up, love will carry you through the dark and cloudy moments of your fear, you are not enough to be a mother.

Becoming a mother is about commitment. To another human being. To life. To yourself. It’s about giving of yourself in ways you never before imagined before this being came screaming and kicking into your life, or you into theirs. It’s about being committed to not crawl back under the covers and hide out while your child screams because you have tried everything to soothe them and nothing you do seems to work. It will demand, again and again, that you put another first, always. And it will insist, every single moment of every single day, that you risk getting your heart broken, again and again.  

Because becoming a mother is about choosing Love. Always. Forever. Wholeheartedly, even when you don’t believe you can or want to. It’s about doing the loving thing for another human being, even when really all you want to do is eat a tub of ice cream and watch junk TV hour after hour. It’s about cleaning up messes you didn’t make with a loving heart and always turning up, even when you look your worst because this tiny, precious, miraculous human needs you to turn up, exactly the way you are. It means having the courage to hold on when all you want to do is let go, and to let go when all you can think of is to hold on tightly. And it requires you to forgive yourself, again and again, in those moments or days or weeks or months when you don’t turn up or simply can’t.

Because no matter how you got to this state or how you turn up, or when, becoming a mother changes you. It will stretch you. Defy you. Frustrate you. Scare you and even when you don’t want it to, it will define you. It will make you believe in miracles. See beauty in everything. From dirty diapers and spit ups on the floor you just washed to first smiles and reading the same storybook for the 1000^th time.

And it will make you believe in love. Eternal. Lasting. Penetrating. Heartbreaking. Love.

Love that doesn’t ask, ‘what’s in it for me?’ but demands instead that you give it your all, whatever that all may be. Because motherhood doesn’t come with any guarantees of being loved in return or not feeling rejected, or accepted. It only comes with the promise, you will be changed, forever and always, by Love.

In year’s past, I would join my sister at the lodge where my mother lived to celebrate Mother’s Day.

I’d take flowers, Jackie would probably have made mom some of her favourite food to share for lunch. Before mom could no longer climb in and out of the car, we would often have met at a restaurant, la grande famille including my daughter who lives in Calgary, to celebrate together.

This year is different. Hugs are virtual. Contact is distant. Restaurants are still closed. And, mom is no longer in this world.

Different doesn’t mean ‘bad’. It just means ‘not the same as before’.

Different also means, we have choice.

To squawk and balk at the presence of something new/unusual/different. To carry loss and sorrow like a burden or to let it flow like a river of Love healing the wounded, broken places.

I can not change the fact that life always finds itself ending in death. Like the snow falling outside my window as I type on this May morning, I cannot change it.

I can accept its presence with curiosity, an open mind and heart, seeking the beauty in what is appearing, finding value in the different so that I can live with grace in its presence in my life.

My mother took her last breath on February 25th. Our world changed that day.

It is a different world without her in it. I consciously stay away from judging it. It is what it is. Not good. Not bad. Different. Present.

Her leaving has created this space where today we get to experience our first Mother’s Day without her physical presence. She is always here. Always part of my DNA. Part of my memory. Part of my life.

It is a time for reflection. For gratitude. For grace.

And for remembering.

I am the woman, and the mother, I am today because of my mother.

I am the woman, and the mother, and grandmother, I am today because of my daughters.

I am forever grateful. Forever in Love.

Namaste.

Happy Mother’s Day to all.