5/14: Mother’s Day

 

It’s Mother’s Day and I am sitting on a bus bound for New York City. I wish to write something profound or poetic about motherlessness, or grief or something, but nothing really is coming to mind. I doze off as I stare out the window, pen still in hand. A blonde man two rows back speaks loudly and incessantly in some European tongue I can neither understand nor recognize.

 

Settling my meandering mind on the concept of sonder, I try to tune out that mildly obnoxious fellow. Sonder is a sense of profound wonder at the realization that each person I see, each driver that passes our lumbering bus, each passenger on said bus, has her ( or his or their I suppose) own life, experiences, worries, pleasures, joys and sorrows; with this thought, I try to be less bothered by that chatty gentleman. But I digress back to sonder. Do they all have mothers they reached out to today? Are they themselves mothers? Or does that term conjure up painful images of death and cancer, a dear one gone too soon? Or harried recollections of a mother who tried her best to love them well but whose best was ultimately not enough? Where do I fit into all of this?

I felt like there was something I was supposed to do today. It felt like something was missing. Which I suppose that something, or rather someone, is. She’s buried in the cemetery I visited yesterday, parts of her were scattered in the waves off Carlsbad, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and mingled with the snowy expanse of the Colorado Rockies. And here I am, inching my way towards New York City, Paris, el Camino de Santiago. El camino, where sore muscles and (hopefully negligible) blisters will be my daily reckoning. 

I forgot to mention that a photo popped up in my iPhone memories from Mother’s Day, another may 14th, exactly 11 years ago. We all looked too cute and innocent, little suspecting what trials and tribulations would be thrown our way in a decade or so.