I am not a mother, neither is Maria, but we talk often about our mother’s, they are never too far from our conscious selves.

My mother died  a long time ago, and I did not see her in the years before she died. I am sorry about that, but I simply couldn’t. I don’t believe I could have survived it, although I wish I had said goodbye to her.

I kept my mother away from my life and my family’s life, I felt I owed them that. I loved my mother, and feared her,  she loved me, and that is about as far as I have gotten in thinking about her and in my memories of her.

She was an intelligent, creative, angry and fiercely independent person, she had great love and much rage in her, in roughly equal proportion. She was a powerful force, but she always believed in me, and fiercely.

She was the first person in the world to tell me I was a writer, I told great stories, and that shaped my creative life. She was also restless and unhappy in a terrible marriage.

Mother’s Day is not a happy day for me, but a day of reflection and understanding. And reconciliation, I think.

She was born in the wrong time, men seemed to undermine her life at every turn, especially her husband, and she could never quite carve out the life she wanted and fought for and deserved.  There was just no support or encouragement for that then, and it made her bitter, sometimes hateful.

Today, there is no point re-hashing the painful parts of her, I am past that, deeply into my own life and fully responsible for it. On this day, I think of all the mothers in the world, how hard they work, how much they love, how difficult their task is to be a mother and also live in our complex world.

I think of my mother, and all of the mothers today, I hope it is a meaningful and loving day for you.