Reflections on Mother's Day Plus an Alice Walker Poem

Selfie on November 2013 Excursion

Sometime in my daughter's growing up, I read Khalil Gibran's chapter on parenting in which he says that our children are not our children. They do not belong to us.  Our task is to love and raise them up, and then to let them go.  We are not to hold onto them as if they were possessions to keep and admire, or servants to take care of our needs for affirmation and love, or mirrors of our vanity.  As the single mother of one child, this was incredibly important advice for me to heed.  I did my best.  I can say that my daughter is self supporting, self-actualizing, loving adult who is on her own exciting wonderful journey.

I feel very blessed on this Mother's Day.  Here's a poem I found in the section called "Forgiveness" in Alice Walker's 1991 collection Her Blue Body Everything We Know

Hilary at one month old.

EVEN AS I HOLD YOU

By Alice Walker

Even as I hold you

I think of you as someone gone

far, far away. Your eyes the color

of pennies in a bowl of dark honey

bringing sweet light to someone else

your black hair slipping through my fingers

is the flash of your head going

around a corner

your smile, breaking before me,

the flippant last turn

of a revolving door,

emptying you out, changed.

away from me.

Even as I hold you

I am letting go.