This Mother's Day, remember that without mom, you wouldn't be here! Maybe we need to remember her everyday.

::::::::

The Power of Story: Mother's Day

We Should Celebrate Mother's Day Every Day.

Mothers!

Is there a more complex figure in life and within our psyches then that of our mother? We come from her and yet we are pushed to distance ourselves from her to achieve our individuality. Sometimes it feels like a duty to love her; sometimes we look at what she's doing and our hearts swell with love. She wants our respect and often doesn't get it, perhaps because she can't control her need to help shape us up. If we're lucky, she shares the wisdom she's gleaned from living her life. Often we don't listen.

Moms carry the load of everyday, physical life, often without thanks or acknowledgment. Moms carry the load of psychological wounding - did she know how to handle our emotional life, especially if she didn't know how to handle her own? Really, do you know anyone here in the US (especially in the older generations) who doesn't have a negative mother complex? Mothers are the source of joy, of love, of pain, of embarrassment, of anger, of life and death. Mothers slay us and heal us. Mothers support us and destroy us. Mothers feed us and deny us nourishment. Mothers comfort us when we're upset or upset us when we just want calm.

Patriarchy celebrates mothers as pure and beloved but gives us little real respect. Just as our masculine, left brain rational culture makes use of the feminine, right brain imagination but doesn't respect it for its true purpose - to connect us to our souls - it also doesn't acknowledge and value our mother-wisdom in its decision-making. Without respect for our power to create life, patriarchy forces women to become mothers, whether they want to or not. Are women mothers or breeders? From what's happening in the US at the moment, breeding seems to be taking precedence over real motherhood, since a growing body (soulless yet) gets more protection than a living mother.

How can a woman be the image of God, seeing she

is subject to man and has no authority,

neither to teach, nor to bear witness, nor to judge,

much less to rule or bear empire!

St. Augustine (354-430)

Patriarchy's disregard for women and our point of view has turned mothers into evil witches. What is repressed comes back to haunt us. Just look at all the fairy tales with evil step-mothers and fairies. By not honoring the life-giving gift of motherhood, patriarchy has turned mothers into witches and the world into a death culture. It's killing the Earth, our Mother. It dishonors the women who might become mothers. And most immediately, patriarchy's power-hungry minions are killing the mothers and children in Gaza and Ukraine, the Congo and Afghanistan.

Patriarchy doesn't honor motherhood. Mothers and our children are not valued and respected for themselves in our patriarchal culture. Somehow, children became the 'property' of fathers. Welfare moms get demonized and homeless children go hungry while we throw money at wealthy corporations.

As a mother and grandmother, the hypocrisy of 'celebrating' Mother's Day, especially in its American version of sending a card or flowers and going to a dinner once a year, is blinding. Because everyday should be Mother's day. Everyday should be about creativity and birthing new people, new ideas, new values. Everyday should be about LIFE.

That's what ancient cultures felt about the Earth and felt about the mothers of the tribe. They accepted her life-giving attributes, so they could also accept her death-dealing traits too. We wail about our misfortunes, blaming each other or god, because we don't really honor mothers, Life and the Mother of All, Earth. If we did, we'd understand that life is both good and hard, that if we are spirits having an human experience, we are here to learn all the lessons of life and death. Those 'pro-lifers' don't believe that we have souls, or they wouldn't be so concerned with the body that is being built to house that baby's soul.

So let's re-enchant the notion of Mother. Let's give her back her power, her potency and really honor her capacity for kindness and love. Perhaps we have to return to a child-like state of heart, one where wonder and delight live.

Watching my 10 month old granddaughter light up with delight and joy whenever her mother enters the room brings back memories of motherhood and the happy joy that my babies brought to my life. And then I think about my own mother and I can't remember if I lit up for her in the way my granddaughter does for my daughter-in-law. The way my kids did for me.

I'm sure I must have, because she was a good mom in most ways and as I grew older, I realized she was a 'cool' mom. It never entered my mind to want a different mother as I was growing up. I just didn't want to do things the way she did, and so, that turned into my negative mother complex. When I learned astrology I understood how differently we approached motherhood - she had an Aquarius Moon (rules, judgments, ideals) and I have a Cancer Moon (nurturing, cuddling, loving). So my reaction to her instructions on raising my kids was to ignore her and find my own way.

I know many people's experience of their mothers was much harsher, while a few had mothers they learned from. But on the whole, Americans seem to have low self-worth and that starts with Mom, who had low self-esteem from our cultural bias. She was never good enough, so how could she raise children who felt good enough. That seems to be the test as we transition out of patriarchy into a partnership society, where the feminine values of life will be the basis for civilization rather than the death, guilt and shame our Christian culture has shaped.

To make this change in consciousness, we have to open up to the knowledge that if there is a male God, there is certainly a female Goddess who is our Mother. This Goddess will give us back our respect for women and mothers, and give us the deep love we each deserve.

Here is a dream of the Goddess as Mother, a dream that asks the dreamer to accept deep love and mothering from her inner Goddess. When she accepts this nurturing, she is restored.

I am an infant, lying alone in the grass. A great Being picks me up. She is huge and black skinned. She has a beautiful face and large soft breasts. She has the kindest smile I have ever seen. She holds me and sits down on the great stone steps of an alabaster temple. She nurses me with the milk of human kindness. I grow into a woman. We are dressed in the most beautiful garments. I have on a rose colored robe and she has on a ultramarine robe with small silver stars on it. It is the entire universe.

Remember. Without her, you wouldn't even be here.

Everyday should be Mother's Day. Let's make it so.

Happy Mother's Day to all the world' s Mothers. Bless you for all the love, time and energy that you give to your children and to the world.

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.

~ Alison Luterman ~

( The Largest Possible Life )

You can find this essay and others on The Power of Story at my substack:

(Article changed on May 10, 2024 at 5:36 PM EDT)

Authors Website: http://www.cathypagano.com

Authors Bio:

Cathy Pagano is a spiritual advisor and Jungian psychotherapist, storyteller, author and teacher.

She is the author of a book on the return of the Goddess, "Wisdom's Daughters: How Women Can Change the World".

Cathy trained at the C. G. Jung Institut-Zurich in dream interpretation, has an M.A. in Counseling Psychology in Feminine Spirituality, and is a certified Life Coach.

As an astrologer and storyteller, she weaves the Cosmic Stories written in the stars. From The Bard's Grove, she writes about emerging archetypal themes in movies and books.

Cathy works with the tools of the imagination - dreams, alchemy, myths, astrology, symbolic language, storytelling, ritual - to awaken the Soul's wisdom.



I believe that Americans are called to a higher consciousness at this point in our history. We are called on to live up to our ideals and create the country our forefathers imagined. Inner consciousness needs to be acted upon for social justice.



Cathy believes that our writers and artists must take up our responsibility to create art that inspires, teaches and heals our humanity.



Cathy writes about political, psychological/spiritual, and cultural issues.