I found this poem as I search for inspiration…

Dear Mom,

I found this poem of yours, written in the Spring of your life, hidden amongst a myriad of poems about Summer and love. I sat at my messy dining room table, your infant grandson asleep on the living room floor, still in my pajamas at 2:30 p.m., searching for myself.

I found this poem as I searched for inspiration, at the exact moment I needed to be reassured that I wasn’t alone in my weirdness. You gave birth to me in the Summer of your life; a time of fertility and love, dreams and hopes, family and creation. You sacrificed your Maiden years to become a Mother, strong and struggling, challenged and ready. I played on your beach, and I danced in your sun. I marveled at your Summer storms and found comfort under your beautiful stars. All those years, I ate the fruit from your trees; I took all that I could until there was no more to take.

I weathered the rain and growing pains of my own Spring. I went out and danced to the beat of so many other’s songs in a fight to be unlike you; in a fit of fury, in a rage of rebelliousness. I set out to become myself, a separate entity, in a hurry and recklessly tripping over my own feet; a constant prisoner to my own thoughts. All the while, you were there, watching from afar.

When I cried uncontrollably in the dark, you held fast, gently caring for the late bloomer you knew I would become.

In the forest of life, one fateful eve of a star-filled moment, the branches of my womanhood emerged from the ground with a silent might. All at once I could see that the Spring of my life was almost over; the nights were growing ever more heated and heavy. I was alive within myself. I looked up and finally saw you as you truly are, the most beautiful creature to which all life has given birth. My mother, the most graceful and poignant tree of a woman, the stuff of which stars are made.

I saw that you stood alone, in your own pasture, under a blanket of your own light, absolutely magnificent.

Now the seeds of my Spring have begun to blossom, I enter into the Summer of my own cycle. I am learning from you how to stand strong within my own heart, how to hear the beat of my own drum and how  to follow the stars that only I can see. It is amazing to me, now a Maiden turned Mother, how much our young can take and how strong I must be; how I must bare fruit for them to eat and give of myself everything I am and have.

I marvel at you as you stand so gracefully in the Fall of your life, your leaves blazing magnificent reds and purples; you still have saved the best of yourself for me.