Without Issue

Pre-dawn Thoughts and a Poem on Mother’s Day

As of last night, I had no words to put in my usual Mother’s Day post.  When I went to bed I had decided that it was okay just to leave a silence, a holding space.  

And that was that.  But, as often happens for me, somewhere between 4am and 6am thoughts seem to take the forms of dreams and vice versa, then out of a tangle of words an idea coalesces, takes on a body and a mind of its own.  

So here I am writing this at the kitchen table just after dawn on Mothering Sunday, the sunlight moving round the walls of my home as if to remind me that everything changes, that everything – including grief – takes on new forms. What I have to offer is this poem that arrived in a rush and which I had to type into the dark on the Notes app on my phone.  It seems to encapsulate how I feel and I’m placing it here with no explanations or apologies, in the hope it might say something to you too.

My love to you all on Mothering Sunday.

I’ve become something

greater than the destiny
that was assumed for me –
the one that could have been.
The silent, sacred longing
of family imagined, desired,
became a life reframed,
untethered.  I inhabit
a different name – a title
I choose wholly for myself
and I speak it complete
with cadences of grief,
grace-notes of what-ifs,
quiet dawn-songs of joy,
with kindness, with gratitude
entirely without shame.

Deborah Sloan, March 14 2021