*The Great Mommy Blogger Love-In CardPost will go up tomorrow – a day after Mothers Day, but there’s just been so much love circulatin’ through our ‘hood that it’s taking me longer than expected to pull it all together (I may, in fact, have material for two – TWO – CardPosts. The head, she spins). That, and today was a bit chocolately ’round these parts and my fingers got sticky. So keep sending links to your odes to mommy bloggers, if you haven’t done so already, and if you’re so inspired; I’ll add whatever I receive right up until the last minute. And if I keep receiving them, I’ll just keep on posting them. Sticky chocolate fingers or not.

But for now, for today, a word to my mother:

Dear Mom,

I’ve told you many, many times over the years, and in many different ways, how much I love you. How you have always been a light and an inspiration; how proud I am and have always been that you – beautiful, whimsical, powerful you – are my mother.

But I did not – could not – fully appreciate the force of you as a woman until I became a mother myself. Until I began living, moment to moment, the heartlifting and heartaching work of loving and nurturing my own daughter, I had only the faintest experience and faintest understanding of what it meant to be fully powerful as a woman. And so I could only perceive the brilliance of you as through a glass, darkly. You were always just Mom. A good lady, a funny lady, that-lady-my-mother. The soft voice in the darkness, the warm skin in an embrace, the furrowed brow, the knowing glance, the generous smile. But still, just Mom. Loved dearly, but taken for granted. Taken as seen. Just mom; just a mom.

Now that I know the weight that is a mother’s love for her children, now that I know how beautifully heavy that weight, now that I know how hard the work that that love demands, I see you more clearly. My mother, my mommy, my mom: the very source of my life, the very source of me. The heart that carried my heart, the heavy weight of my heart, through childhood, girlhood, womanhood, life.

I see you now. Thank you.

With so much love,

Your Bad Daughter, Her Bad Mother

Bad Daughter: The Next Generation