From the Brain of Dr. Nicki: Celebrating Personal Mother…or Not!

Reading all the mother’s day salutations on FB can be daunting. Especially for those of us who had…uh….a different kind of mother. Maybe you can identify. If so, you, like me, have searched over and again for cards to genuinely reflect us.

Now mine’s dead. I don’t miss her. I mean it. I don’t. In fact, she turns out to be worth more to me dead than alive. Are you reeling yet?  Hating me? Imagining me certainly ignited in a fiery heretical blaze? Let me explain.

My mother and I all my life, even from moment of inception, traveled a challenging road together. Naturally in light of that she was my most important teacher. But best teachers are often, maybe even usually, not the easiest teachers we encounter. And for my most vivacious life learnings I’m one of those folks that need big rolling boulders to knock me over the head. Mother was just that kind of big rolling boulder. From beginning to end.

Then she died. Top of 2015 at the age of 93, she gave up her body. 

Thing is, right before that dying happened she and I shared the best, most authentic moment of our entire mother/daughter life. Pure and sweet and personality free. I never expected it. I never assumed it. I simply basked in its astonishing glow.

I won’t describe that moment much here now (stay tuned for my one-woman show about mother & me coming in the fall called: Becoming Human), but that’s when I experienced the entirety of the most Blessed parts of mother – mother at Soul and Core. This experience tilled my inner landscape for what was about to occur a month later.

Yes, it was a month later that she died. In that dying the very crux of mother’s matter flowed into me like a rushing, cool, infusion of perfectly clear, desperately thirsted for, water. And immediately, bursting out of the rich soil of my body, blossomed new never-before met life.

Don’t know if you get yet what I’m saying. I don’t miss my mother as she was in her potent, insistent, gnawing-at-life personality state because, after decades of dancing with the effects, after-taste and glass shards living in me called “my” mother, it was her dying that most clearly announced the truths she’d grown in me – both by how she was and by how she wasn’t. Now – hallelujah now -- I get to feel the transformations she’s left me with. In my body. In my Being. In my Love. 

So I mean it absolutely when I say I don’t miss my mother. I never, ever in my life picked up the phone to ask her advice. I never, ever in my life saw in or with her unselfish kindness, elegance or authentic love. But she was brave, and life-enthused, and enormous, and always hungry for more. I have been graced and gifted with the capacity to transform in me all of what she was, that I may be my finest Self in service to my community of travelers. 

Yes, I don’t need to miss my mother. She’s here. Inside. The best and brightest of her. Walking me through from now to then, from here to not here. And I am glad. Happy belated Mother’s day mom.