Thoughts on Mother’s Day 2019

We have a child. We call them ours. We swaddle them in soft cotton blankets, wrapping them up like mummies we can preserve forever. They are ours, fully and completely. We have a lifetime.

For a while, the dream continues. They search our faces for the signs that they belong somewhere. They cry when we leave them, and press their fevered cheeks against us when they are sick, falling asleep in the safety of our presence.

They yell to us from atop the slide to watch them. Watch them. They make us jewelry.

They draw us the house they will buy us when they are famous. They laugh at our jokes and tell us about their field trip. They buy us jewelry.

They are a nervous smile behind the wheel, a navy linen suit for graduation, an angel’s voice singing in an upstairs bedroom.

We call them ours, but they never really are. They are the fleeting ghosts of love, whispers on a moonlit shore, a memory we can’t keep hold of.

They are tiny deposits of DNA left in our brains, long after the feel of their hand on our palm has faded. They are the longing for grace that sits in our heart, the call of a whip-poor-will, a perfect sunset over a living mountain. They are everything that can never be ours, every glimpse of a lost Bird of Paradise.