Mothering Sunday

 

It's been almost two years since I last wrote a blog post. Why has so much time gone by without creative writing in my life? What resemblance do our lives bear today to our lives two years ago?

I started to write a blog post one year ago, in March 2020, but didn't publish it. Here's what I wrote then:

"The world I am in today is barely recognizable. It's Mother's Day in England and the Prime Minister is urging people not to visit their mothers. Cornwall's Member of Parliament is saying "Please don't come to Cornwall." Pubs and restaurants are closed. Schools are closed. Airports are deserted and most countries have closed their borders to all but essential travel. If my children and I wanted to see each other on Mother's Day, we could not. They are in California and I am in England. I do not know when I will be able to see them again, other than online. Oh yes, and there's a virus that respects no boundaries abroad in the world."

Today is Friday, on Sunday it's Mother's Day again in England. A whole year has gone by since I wrote the paragraph above. A year later and again we are in lockdown, again many of us are not to see our mothers on Mother's Day.

This isn't really about Mother's Day and yet, perhaps it is. The old name in England was Mothering Sunday. I think that's a better name as while not all of us are biological mothers, we have all mothered someone or something, and been mothered too.

In the past two years my life has transformed. I could not have predicted what my life looks like now. I bet that's true of quite a large proportion of the population of the world. How has your life changed since March 2019?

What has happened in those two years?

The spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burnt down in April 2019. I watched this apocalyptic event live on t.v. in the comfort of my mother's sitting room. At the time it seemed like a portent.  January 2018 was the last time I had felt this warning bell go off. A sign that, like Greta Thunberg's School Strikes, shouted at me about the unsustainable nature of our lives. The mudslides in Montecito destroyed homes, swept people and possessions away and closed the main North South artery between Ventura and Santa Barbara for a month. Montecito is where Harry and Meagan now call home. Do they know the history?

What else has changed in the past two years?

I've moved again. Twice.

First I moved to England, after my mother died in July 2019. Then I moved out of my mother's house when we sold it in December 2020.

I've changed jobs. A bit like a wedding, it's been a case of something old and something new.

I resigned from my teaching position in Norrköping in May 2019 to return to California, defend my doctoral dissertation and graduate with a PhD in somatic depth psychology. In those days the dissertation had to be defended live. It could not be done on Zoom.

I got to spend time in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Oakland with my three wonderful children before returning to England in July 2019, just before mum died, aged 86.

The funeral was beautiful. It was the best I could have imagined. To be surrounded by mum's family in Sweden, in the old whitewashed church and in the pink salon of the historic hotel where her brother's and her parents' funeral dinners had been held, provided the sacred rites and ceremony that we all crave to reassure us of the hidden meaning of our little lives.

Back in England in the autumn of 2020 I got a new job with the Society of Homeopaths, editing their journal and moderating their accreditation of homeopathic training. Then, like a boomerang you'd forgotten you threw, an old job came back. I was approached by my former employer, Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California, to teach their Mexican art history class, which I now do from England, on Zoom.

Sunday will be the second Mother's Day that I will spend without my own mother and without my children. But don't feel too sorry for me. 

I am grateful my mother had a long life and died in her own bed at home before this pandemic hit. She will never have to suffer the anguish of not being able to hug her children and grandchildren, or experience illness or hospitalization again. She will not have to witness the world becoming unrecognizable before her very eyes, or see freedoms she took fore granted her whole life being stripped away one after another. 

I am grateful that my children are well and living the lives they want to live in California. I'm grateful we can meet in our weekly Saturday night (for me, morning for them) family Zoom fests. I know I'm their mother and they are my children. Always were, always will be. They are adults now and we all have to be adults now and make some big decisions about our individual and collective lives over the coming weeks, months and years.

The time for thoughtless living is over for us humans. It's high time to face the questions that have been trying to force themselves into our blinkered fields of vision for years. Questions of climate change and migration. Questions of food and housing. Questions of government control and individual freedom. Questions of culture and tradition. What is sustainable and what must be let go of? How must each of our lives change in order to ensure the survival of Gaia, our home, our mother?

Which organizations and structures can survive in the new Age of Aquarius? And which ones have outgrown their usefulness? Which ones do we hang onto out of a false sense of security and nostalgia? Which medicines will cure us, and which will kill us? Which medicines can we afford? Which ones are most cost effective - both in terms of financial cost and in terms of reported patient outcomes over a period of time?