Where Does It Hurt, Honey?
This is where I go when my heart aches for an Ultimate Mother caliber of kindness
As a child, I used to think God must’ve had a really bad day when She drafted my mother’s earth-itinerary.
At eighteen, Edita lost her adored father to suicide.
Her first husband? A wife beater.
Her son — my brother —eight years old— swallowed by a world gone mad with hatred.
Her mother, my grandmother Sofie — torn from her home and vanished in one of history’s many factories of forgetting.
Edita herself endured that underworld. Starvation, disease, the terror of being seen —or not seen—by the ones who held life and death in their hands.
And after the war, her second husband, my father, drowning in his own waves of post-war grief over the loss of his widowed mother and cherished younger sister, became a man whose pain too often spilled over as rage.
And still, in the aftermath of so much sorrow, Edita kept choosing life. Choosing love.
She loved us, my older sister Susan and me, with a kind of fierce, feral devotion. I know this. I’ve always known it as a bone-deep truth.
And I also know: tenderness was never easy for her. It wasn’t easy to offer, it wasn’t easy to hold. Tenderness would have made the little boy, her son, our brother Robert, too real. It would’ve made his absence unbearable.
In Hungarian, we called her Anyu. Mother.
The n in Anyu is soft, like a hush, like a hidden softness.
My mother’s softness was hidden, too.
And so, my own life became a long, ceaseless search for softness.
Until I grew a mother inside me.
I didn’t do it alone, and it wasn’t a sudden metamorphosis — it was a long, long gestation. But then, at some point, it morphed into the central theme of my life and work.
Now, She’s always there.
So, where do I go, when I need a where-does-it-hurt-honey kind of mothering? On days when I need to fully let go and be carried by a force I’ve come to call the Ultimate Mother? The days when no flesh-and-blood human can hold the weight of what aches inside me?
On such days, I drop into the deepest layers of the heart, knowing She waits there for me. No appointment needed.
I slow down. I listen.
Once I align my breath with Her breath, She points me — sometimes toward a human with arms and words and truths to soothe me.
Sometimes toward the right line in the right book.
Sometimes toward a cobblestoned street, one that seems to recognize my feet and greet me like an old friend.
Sometimes I lean against her arms in the Hands Of Kindness Imagery, let her scoop me up, trusting She’ll carry me safely to my next best destination.
Here’s the tiniest of poems I wrote for a friend once:
Love thyself,
no matter what the pain,
then mother yourself
the way your mother
couldn’t mother you,
since no one showed her how.
And you?
Where do you go when you need a “where does it hurt, honey?” kind of mothering?
Is it a person, a pet, a poem, a place?
Or maybe — just maybe — you’ve grown your own soft-voiced mama inside you too.
I’d love to know. Would you leave a comment and let me know? In the most recent Fertile Heart Visionary Circle, the theme of alone-ness rose up for several of us.
Let’s remind each other we’re never as alone as we might feel.
This is so beautiful, Julia. Thank you for this gentle, loving practice on a day that can bring a complex range of emotions.
What a beautiful, poignant and important essay to read on Mother's Day. I'm so lucky to have read it today.
The pictures of your mom and you and your mom and sister are just so precious and I see that fierceness of love you write about in your mother's arms and eyes.
Such a different story, but I am relating (which is what happens when we write and share to the public), I know my mother fought fiercely to be a mother too. And you know I did as well. And you helped me through your work become a mother and even named my child during a private consultation, but the naming was one of the most important parts of helping me meet my child halfway.
Your essay reminded me the thing I miss so much about my mother was her softness and tenderness. I had that.
You ask your readers to opine, Where does it hurt honey, it hurts in my heart, I miss that sweet softness and tenderness so much. That is the part I wish I could trust to rely on in myself and I recognize more than anything I don't think I can live without in my marriage. The thing I also realized is I can find that softness and trust in that everlasting tenderness through the ultimate mother within me. I can provide that kindness to myself. If only...I still struggle.
Just a beautiful, beautiful piece, starting with God as you write about the force, as a she.
The sentence ",,,the crime of being born." Catastrophic feeling, realization, described like that. No words.
Thank God your mother kept choosing life after everything and so much loss, and grief, and you pass on that message to everyone in your work, your words, your way, and you help people choose life if that's what they want and fight for it. You certainly helped me choose life when all I saw was grief everywhere, when my mother passed away, unexpectedly.
I printed this piece out and put it in my current / journal / notebook. I love when you write a piece -- always, always I learn, feel and like when I talk with you, see so many things differently.
You really open up eyes!
Your books, essays always open my eyes for sure.
Today on Mother's Day I will give myself a gift, the gift of the Kindness Imagery you shared..