Mother God

A Lullaby for Grown Ups & An Ode to Maternal Love

When the day is long and you are tired and worn out
running 'round in circles, trying to find your way around
the whole world, the wild world 

Give me all your troubles, let me carry them with you
what good is it if you hold everything inside your heart?
your whole heart, your wild heart 

it's ok to cry, like water from the sky 
watering the things that grow in time 

when you were a child I would sing lullabies 
hold you in my arms and look into your deep green eyes 
my whole world, my wild world 

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

One of the most surprising parts of adulthood is that perpetual kind of hunger I feel for my Mom. Is it a need to be held, comforted, known? Yes. Is it a need to be taken care of, protected? Yes. It’s not often I feel this, but what has struck me is that the need still arises. It is a hunger for the flesh and blood woman I call Mother; it is a deeper kind of ache for someone…Other.

Friends are beautiful, no—crucial—to my nurturing. My husband is “a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.”¹ I am grateful for a Dad that I adore and love like no one else. And yet, that ache for my Momma comes swooping in some days and catches me off guard in all the ways that fragility can and does. I was just feeling so strong. And when I feel weak, I long for that comfort of her voice, her maternal love, that heart that expanded and keeps expanding with me.

~

When my husband and I married and moved into a new-to-us townhouse last year, I left behind my piano with the family I was living with. Space was limited, and I figured I could live without it for a year while we settled into together. I have missed it more than I dreamt I would. We’re in the process of moving around furniture to tuck it back into the townhouse, to rearrange and reunite one beloved to another.

~

My Mom plays piano. I grew up sitting next to her, turning the pages of the hymnal, hearing her alto harmonies in my left ear while I sang melody. When we sit next to each other now and she plays and I turn the pages, as rare as those moments are these days, it feels like coming home.

~

When I was 19 and brokenhearted, I sat at the piano and decided I needed to play. I asked Mom to teach me, but we’d get in small arguments because she reads music and I didn’t have time for that. (Read: I was dramatic.) I needed something to sing to, something to sing with, and I didn’t have time for treble clefs and theories. She would teach me enough to get me started and then I would send her away so I could figure it out on my own. I started to figure out, and then I started writing really bad songs. What I have come to see is during those days, when it was just me at the keys, God in all their feminine, gentle, nurturing nature sat next to me and listened.

When I play, I feel my Mother, both the woman with blue eyes and a voice that I can pick out of any crowd, and the God that is tender, soft, gentle, feminine, holy.

~

The only way I reasoned I could live without the piano at home is that I have access to a grand piano in the choir room at church and a spinet in a Sunday school classroom. So I play when I am at work. It is not the same, but it has sufficed.

One day I was sitting in the choir room, playing, and I was listening to the pre-school children playing on the playground outside the window. I felt as small and fragile and wild as they were on the swings on the piano bench, and I wrote this little song to remind myself that I am wild and beloved and held and it’s ok to cry and God is real and bigger than all our boxes but it’s helpful to think of God as mother and me, a daughter, playing, singing, being.

Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash

1. Book of Common Prayer: The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage