When we speak of "mother" in the largest sense, we speak of the ongoing miracle that we are here at all.

Some Thoughts on Mother's Day

Mother’s Day arrives every year with its strange, bifurcated light—part golden, part bruised. For those of us whose mothers could not give us what we needed—especially unconditional love—it stirs a specific ache. Not the grief of losing something whole, but that of never having had it. A shape you tried to fit yourself into, over and over, only to find it was made of smoke.

My mother was brilliant, volatile, magnetic and merciless. I loved her the way one loves fire from too close, singed and sometimes spellbound. Her absence was not always physical, but it was constant, a hollow in the air between us.

When I became a mother myself, the light became more golden than bruised. I tried to resonate with the soft script the world wrote for Mother’s Day—flowers, cards, bright declarations. I wanted so much to believe in the easy myth. And the truth is that these days, with our frenetic, complicated, love-filled, messy, sticky-fingered, bright-eyed world of adult kids and grandchildren, there’…