There have been many moments in my life when I realized with sparkling clarity: My mother is a genius. The following was just one of them.
It was the first real tragedy I’d ever experienced. A classmate in seventh grade was suddenly and dramatically pulled out of shop class. He was told to leave his project, mid-sanding, and rushed away by a frantic school secretary.
Later, we learned: in a postpartum psychosis, his mother said she heard voices telling her to stab her infant daughter and throw her out the window, which she did. The shock, sorrow and horror of this event pierced our little, rural Midwest town at the heart.
After the funeral, as my classmate was processing out behind the tiny coffin, he glanced up and caught my eye. He was one of the smartest and most liked kids in our class, a leader. But in that moment, tucked into his Sunday shirt and tie, he looked so small and fragile, like he might collapse any second. I wanted to reach out and hug him, or more, hold him up, but he passed our pew, and the moment was lost.
Afterward, the rest of my classmates returned to school, but I found this impossible. I called my mother, and she came to pick me up. I can still remember her gloved hands on the steering wheel of our station wagon as she drove me home. She took one hand off and reached over to pet me, saying quietly, “Why don’t you go for a ride when you get home?”
She knew — this was not a time for words but a time for feeling and being and sensing. And there was nowhere I felt safer as a child than with my horse, Windy, riding through the open countryside.
It was a warm, early spring in Minnesota, and as the day wore on and the sky began to glow pink, I remember riding in the snow and the sound of the crunch that Windy’s hooves made. I found Windy to be an especially tenderhearted, high-strung animal. Horses like that can sense the emotional timbre of their rider. I swear she almost tip-toed that afternoon, carrying her brokenhearted passenger through the country fields as though she were the pearl of great price, somehow intuiting that this mourning I needed to do was with the world itself — nothing less than the whole earth and sky could absorb it.
That dreadful day, my mother had the internal strength to reverence me and my sorrow and to release me to the barn, release me though she knew she could no longer protect me in the same way because I now knew a world where evil erupts, suddenly and with unspeakable, brute force. She released me to this sacred task of grieving and struggling to understand — it was not something she could do for me.
I will never be able to repay my mother, almost 91 now, for the restraint and wisdom she showed that day, allowing me to begin to learn that I was part hermit, that much of my spiritual and emotional work would be done outdoors and in solitude. She allowed me my introverted young soul and though I know she would have taken all my pain unto herself in a moment if she could have, she honored me enough to let me move through it the way that was best for me.
Bless you, and thank you, Mom, for that gift and a million others, equally valuable, in this month we celebrate the genius of motherhood.
Stanchina is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books. She travels to speak and lead retreats throughout the US. Find her schedule at LizK.org. Follow her on Instagram at LizKToday.
