Image © Jose & MidJourney
This is more personal than my usual posts.
My Mother passed away September 2019, she was 82. Her last 10 years were painful, for her above all, Parkinson’s and several other complications took away all her dignity and quality of life. As her only son, I feared the worst and prepared for a long time, but it didn’t help, it felt like a punch in the stomach from which you never recover.
Fifteen years ago, I asked a mathematician friend who is also an astrologer to look at my birth chart, at that time he pointed out a date range where I would have a significant event in my life, perhaps the loss of someone irreplaceable, he was right. I now went back to him for a conversation, and we talked about several things, including my mother. He suggested that my mother was a figure who, although being caring and affectionate, also bared a controlling aspect. He described my mother as someone who had a strong presence, possibly a central figure in the family dynamics, and someone who asserted her visibility and influence in the household. He hinted at possible difficult pre-birth conditions, potentially influenced by my mother’s emotional state during that period, and that this might have instilled in me a cautious approach to trust and relationships. Many of you will discount all this as mumbo jumbo, I am not sure I believe in it all the way, but I feel it adds to my understanding of who I am.
We have just celebrated International Women’s Day, a strange one-day celebration of a reality that the world insists in being reminded every year. Like many, I went back to my Mother, not just as such, but also and above all, as a woman. Without going down the rabbit hole of psychoanalysis, I have tried to envision her as a young mother more than 60 years ago, 17 years younger than my father, training herself in such diverse things as shirt making and hotel cooking, to support my father’s dreams, changing countries, starting over, and over, while expecting and raising me, managing a life where my father thought he was in charge, and everyone else saw her as the appendix. The last person to slap me across the face was not my father, but my Mother, I was 17 and I messed up, I deserved it, she told me this was for me to remember that she was still my mother. And yet, she did it all gracefully, almost effortlessly to outsiders, as if she was born for it, as if she trained all her life. When I turned 18, she let me go do an exchange program in the USA, thousands of miles away. When I turned 25 and said I didn’t want to take on the family business, she convinced my father to sell it all and move to be closer to me, letting me pursue whatever I wanted. Yes, she was my mother, but also a remarkable woman, that will not show up in the annals of history as having done anything significant, not even bearing me. And I think of so many other women, doing this and even more, every day, every year, in conditions so many times worse than my mother. And I ask myself, what else does the world need to recognize women for what they are, every day, everywhere, on every situation?