God Is Funny: On Love, Listening, and Letting Go

God is funny, isn’t she?

A few weeks ago, I made my way to get loved on in a prestine way. A gentle way. A loving way. A firm way.

I went to a hammam. A Moroccan bathhouse. Here, naked save for a pink paper panty, two women I’ve met once before at the same place, scrubbed me down. They exfoliated my skin until in flaked away, sloughed off, and the new skin beneath it happily unveiled herself.

And while there in the darkness of the steam room on a cool, granite slab for a table, I couldn’t help but ask myself:

What does it mean to mother, and to be mothered?

I didn’t answer the question. I didn’t know how. More like I didn’t “know” how.

The question played in my brain. Randomly popping up, begging to be answered. Asking me to attend to her. Like a young child she playfully popped up in my present memory, “Hey! Remember me! I know you see me! Answer me!”

And here I am, weeks later, in my Black Writers meeting reading, of all things, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by award-winning educator Felicia Rose Chavez, and the question presents itself again.

Not to be forgotten, here she come. Here she is!

What does it mean to mother in our writing? To mother Black and brown writing students in the yt classrooms in which we live?

My question, and perhaps me, too, are happy. Happy– a lazy word– one not quite precise enough to capture my true emotion, but it will suffice.

I have the answer I once longed for and just recently didn’t want to answer, to address.

Who does my writing need to me to be? How does my writer, my inner voice, my inner self, need to be mothered? Need to be loved and nurtured? What kind of nurturing and support do I need to provide for myself, for my writing and my sweet inner writer to blossom?

Big questions. “Big” questions.

Felicia defines mothering as (deep) listening. And isn’t mothering about reparenting? While you parent your baby you inevitably parent yourself, too? Healing the hurts and wounds from your own mother while you love your little one? Thinking back on your own childhood to think in the present of how you desire to show up, to love, to be loved?!

And so, yes, God is funny!

Funny that in this intersection of leaving my old job and now loving my 171 students– my kids!– from afar, I get to reparent myself, too.

I wrote them a letter. A love letter. What I wish I knew at their age. What I wish someone who loved me would tell me. The truth personified. I wrote my kids, my students, what I wish I knew… In 2 single spaced pages because with only a few lines left, I had two notes in my phone for what else I wanted to tell them.

But perhaps that’s mothering, too. Saying what needs to be said and not being able to say everything, too. As the space of listening closes and grows smaller, our hearts grow bigger, our yearning grows deeper, and our love grows fonder.

A Prayer for the Ones We Raise, Release, and Remember

God, bless my babies. My 171 babies I didn’t birth but I got to raise. I’m beyond grateful. Grateful to have known them and to be known by them. Grateful to have seen them, supported them, loved them. Grateful to have been gentle with them when they weren’t gentle with themselves, or with me, either.

Grateful. I am grateful, and that isn’t enough. That word, those 9 letters, not big enough to capture the words I have for them, the love I have for them. I am grateful that through me, they met You, God. I am grateful that through me, they learned love, gentleness, kindness. Through me, they learned the things I didn’t say. The things I wanted to say but time or energy or stress or space or whatever didn’t allow. I am grateful that I knew that.

I am grateful that I am made better because I met them, loved them, knew them. I am grateful that because of them, I am so much better than who I was before I met them.

I am loving. I am loved. I am grateful to have been myself. I am grateful that they became more of themselves, too.

Protect them. Guide them. Show them. Shape them. Mature them.

As above, so below. Bring them heaven on earth. Show them how it’s done.

And so it is. It is already done. Amen!

When the Time Shortens, But the Love Grows

If you’ve ever loved someone so much it changed you, this is for you.

Share this with a fellow teacher, mother, writer. Anywho who knows what it means to love deeply, even without the perfect words. When the time shortens but the love grows.

P.S. I shared the letter I wrote my students for half a second but I left like that needed to remain between us, you know? So instead, here’s a love letter I wrote from 40-year-old me to baby me. From me to you, saying aloud to myself what I wish I had known. From Self Doubt to Divine Truth: A Letter Across Time.