Mother's Day Sermon 2016 - Loving and Letting Go
Being a mother is, without a doubt, the best and most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Parenting a child is an awesome and life-affirming responsibility. Nothing has shown me myself more fully and with more brutal honesty than this job of bringing children into the world and showing them how to be alive in it. The cruel irony of parenthood is that, along with the deep love for our children that grips us the moment they enter our lives, we must, almost immediately, reckon with the fact that we hold them for only a little while. Each day we are parenting, we are preparing to let them go. As children grow and learn, God willing, to be independent, functioning and responsible people, we are learning how to give them back to the universe to which they truly belong. It is a painful and beautiful ordeal.
In her book, Maternal Thinking, philosopher Sara Ruddick shares her theory that the practice of motherhood involves three primary, and often competing, demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptability. Each moment of maternal practice, of being a “good enough mother,” involves some combination of, “meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training.” The most fundamental aspect of motherhood is protection or preservation. The basic minimum of mothering is keeping our children safe. Next, and less universal is the need to nurture the emotional, mental and spiritual growth of our children, though cultures and individuals may disagree about the best way to do that and to what degree it is necessary. Finally, all social groups have an expectation of correct behavior to which parents (and particularly mothers) are expected to train their children to adhere. The daily, internal struggle caused by trying to meet these, often conflicting, demands can tie a mother in knots. We feel the need to protect our child, to nurture their growth and to help them function within societal expectations, and on top of it, from the moment they are born the clock is ticking and the subject is constantly changing. What is acceptable, safe, and nurturing to the child one day will change in the next.[i]
Mothering is not the exclusive role of women who give birth. Mothering happens wherever these demands for protection, nurturance, and training take place and mothers exhibit different abilities to meet these demands depending on their circumstances and capacities. My friend, retired history professor Jerry Adler, reminded me that some of the most powerful ‘mother’ figures in history including Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Dorothy Day were not biological mothers but no less protected, nurtured and trained many.
To Mother is to create, to bring to life, to nurture and to love. And Mothering is also the ultimate practice of letting go. Each of us is part of the co-creation of life and in living we each experience the challenge of letting go in one way or another. We let go of the past. We let go of our expectations of others and ourselves. We let go of loved ones as we grieve. We let go of what we hope and wish for to make room for what is and what might be. In the words of Mary Oliver, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a mother. I played with and cared for my dolls constantly and with tireless devotion. I was an experienced babysitter and I put myself through college working as a nanny for a family with two little girls. What I didn’t know is that no amount of experience can really prepare you for the unending demands of motherhood. But there was never a question in my mind that I wanted to be a mother. And, of course, I was not going to make any of the mistakes my parents made. I was going to read to my children every day, and they were going to eat well and sleep well and grow into self-actualized, creative and compassionate people.
And I have been very lucky. I have the privilege of raising two wonderful, smart, kind and healthy children but that is definitely not because I made no mistakes or because I met my own expectations of being a perfect mom. I have fallen short of my impossibly high expectations of myself many times. There have been many times when I’ve looked to my Unitarian Universalist community to help me know how to parent. There have been times when I’ve turned to a higher power, I’m not even sure I believe in, to beg for guidance and I have been led toward a way or the words that felt right. So, I am no parenting expert but I know that things have become a bit easier and I think I’ve become a better parent by learning how to let go a little of expectations.
As our children grow, the process of letting them come into their own person is not, in my experience, a slow and gradual handing off of responsibility. It has felt to me more like a tug of war, with both sides regularly landing in the mud. There is no way of knowing for sure how much independence to give your child as they are becoming an adult because each child is different, with different needs and capacities at each moment. Again, a mother’s job is to protect, nurture and train, but doing that for your two year old is different than it is for your 5, 8 and 17 year old. And there is no script or plan to follow. It is all done by feel.
Not too long ago, I was, with some measure of pride, telling one of my friends that I had discovered how to let go of my teenage son as he struggled with the long, anxiety producing college application process. I was feeling overwhelmed, not knowing how to help my son navigate this huge life transition, and because I have a wonderful partner in parenting who was staying engaged, I was able to manage my anxiety by turning away. The fear and heartbreak of watching my son make more and more of his own choices led me to pretend that I could simply throw up my hands, walk away and let him figure it out. However, my gentle and thoughtful friend showed me another way to let go. He has found that, in the midst of letting go, it’s been important to stay connected to his son, who is now living hundreds of miles away. So he sends him a text each night to let him know he loves him.
I was embarrassed by the quickness with which I was ready to wash my hands of my child, telling myself he’d almost reached adulthood so I had no choice but to let go. My friend reminded me that letting go doesn’t mean turning away. Letting go and remaining in loving relationship is an act of faith. For those who mother, the urge to protect, nurture and guide remain with us no matter the age of our charges. We inevitable remain in love with those we are trying to relinquish. Though we don’t stop loving as our children grow, when we let go, genuine and more liberated love can come pouring into our open hearts. Letting go, without turning away can be excruciating but we can learn to do it, to become non-attached and still be attentive to the needs of our children and the world beyond them.
It can be tempting to turn away, to disengage from the suffering of the world, the madness of politics and climate destruction, or from the challenges that everyday life and relationships present. The suffering and oppression we see in the world can make us want to bury our heads in the sand. But to be alive means we are a part of all that the world has to offer – it’s beauty and ugliness. We may want to turn away but there is nowhere for us to go. We can try to avoid the realities of loving and letting go by numbing or burying our pain but it simply doesn’t work. The only true choice we have is to keep our hearts open to be broken again and again, to keep loving, and holding what we love as if our lives depend on it, and then to let go even as we remain in love. If we could only disengage ourselves from the pain in the world, throwing our hands up in surrender, it would be so much easier. If only we didn’t love life so much.
There is no recipe or instruction book for letting go that I know of. I wish it were simply a matter of deciding to let go. Like when someone tells you to relax when you’re upset. Has anyone ever told you to relax when you’re upset? It doesn’t really work. In fact, I find it to be an incredibly infuriating and unhelpful instruction. Telling someone to let go, when they are holding tight with fear, worry, grief, sadness or anger is similarly unhelpful. Letting go is the practice that love requires especially in the moments when our impulse is to cling.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron speaks of a meditation technique of loving and letting go in her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where we can approach our experiences with “softness,” and learn to “make friends with” our fear, anger, or depression rather than, trying “to get rid of it.” I’m new to meditation, but through practice, I have felt a difference in my ability to be present and yet less attached. I’m trying her specific technique of focusing on the out breath only and gently naming whatever thoughts that come as “thinking, thinking” before softly letting them go. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
I also wonder if letting go happens in the moment we realize that we have no choice. That there’s really not much we are actually holding onto. In the words of poet, philosopher, Khalil Gibran in his book The Prophet, ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.’ Sometimes letting go can happen when we remember and name the truth of transience.
I experienced something like this when I stood at the open door of an airplane at 10,000 feet, strapped to a much more experienced skydiver. I found letting go was easy in that moment because I had no choice. I WAS going out of that airplane in tandem with this other, larger person, and because I had no choice, fear drained out of me. Letting go happens when we stop kidding ourselves into thinking we have control when we don’t. The responsibility of parenthood can fool us into thinking that we are in charge or that we are supposed to be. Of course we have a responsibility to protect, nurture and guide our children but we need to remember the limits of our control over others and life itself. The serenity prayer spoken often in twelve step meetings is a good reminder: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The difference is pretty simple: I can change some aspects of myself. Everything else is pretty well beyond my control.
We are, in every moment shaped by each other and concurrently shaping one another through relationship. However, we never own or possess one another. Humans oppress, marginalize, and destroy other human bodies but we cannot own the mind or spirit of another being. Letting go is an illusion because we never really hold anything. We are mutually co-creating every moment, everyone and everything, but never truly possessing. It is the mind’s trick on us that leads us to think that one person can own another and yet, paradoxically, we do belong to one another – in our infinite, intimate interconnection.
Does letting go mean abandoning our responsibilities? If we let go of expectations, are we expecting too little of ourselves and others? When we have high expectations of our children, it is said, they rise to meet them. And the same is true of low expectations. But can we be gentle and honest with our expectations? Can we write our hopes in the sand and let the wind take them where it will? Can what we want from one another be separated from our worthiness and our love? Can I love you even when you disappoint me? Can I love myself when I let myself down? In my experience this process of letting go of my son, who is now almost an adult, about to leave home for college, has been like watching him leap off a ledge into the dark and I have wanted so many times to turn away, to not look. I have wanted to absolve myself of my parental responsibilities because it is so hard. And I acknowledge and mourn the fact that there are parents who do that, who resign from parenting in all kinds of ways, and I have shirked my responsibility in moments of despair. But I know I can’t really turn away. I can’t quit my job as a mother because I love my children and part of who I am is the person who has walked with them through total dependence into a gradual interdependence. I’ve protected, nurtured and trained them to be independent and happy people. I must keep loving them, holding them against my bones knowing my own life depends on them, and when the time comes to let them go, to let them go. I must share with them my hopes and expectations for them but let my expectations be blown away by the wind of their own visions for themselves.
The struggle to love and let go is alive in all being and becoming. The struggle happens whenever we create something and have to let that creation become its own thing. As differentiated beings we long for the connection that is always there but too easily forgotten. We become enmeshed. We lose ourselves in the loving of another or lose ourselves in the creation of something. It is so natural to over identify with those we care for and lose our sense of value beyond our relationship to that person or thing.
Losing ourselves can be wonderful sometimes. To be out of our own heads, out of our own way, in the zone. But this flow only happens when we really are letting go and allowing ourselves to be a channel for something higher, for love to move through us.
Letting go need not mean turning away from the world or each other with cynicism and despair. As Krista Tippet said this morning on the NPR show, On Being, “Love crosses the chasms between us and it brings them into relief.” We are called to stay engaged, to stay connected to one another and to the pain in the world. We are asked to write our hurt and pain in the sand and let the wind blow it away. And we are called to carve the transformative, life-saving love we experience in relationship into stone so that it can break our hearts open and let more love, more hope, more creative possibility to flow in. May we continue, in each moment, to let go and let creating, sustaining and transforming love pour into the openings in our hearts.
[i] Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Beacon Press, Boston, 1995
In her book, Maternal Thinking, philosopher Sara Ruddick shares her theory that the practice of motherhood involves three primary, and often competing, demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptability. Each moment of maternal practice, of being a “good enough mother,” involves some combination of, “meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training.” The most fundamental aspect of motherhood is protection or preservation. The basic minimum of mothering is keeping our children safe. Next, and less universal is the need to nurture the emotional, mental and spiritual growth of our children, though cultures and individuals may disagree about the best way to do that and to what degree it is necessary. Finally, all social groups have an expectation of correct behavior to which parents (and particularly mothers) are expected to train their children to adhere. The daily, internal struggle caused by trying to meet these, often conflicting, demands can tie a mother in knots. We feel the need to protect our child, to nurture their growth and to help them function within societal expectations, and on top of it, from the moment they are born the clock is ticking and the subject is constantly changing. What is acceptable, safe, and nurturing to the child one day will change in the next.[i]
Mothering is not the exclusive role of women who give birth. Mothering happens wherever these demands for protection, nurturance, and training take place and mothers exhibit different abilities to meet these demands depending on their circumstances and capacities. My friend, retired history professor Jerry Adler, reminded me that some of the most powerful ‘mother’ figures in history including Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Dorothy Day were not biological mothers but no less protected, nurtured and trained many.
To Mother is to create, to bring to life, to nurture and to love. And Mothering is also the ultimate practice of letting go. Each of us is part of the co-creation of life and in living we each experience the challenge of letting go in one way or another. We let go of the past. We let go of our expectations of others and ourselves. We let go of loved ones as we grieve. We let go of what we hope and wish for to make room for what is and what might be. In the words of Mary Oliver, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a mother. I played with and cared for my dolls constantly and with tireless devotion. I was an experienced babysitter and I put myself through college working as a nanny for a family with two little girls. What I didn’t know is that no amount of experience can really prepare you for the unending demands of motherhood. But there was never a question in my mind that I wanted to be a mother. And, of course, I was not going to make any of the mistakes my parents made. I was going to read to my children every day, and they were going to eat well and sleep well and grow into self-actualized, creative and compassionate people.
And I have been very lucky. I have the privilege of raising two wonderful, smart, kind and healthy children but that is definitely not because I made no mistakes or because I met my own expectations of being a perfect mom. I have fallen short of my impossibly high expectations of myself many times. There have been many times when I’ve looked to my Unitarian Universalist community to help me know how to parent. There have been times when I’ve turned to a higher power, I’m not even sure I believe in, to beg for guidance and I have been led toward a way or the words that felt right. So, I am no parenting expert but I know that things have become a bit easier and I think I’ve become a better parent by learning how to let go a little of expectations.
As our children grow, the process of letting them come into their own person is not, in my experience, a slow and gradual handing off of responsibility. It has felt to me more like a tug of war, with both sides regularly landing in the mud. There is no way of knowing for sure how much independence to give your child as they are becoming an adult because each child is different, with different needs and capacities at each moment. Again, a mother’s job is to protect, nurture and train, but doing that for your two year old is different than it is for your 5, 8 and 17 year old. And there is no script or plan to follow. It is all done by feel.
Not too long ago, I was, with some measure of pride, telling one of my friends that I had discovered how to let go of my teenage son as he struggled with the long, anxiety producing college application process. I was feeling overwhelmed, not knowing how to help my son navigate this huge life transition, and because I have a wonderful partner in parenting who was staying engaged, I was able to manage my anxiety by turning away. The fear and heartbreak of watching my son make more and more of his own choices led me to pretend that I could simply throw up my hands, walk away and let him figure it out. However, my gentle and thoughtful friend showed me another way to let go. He has found that, in the midst of letting go, it’s been important to stay connected to his son, who is now living hundreds of miles away. So he sends him a text each night to let him know he loves him.
I was embarrassed by the quickness with which I was ready to wash my hands of my child, telling myself he’d almost reached adulthood so I had no choice but to let go. My friend reminded me that letting go doesn’t mean turning away. Letting go and remaining in loving relationship is an act of faith. For those who mother, the urge to protect, nurture and guide remain with us no matter the age of our charges. We inevitable remain in love with those we are trying to relinquish. Though we don’t stop loving as our children grow, when we let go, genuine and more liberated love can come pouring into our open hearts. Letting go, without turning away can be excruciating but we can learn to do it, to become non-attached and still be attentive to the needs of our children and the world beyond them.
It can be tempting to turn away, to disengage from the suffering of the world, the madness of politics and climate destruction, or from the challenges that everyday life and relationships present. The suffering and oppression we see in the world can make us want to bury our heads in the sand. But to be alive means we are a part of all that the world has to offer – it’s beauty and ugliness. We may want to turn away but there is nowhere for us to go. We can try to avoid the realities of loving and letting go by numbing or burying our pain but it simply doesn’t work. The only true choice we have is to keep our hearts open to be broken again and again, to keep loving, and holding what we love as if our lives depend on it, and then to let go even as we remain in love. If we could only disengage ourselves from the pain in the world, throwing our hands up in surrender, it would be so much easier. If only we didn’t love life so much.
There is no recipe or instruction book for letting go that I know of. I wish it were simply a matter of deciding to let go. Like when someone tells you to relax when you’re upset. Has anyone ever told you to relax when you’re upset? It doesn’t really work. In fact, I find it to be an incredibly infuriating and unhelpful instruction. Telling someone to let go, when they are holding tight with fear, worry, grief, sadness or anger is similarly unhelpful. Letting go is the practice that love requires especially in the moments when our impulse is to cling.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron speaks of a meditation technique of loving and letting go in her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where we can approach our experiences with “softness,” and learn to “make friends with” our fear, anger, or depression rather than, trying “to get rid of it.” I’m new to meditation, but through practice, I have felt a difference in my ability to be present and yet less attached. I’m trying her specific technique of focusing on the out breath only and gently naming whatever thoughts that come as “thinking, thinking” before softly letting them go. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
I also wonder if letting go happens in the moment we realize that we have no choice. That there’s really not much we are actually holding onto. In the words of poet, philosopher, Khalil Gibran in his book The Prophet, ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.’ Sometimes letting go can happen when we remember and name the truth of transience.
I experienced something like this when I stood at the open door of an airplane at 10,000 feet, strapped to a much more experienced skydiver. I found letting go was easy in that moment because I had no choice. I WAS going out of that airplane in tandem with this other, larger person, and because I had no choice, fear drained out of me. Letting go happens when we stop kidding ourselves into thinking we have control when we don’t. The responsibility of parenthood can fool us into thinking that we are in charge or that we are supposed to be. Of course we have a responsibility to protect, nurture and guide our children but we need to remember the limits of our control over others and life itself. The serenity prayer spoken often in twelve step meetings is a good reminder: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The difference is pretty simple: I can change some aspects of myself. Everything else is pretty well beyond my control.
We are, in every moment shaped by each other and concurrently shaping one another through relationship. However, we never own or possess one another. Humans oppress, marginalize, and destroy other human bodies but we cannot own the mind or spirit of another being. Letting go is an illusion because we never really hold anything. We are mutually co-creating every moment, everyone and everything, but never truly possessing. It is the mind’s trick on us that leads us to think that one person can own another and yet, paradoxically, we do belong to one another – in our infinite, intimate interconnection.
Does letting go mean abandoning our responsibilities? If we let go of expectations, are we expecting too little of ourselves and others? When we have high expectations of our children, it is said, they rise to meet them. And the same is true of low expectations. But can we be gentle and honest with our expectations? Can we write our hopes in the sand and let the wind take them where it will? Can what we want from one another be separated from our worthiness and our love? Can I love you even when you disappoint me? Can I love myself when I let myself down? In my experience this process of letting go of my son, who is now almost an adult, about to leave home for college, has been like watching him leap off a ledge into the dark and I have wanted so many times to turn away, to not look. I have wanted to absolve myself of my parental responsibilities because it is so hard. And I acknowledge and mourn the fact that there are parents who do that, who resign from parenting in all kinds of ways, and I have shirked my responsibility in moments of despair. But I know I can’t really turn away. I can’t quit my job as a mother because I love my children and part of who I am is the person who has walked with them through total dependence into a gradual interdependence. I’ve protected, nurtured and trained them to be independent and happy people. I must keep loving them, holding them against my bones knowing my own life depends on them, and when the time comes to let them go, to let them go. I must share with them my hopes and expectations for them but let my expectations be blown away by the wind of their own visions for themselves.
The struggle to love and let go is alive in all being and becoming. The struggle happens whenever we create something and have to let that creation become its own thing. As differentiated beings we long for the connection that is always there but too easily forgotten. We become enmeshed. We lose ourselves in the loving of another or lose ourselves in the creation of something. It is so natural to over identify with those we care for and lose our sense of value beyond our relationship to that person or thing.
Losing ourselves can be wonderful sometimes. To be out of our own heads, out of our own way, in the zone. But this flow only happens when we really are letting go and allowing ourselves to be a channel for something higher, for love to move through us.
Letting go need not mean turning away from the world or each other with cynicism and despair. As Krista Tippet said this morning on the NPR show, On Being, “Love crosses the chasms between us and it brings them into relief.” We are called to stay engaged, to stay connected to one another and to the pain in the world. We are asked to write our hurt and pain in the sand and let the wind blow it away. And we are called to carve the transformative, life-saving love we experience in relationship into stone so that it can break our hearts open and let more love, more hope, more creative possibility to flow in. May we continue, in each moment, to let go and let creating, sustaining and transforming love pour into the openings in our hearts.
[i] Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Beacon Press, Boston, 1995