Reflections on Mother’s Day
I have my mom. I love her dearly because she is my mom, a mom whom I pray for and try to protect. I have another mother whom I also love because she is the Mother of God, a mother whom I pray to and ask for protection. I am incomplete without either and am grateful for both.
My mom is human and she has her failings and it is because of her failings that I have learned forgiveness. Mary, Mother of God, was human but I doubt she had many faults and even if she had them, the few she had been sanctified by her constant prayers and intercessions for those who go to her for help and for those who have failed to acknowledge her. The love of Mary is immense and I suppose humanly incomprehensible in many instances. It is because of the breadth of Mary’s love that I am able to reach for her forgiveness despite my continuous failings.
As a young child, I had daydreams about a mother’s love. Without really understanding it or perhaps not being able to obtain it when I needed it, I was only able to feel that love vicariously, by equating my love for my mom to my mom's love for me. That love in my fantasy world was inseparable from my very being and in its absence I was completely lost and in tears. I did not know Mary then, not in the way I know Mary now. I knew her to be the Mother of God but considered her to be a peripheral figure in my nascent self-formed beliefs in God, Satan, angels, demons, Heaven and Hell. Mary was not there when I was the boy who was seemingly lost, alone and distraught.
When such episodes vanish, I had my mom to go to and gone were my tears to be replaced by my mom’s presence and my contentedness to be by her side. No wonder Mary did not see a need to reveal herself and assert her constant love as if I were not being loved at all.
As I grew up, the boy in me did not. I still needed a lot of love, forgiveness and support but was too grown-up to rely on my mom for all of that. I needed a perfect mother to whom I could be fully truthful and bare my all and who would understand and love me unconditionally. It took time, but I found this love and my complete trust in Mary, Mother of God.
She came to me gently in the beginning because I did not know her. I felt that because she was my other mother, she was weak and that I needed to protect her. She proved me wrong and found the perfect chance to do so. I was moving from LA to SF one summer, loaded up my trunk and drove up Highway 5 when the passenger rear blew out in the middle of nowhere after a couple of hours of speeding. I was trying to loosen the lug nuts and could not. I did not know what to do (this was before cell phones were common). I said some Hail Marys but that did not work fast enough for me, so I thought that it was stupid to pray to Mary since she was a woman and she would be too weak to help me loosen them. Because I was not strong enough to do it myself, I prayed to Mary again and all of a sudden the first lug nut came loose, the rest of them then came off quickly. Perhaps it was pure physics, that time had passed and the wheel had just enough time to cool off for the lug nuts to come loose. Perhaps it was that, but I deliberately felt the heat on the metal and the nuts and all of them were still quite hot to the touch. Somehow I knew it was Mary who wanted to prove me wrong. This was the first time in my life I had felt Mary's presence. I am now convinced that Mary is strong, far stronger than I am, or any human for that matter.
From that time forward, Mary has been someone I go to, in happy times and in desperate, to share with her every aspect of my life that I am not prepared to share with my mom, for I do not wish to burden her with my internal struggles and unhappiness.
On this Mother’s Day, I am content that I have both my moms.
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