You’re born, and then you grow and you never remember a time when your mom wasn’t your hub. All your world revolved around her. She was the axis and from her stretched the spokes that were your food, your time, your emotions, your spirituality, your education, your style, your livelihood, your illusions, your teenage angst, your frustration; and your eyes slowly peeled open when you created your own first human.
There is an invisible but almost tangible conduit that links your heart and your soul to hers. You can’t imagine there’s anyone else in this world who is connected to you like she is. And you’re mostly right, until you meet him.
He is new, he is arresting and he is yours. He is all hard angles and soft feelings and he comes with his very own hub. She is the center point he has revolved around all his life and these revolutions around our mothers are sometimes hard to remodel.
As you grow together, you become the axis of what you create together and the world opens up because the rose of understanding blooms in your heart and mind and motherhood changes you.
Years into loving him, you recognize the spark in your heart that burns bright for your own mother, also burns for his. You love her like he does. You never could have imagined the possibility of two nuclei in your life. But here you are.
The prospect of losing either of them stings and stabs deep in your heart. When she suffers, you feel the misery acutely. Watching him ache for her breaks your heart into shards of emotional glass. When you’re faced with the fragility of her life and the precarious thread upon which we dance daily unraveling, the future feels like it arrived too quickly and you realize with panic that you haven’t had enough time with either of them.
There is peace that radiates from your knowledge of Christ. There is always a warm hand on your shoulder because you embrace the infinite power of His atoning sacrifice. But the graduation from mortality still strikes fear and sorrow and grief in your gut. You just keep climbing and clinging to the strands of beauty stitched into your tapestry because you know the love of two mothers.
