My Mother's Hands

My ma is the OG conspiracy theorist badass in my family.

The woman has said things years in advance prior to the alternative media making those claims, even, and although I haven’t completely aped into all of the stuff she says, there are enough compelling nuggets of information to move my needle one way or another on major issues.

My household is multi-generational, not by necessity but by desire. Having three adults available to parent my three sons is essential. Heck, she still parents me, I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Having a warm meal after an extra-long work shift prepared and ready for you when you get home is heaven. Avoiding grocery shopping (quite possibly my least favourite general maintenance task) is a massive help. Sitting with a cuppa and discussing the globalists’ plan while we daydream fucking the system and unfucking the world is my comfort zone.

You can imagine the lengths my ma has gone through and the strength she has taught me during this past year. Many people helped me during my cancer journey, and I am forever grateful to them, but my mum deserves a special mention. She was always there: waking up at 5 a.m., making coffee for enemas, trying to diversify the Gerson diet so I could eat healthy meals that actually taste good, crushing 20 lbs of fruits and veggies to make 13 juices a day, and washing the juicer until her hands were raw and sandpaper, a juicer whose mechanisms would get stuck and task my mother’s hands to the limit.

My friend Mary recently wrote that she’s taking care of a close family member with cancer, and I wrote this in her comment section:

Caring for a loved one, what appears to be an intimate and micro gesture in the grand realm of the universe, echoes through the morphic field on a macro scale. Through helping her heal, you help heal the world. May the blessing of all the healers come upon you.

I wrote it from a place of observing how my mother healed me; executing every task with utmost care, wrapped in love, not obligation, and still knowing that her gestures, considered however small by the world, created ripples of goodness and energetic joy that echoed in our collective consciousness. I’d like to think my mother’s hands help heal the world.

Since it’s Mother’s Day today, and it’s also the month of my ma’s 70th birthday (!!!!), I thought I’d publish a brief post in appreciation. In years past, I have tried to make her feel special and on occasion, have managed to do so. For her 50th birthday, I got her a gift for every trip around the sun. A few years ago, I invited people over for an art project where each attendee received a square which they copied onto a bigger square and when all the squares were put together, they revealed the image:

My ma

Last year, my besties and I recorded a Bulgarian song that we sang and added as a soundtrack for a birthday slide show, which I’m pasting below if you’d like to take a gander/listen.

For this year, I’d like to offer this short poem. I’m no poet, but I’ve been inspired by the likes of Mary, Margaret, gate(less), and the haikus of April and Isaac, so I hope you forgive this brief lapse in my usual MO to make room for a tender moment.

My Mother’s Hands

My mother’s hands smell like Bulgarian lilacs:

The lotion she received for Christmas

That she would never normally buy for herself.

My mother’s hands once held babies up in the air

During secular naming ceremonies

Like Rafiki holding up Simba, but poised, graceful, beautiful.

The skin on my mother’s hands is paper-thin

As she washes, prepares, and cleans up for meals,

Especially since my diagnosis and my extra needs.

A cigarette is often lodged between the fingers

Of my mother’s hands.

A decades-long habit that won’t be broken.

“My hands are made of butter”, my mother often says

When she drops something or when she can’t open a jar.

But some jars are just really hard to open.

My mother’s hands have knitted a sweater

For every birthday and every Christmas –

That’s hard when your birthday and Christmas are only a month apart.

The food prepared by my mother’s hands

Is infused with love.

It’s the secret ingredient in all her recipes.

My mother’s hands used to hold thick books

Falling apart from being reread so many times.

Now they hold a tiny phone as she reads her news.

The world can burn to ashes and I will still believe

That it’ll be alright, in the end.

As long as I get to hold on to my mother’s hands.

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