From Webb's Creek Track, Coromandel
My brother reports from Napier that my parents often return to stories from France, where we briefly lived in the early 1970s for Dad's work on the Concorde project. Having made our peace with our parents' memory loss, we receive these repetitions without judgement.
Being in the Kauaeranga Valley the other day reminded me my mother first tried proper tramping there in the late 1970s. Let's just say it wasn't her favourite thing, and that was before all the tracks were nicely upgraded and the Pinnacles became a Great Walk instead of a mud-fest. Never again did she go there. Perhaps I will remind her of it when I visit next week, to provide some relief from the French stories.
Mum was a person of many skills, activities and hobbies, tramping was certainly not one of them. She was a 'home-maker' in a very real sense. Without A levels or formal post-secondary qualifications, Mum was more than capable of assisting me with sixth form maths homework, a subject I had foolishly taken one year further than I ought to have. Her many household and hobby skills kept her active for many years, and her family wanting for nothing. It is a kind of grieving process to have seen her world and capacity for complex thought and activity diminish in the last few years, to a constant cycle of internet patience games and repetitive family stories.
For each one of us there is a different circumstance regarding our mothers. We celebrate their lives, we remember things good and bad, we grieve their deaths. In some cases we hardly knew them. Either way, they have given us life which is a gift, still rich with possibility and hope, whether we are old or young.
For many of us, myself included, our experience of having a mother has been a nurturing one, and we have seen in them lives of self-sacrifice and resourcefulness, which in turn has given us life. In a still patriarchal world and (sometimes) church, let us this week celebrate what mothers teach us about God. The 14th century recluse and mystic Julian of Norwich wrote:
A mother may feed her child with her own milk, but our precious mother Jesus feeds us with himself, and does it with great courtesy and tenderness, in feeding us with the blessed sacrament that is the precious food of life.
This week we gather at the Lord's table, with God our parent as the host. May we be sustained and nourished together. We give thanks for our mothers, and their part in our life and flourishing.